Bags

It wasn’t super relevant to the story, but yeah, I could just browse the files right on their PC, definitely a “Not intending to share it for free” kind of situation, completely devoid of any authentication or security.

I’ve actually taken note of my navigational skills over the last couple years… I grew up in one state, and then a few years after graduating college, moved to a different state. When I was growing up, phone navigation didn’t really exist as it does now, cars didn’t have built-in navigation, and standalone navigation devices were slow and not all that great (at least the ones I could afford).

I find that when I return home, even 10 years later, I am able to navigate all the places I used to go unaided with ease, back-roads, niche routes, able to travel for hours without getting “lost”.

When I moved, though, I had very recently gotten my first smartphone, and google maps was very convenient to “learn” the new area. I ended up just continuing to use navigation since it was convenient. I’ve found that beyond the major main routes, I don’t have the same kind of “built-in” navigational skill that I do for my original home-turf. I never really learned the area.

I am moving towards a smart-phone-less life, and I’ve been able to let go of a lot, but GPS navigation remains a sticking point. I need to start training myself to navigate unaided in my current area.

Many many years ago in the paleolithic era when 2.4GHz was king, a neighbor in the next unit over had an unsecured wifi network… I connected my old laptop, figured out where the connection was best (turned out to be beside the stove in the kitchen?), piped the connection out the ethernet port and into the WAN port on my router, and set up my own “secured” network lol. I’m fairly certain anyone with a straight-up unsecured wifi network doesn’t have the skills or knowledge to detect someone leaching their bandwidth. I did that for like 3 years without a single hiccup until I moved and finally had to start paying.

While I haven’t seen him the most times, I am unequivocally a massive Dev-head. I’ve seen Devin Townsend 3 times (4 if you count the virtual concert during lockdown in 2020), but one of them was to travel from the USA to the Netherlands this March to see the one-time live performance of The Moth (I was right in the second row, I get a lot of peripheral screen-time in the live-stream). It was such an amazing experience, I’m going to count that as 10 or 20 normal concerts. I probably also haven’t cried that many happy tears in at least a decade or two. It was also my first time ever leaving the USA, and I really REALLY didn’t want to go home. I’d have happily lived the rest of my life on the Dutch train network.

I’ve been meaning to get to one of their shows, but just never had the chance, or always learned about it right after it happened.

I really wish Грай (Grai) would tour somewhere in North America…

I had never heard of Thank You Scientist before, but they were opening for one of the bands that I really like to go see live (Rivers of Nihil, seen them 5 times so far). HOLY SHIT they are so good. I have no idea how they ended up as the opener for that show, they’re so different from the other bands on the setlist, but I am very glad I got to see them.

I saw Tesseract recently when I went to see Devin Townsend, that was an amazing show.

You’re not going to get an argument out of me lol. I had a Reddit account for over a decade. I was addicted to the karma system of Reddit, it was seriously negatively impacting my life. I finally deleted my account and moved here recently, it’s been one of the better changes I’ve made in my life. You can completely hide post scores here, and the communities are smaller and less active which drives a more genuine engagement vs the hot-take one-liners, memes, and low-effort post replies.

Reddit can burn to the ground and cease to exist for all I care. It’s become so big and full of hate and misinformation.

My legitimate advice is just… don’t go back and save yourself the headache.

The karma itself is the gamification that increases engagement.

The gated subs, karma limits, etc. are there to cut down on spam, low-effort content, brigading, etc. in large communities to keep the engaged users more engaged so hopefully they spend a few more dollars on silly updoot awards.

It’s all supply and demand, profit-driven decisions. If a feature like karma limits alienates a small number of users, it is still worth it if it retains and engages with more high-value users who invest money in the platform with their ad viewership and direct purchases.

Costco bought RAC in a stunning buyout in 2437 after Costco’s CEO Harambe Memelord Disney Jr. offered RAC’s CEO Squiggy John John John John Johnson a 2-for 1 deluxe latte coupon and an extra big-ass fry.

It’s funny, I was JUST hankering to take my SW out to browse the airwaves, and then I log on to see this post.

I have a Halicrafters S-119, still runs on tubes. Picks up 2-16MHz.

I already spent some time rummaging around for my antenna, but I can’t find it and don’t have a spool of wire handy, so I’ll need to work on that. Last time I had it set up was a couple years and 2 moves ago.

They run a custom vendor-locked distro named QTS, so they’re not really as easy to modify as a normal system, I don’t think you can even install programs like that.

I’ll definitely bookmark it though if I ever get around to building my own solution, thanks!

I have no idea if it’s a QNAP-wide issue, or just some specific models, I haven’t bothered to do that much research. I’m guessing that the discs WOULD spin down if you have that option selected if they weren’t constantly being pinged a couple times a minute. That constant pinging is the part I can’t seem to track down.

An excerpt from a post I was reading while researching this sums it up prettt well: “700 posts about spindown/sleep/standby not working in the QNAP HDD Spin Down Forum. No one seems to be able to resolve it. Qnap clearly couldn’t care less.”

The only solution that I’ve found that seems to work is to install some other operating system on it, which kind of defeats the purpose of buying a turn-key NAS, and is slightly outside my comfort zone right now. I just ordered a kill-a-watt, so I’ll see how much power it’s taking with/without drives and go from there if it’s worth my time to dive into an OS swap, or building a custom rig.

If you can figure out how to get a qnap to spin down its disks, please let me know lol. I’ve been searching for months and haven’t found a reliable solution. I basically only need to access it once a day at MOST, so having the disks spinning away for like 99% of their life sucking down power is something I’d like to avoid. The problem seems to be that even with a perfectly clean slate, no services running, the system set up in their own RAID0 SSD pool, the HDD’s, even with 0 bytes of data on them, are being pinged for access at least once a minute. I’m assuming it’s some log being written to, but it’s not anything visible in the file system, and I haven’t been able to find any solution online, lots of people seem to have the same issue.

I’m tempted more and more every day to just grab one of those low-power embedded ITX boards and build up a custom rig. Other than the disk spinning constantly, the TS-462 does everything I need perfectly.