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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 12th, 2023

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  • That’s news to me considering the EPA-rated fuel economy of vehicles with both hybrid and pure ICE drivetrains is universally higher for the hybrid versions.

    An ICE vehicle needs a much larger engine than is truly necessary due to the inefficiencies and limitations of mechanical transmissions, whereas a hybrid can have a much smaller, more efficient engine.

    A hybrid can potentially act like a ‘perfect’ transmission, capable of taking in power from an engine running at its single most efficient RPM and, with the aid of battery storage, produce any combination of speed and torque that has an average power less than the output of the ICE.



  • People recommend backblaze B2 as a restic/rclone/borg backend because it works extremely well and is an excellent value compared to other available options at a near-flat $6/TB*month rate.

    The reason they ‘force linux users to use their b2 product’ is very specifically done, on purpose, to avoid the exact kind of abuse you want to do, which is upload 18TB of near-incompressible data for them to store for $9/month or less.

    Buy a 20TB harddrive and keep it in a fireproof filebox, and maybe another to keep at a friends house. You don’t need cloud backups for media you can reaquire relatively easily, save that for the stuff you can’t trivially replace.



  • I ran RAID-Z2 across 4x14TB and a (4+8)TB LVM LV for close to a year before finally swapping the (4+8)TB LV for a 5th 14TB drive for via zpool replace without issue. I did, however, make sure to use RAID-Z2 rather than Z1 to account for said shenanigans out of an abundance of caution and I would highly recommend doing the same. That is to say, the extra 2x2TB would be good additional parity, but I would only consider it as additional parity, not the only parity.

    Based on fairly unscientific testing from before and after, it did not appear to meaningfully affect performance.


  • 125W (Less than $15/month) or so for

    • Ryzen 9 3900X
    • 64GB RAM
    • 2x4TB NVMe (ZFS Mirror)
    • 5x14TB HDD (ZFS RAID-Z2)
    • 2.5GBe Network Card
    • 5-port 2.5GBe Network Switch
    • 5-port 1GBe POE Network Switch w/ one Reolink Camera attached

    I generally leave powerManagement.cpuFreqGovernor = "powersave" in my Nix config as well, which saves about 40W ($4/mo or so) for my typical load as best as I can tell, and I disable it if I’m doing bulk data processing on a time crunch.


  • Realistically, the target audience are organizations as nowadays most business laptops are being carried between docking stations with the occasional meeting or air travel in-between and 13" is an excellent size to meet those needs.

    When hooked to a docking station, the screen size and keyboard is entirely irrelevant and modern laptop performance is…honestly crazy good.

    When in a meeting, it’s probably being either used to take notes fullscreen or show a presentation, so pretty neutral.

    Finally, when traveling, you can really can feel the difference between a 13" and a 15" when you’re running on too short of a layover between flights.


  • The Walmart app provides historical receipt data if you have an associated card. A few months ago I spot-checked a ‘standard basket of goods’ (food and household items often repurchased) for myself between then and the end of 2019 (right before covid), and the average increase in price of those goods over that period of time was just about 50% overall for my personal basket of goods.


  • My partner and I use a git repository on our self-hosted gitea instance for household management.

    Issue tracker and kanban boards for task management, wiki for documentation, and some infrastructure components are version controlled in the repo itself. You could almost certainly get away with just the issue tracker.

    Home Assistant (also self-hosted) provides the ability to easily and automatically create issues based on schedules and sensor data, like creating a git issue when when weather conditions tomorrow may necessitate checking this afternoon that nothing gets left out in the rain.

    Matrix (also self-hosted) lets Gitea and Home Assistant bully us into remembering to do things we might have forgotten. (Send a second notification if the washer finished 15 minutes ago, but the dryer never started)

    It’s been fantastic being able to create git issues for honey-dos as well as having the automations for creating issues for recurring tasks. “Hey we need to take X to the vet for Y sometime next week” “Oh yeah, can you go ahead and put in a ticket?” And vice versa.


  • what does industry do when they need to automate provisioning of thousands of devices for POS, retail, barcode scanning, delivery drivers, etc.

    MDM doesn’t help with the kind of stuff OP is trying to automate, but it does usually cover most business use cases and if you need more than that, you generally either have a contract to get the manufacturer to do it for you or just put what you need into the org-specific superapp you already have to have.