Don’t buy any kind of drive from aliexpress.

Shop here: https://diskprices.com/ and even then pay attention to the source.

You have backups or replicants of your data, right?

I’ve tried both approaches, even some in/some out, etc.

It really depends on the space, as box fans can’t generate much pressure differential so their effect tends to be pretty localised.

In my current space I’ve found using outward in a specific window works best for overall cooling for the rest of the house overnight, but that room has a markedly higher temp.

If that fan is inward-facing, that room is 5-10 degrees (F) cooler (than using outward), again overnight.

Now if you can get a fan that handles pressure differentials (e.g. a compressor fan) then it’s a different game.

Overall I’ve found a combination of inward/outward to work best (I suspect because of the weak pressure differential of box fans), so targeting a consistent air flow velocity is what works for them.

According to you and your paradigm, and how you see the world working.

The comment you’re responding to shows this.

Try using one on Mint. A mouse that’s been around longer than Mint has been an idea doesn’t work at all until you search and discover a third party app to enable it.

ANY Logitech mouse works with generic windows drivers since 2000. Under Mint they don’t work at all without the third party app.

Or Libre Office. None even compare to MS Office, by a long shot.

They’re fine for the average person, but any business user is going to run into major walls.

We need to be brutally honest about what works, and the limitations. I’m not going to recommend a business use any form of OSS office.

Now Aunt Sally? For sure, because she’s not doing anything complex.

What’s more important is redundancy, as all drives fail.

What’s your replication/redundancy/backup plan look like? That’s more important than “which drive” (other than SMR/CMR), as even enterprise drives fail.

I’ve had consumer drives running 24/7 for 10 years.

Drives are a lot more robust than most people think, but they still fail at seemingly random times, so having backup is crucial.

Backup, backup, backup.

I have an (old) NAS that frankly I don’t trust to not die. Then again, anything can die, so it’s just one component of my local data replication.

I also have my server which is authoritative for all data, which is then duplicated (on schedules) to the NAS and 2 external drives, so I have 3 local copies.

All of these drives are 5+ years old except the primary data drive which is 2.

Bullets are even easier to make than a 3D printed gun…

Take your oppression elsewhere.

Don’t forget the middle finger

Power management on a laptop.

Use a 10 year old Logitech mouse out of the box.

Mint’s stupid annoying print monitor.

Dealing with cached samba creds though the box to save creds wasn’t checked.

The lack of real competitors to office. And no, Open Office doesn’t come close to replacing MS office.

There’s lots that’s annoying.

But Linux is excellent as my servers, as my VM host, as my dedicated systems. Still has it’s issues, but works great for always-on systems with very specific tasks.

Linux and Windows serve different purposes.

If that crawl space is a dirt floor and not concrete, that soil is going to continually provide a moisture source.

I’d seal that opening with some plastic to create a vapor barrier (tape it around the ducts and to the wall or framework). Anything more solid will generate noise from the ductwork vibrating against it.

Yea, what a useless ass. If that’s the kind of people they employ I wouldn’t want that shitty company back in my house.

The condensate drain needs to be drained out of the house, like any other drain.

There are condensate pumps (very small, like a large aquarium pump) for moving condensate up high enough to reach a proper drain (such as the one for your washing machine).

Simply capping off the existing drain is simple laziness. Fuck that guy.

I like your point about power monitoring - that would be an interesting secondary method for alerting to a possible breach, if you have a consistent power-use profile.

While I agree (and I’m largely degoogled for a couple years now), there are a few things that make it quite a pain.

Maps being the biggest one. I have 5 mapping apps (CoMaps, Magic Earth, CoPilot, Organic, Waze and Gmaps) and even the combo of them doesn’t approach what GMaps can do, unfortunately.

I’ve paid for CoPilot to have true offline mapping, I would pay for an app that can do what GMaps does.

But the average person will have a real hard time de-googling, unfortunately. Google has done an exceptional job locking people in.

We wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t already answered the second question affirmatively.

I have an Optiplex that at one point I had 4 2.5" drives in, had to use some duct tape and glue, but it worked fine.

I would suspect he’s getting relayed, and I suspect I was too for my test.

Connecting remotely to your home devices is dependent on your home internet connection’s upload speed, which is usually a fraction of the download speed.

Then add the overhead of the VPN (Tailscale) and how direct of a connection it’s able to make.

Then the connection of the device you’re testing from - it may have some bandwidth limitations.

I just did a quick test - copy a specific file from a local server to my phone - just enabling Tailscale made that copy take twice as long, so it’s definitely adding significant bandwidth constraints (could be an Android limitation).

I prefer the idea of a script that changes the birth date randomly, on a random schedule.

Or to always be the bare minimum “adult” age every day.

Or always be 99

To add - by doing pulls the backup server uses different credentials to run than the credentials used to perform pulls.

Backup server has it’s own credentials database, machines being backed up have their own database. Backup service in backup server uses appropriate credentials from machine being backed up to access the data there (shares, etc). So credentials from compromised machine are unrelated to credentials for backup server.

And if backups are done properly (full on a schedule, daily incrementals, or something similar) you should be able to revert to a known-good state with minimal data loss.