Anything I’ve listened to with Ray Porter reading it. His intonation is great and just brings that something extra to the stories. In particular Project Hail Mary and the Bobiverse books. He also did Paradox Bound, which felt like a fine time travel story but his portrayal of the voice of the “faceless men” made the character 's menace come to life for me in a way I don’t think would be captured in text.
Prosthetist. I work with patients to make and fit artificial limbs to them.
Lots of good advice here. I’ve got a bunch of older WD Reds still in service (from before the SMR BS). I’ve also had good luck shucking drives from external enclosures as well as decommissioned enterprise drives. If you go that route, depending on your enclosure or power supply in these scenarios you may run into issues with a live 3.3V SATA power pin causing drives to reboot. I’ve never had this issue on mine but it can be fixed with a little kapton tape or a modified SATA adapter. It’s definitely cheaper to shuck or get used enterprise for capacity! I’m running at least a dozen shucked drives right now and they’ve been great for my needs.
Also, if you start reaching the point of going beyond the ports available on your motherboard, do yourself a favor and get a quality HBA card flashed in IT mode to connect your drives. The cheapo 4 port cards I originally tried would have random dropouts in Unraid from time to time. Once I got a good HBA it’s been smooth sailing. It needs to be in IT mode to prevent hardware raid from kicking in so that Unraid can see the individual identifiers of the disks. You can flash it yourself or use an eBay seller like ThArtOfServer who will preflash them to IT mode.
Finally, be aware that expanding your array is a slippery slope. You start with 3 or 4 drives and next thing you know you have a rack and 15+ drive array.
Same, though I’ve got a couple Decepticons sprinkled in. They all connect to the Allspark ssid.
Seconding the Shield, for all of the above plus Nvidia’s update commitment to it. IIRC the 2015 Shield is the longest continually updated Android device ever. I have a 2015, 2017, and a 2019 at my house, and a couple of 2017s at my parents’ place. I upgraded the older ones to the toblerone remote last year. All are still working great, and continuing to receive regular updates.
Walking on the Sun by Smash Mouth. I had a radio recording on a cassette tape until my uncle bought me the CD of the album Fush Yu Mang. I was only allowed to listen to that track off of it because my mom deemed the rest of it to not be appropriate. (As an adult, the other tracks were indeed totally inappropriate for a preteen)
Great advice from everyone here. For the transcoding side of things you want an 8th gen or newer Intel chip to handle quicksync and have a good level of quality. I’ve been using a 10th gen i5 for a couple of years now and it’s been great. Regularly handles multiple transcodes and has enough cores to do all the other server stuff without an issue. You need Plex Pass to do the hardware transcodes if you don’t already have it or can look at switching to Jellyfin.
As mentioned elsewhere, using an HBA is great when you start getting to large numbers of drives. I haven’t seen random drops the way I’ve seen occasionally on the cheap SATA PCI cards. If you get one that’s flashed in “IT mode” the drives appear normally to your OS and you can then build software raid however you want. If you don’t want to flash it yourself, I’ve had good luck with stuff from The Art of Server
I know some people like to use old “real” server hardware for reliability or ECC memory but I’ve personally had good luck with quality consumer hardware and keeping everything running on a UPS. I’ve learned a lot from serverbuilds.net about compatibility works between some of the consumer gear, and making sense of some of the used enterprise gear that’s useful for this hobby. They also have good info on trying to do “budget” build outs.
Most of the drives in my rack have been running for years and were shucked from external drives to save money. I think the key to success here has been keeping them cool and under consistent UPS power. Some of mine are in a disk shelf, and some are in the Rosewill case with the 12 hot swap bays. Drives are sitting at 24-28 degrees Celsius.
Moving to the rack is a slippery slope… You start with one rack mounted server, and soon you’re adding a disk shelf and setting up 10 gigabit networking between devices. Give yourself more drive bays than you need now if you can so you have expansion space and not have to completely rearrange the rack 3 years later.
Also if your budget can swing it, it’s nice keeping other older hardware around for testing. I leave my “critical” stuff running on one server now so that a reboot when tinkering doesn’t take down all the stuff running the house. That one only gets rebooted or has major changes made when it’s not in use (and wife isn’t watching Plex). The stuff that doesn’t quite need to be 24/7 gets tested on the other server that is safe to reboot.
Ditto. I’ve had mine for over a year now with daily use and it’s been great. Good room for tools, and a dedicated outside pocket for glasses. Inner pocket keeps water bottle in place. Organized device storage that holds 2 laptops, an iPad, Steam Deck, Kindle and travel router. The fact that it fits the exact dimensions under most airplane seats has been clutch for travel.
I had to make a warranty claim this week when some of the zipper teeth separated from the bag for some reason. For all the hubbub around the “trust me bro” warranty, support responded within 2 hours and is sending a completely new bag as a replacement. Top notch support.
Same! Every time I deploy a new machine I look a the list of characters and pick one. It’s been serving me well for over 15 years now.
The more I’ve thought about it the more I think Pete really is one of the safer candidates in that list. He’s already been vetted at the national level from the 2020 cycle. He’s wicked smart, is a great debater, and from the people who have seen him speak gets people excited. He has a national presence already and doesn’t require giving up a governorship or senate seat.
He won the Iowa caucus in 2020 but because of their whole glitch thing it wasn’t official until days later. Should bring some good Midwest support too being from Indiana and presently living in Michigan.