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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Do I need a 20TB boot drive? No. Do I want it enough to pay $250? Yes, absolutely. I’m running 1TB now and I need to manage my space far more often than I’d like, despite the fact that I keep my multimedia on external mass storage. Also, sometimes the performance of that external HD really is a hindrance. I’d love to just have (almost) everything on my primary volume and never worry about it.

    It’s kind of weird how I have less internal storage today than I did 15 years ago. I mean, it’s like 50 times faster, but still.

    I’m not super-skeptical about the pricing. This stuff can’t stay expensive forever, and 2027 is still a ways off.


  • I think it helps to think of browsing as a basic form of searching. Everything you can do in a browsing context, you can by definition do in a searching context…if the client doesn’t suck. The information needed to browse is embedded in the tags.

    So this strikes me as entirely dependent on your client software. A good client should let you browse by tags. You could add Dewey numbers as tags to start with, so you can browse that way if you want, then add any other tags that might be useful (like genres, for example) on top of that.

    The only difference with tags in this context is that books will appear in multiple places.








  • I had some CD-Rs that rotted within a few years. I was devastated, because at the time CD-Rs were hyped up as the most durable of any consumer media, and storage was expensive. I had tons of stuff that was ONLY on CD or DVD. That’s how I archived everything.

    There was an old site that did a comprehensive analysis and ranked different brands of CD-R and DVD-R discs into tiers. My main takeaway at the time was Verbatim or bust. There were some other brands that got discs from the same manufacturer, but not consistently so it was something of a gamble. IIRC Sony was one of the better ones, but Verbatim was the safest choice.

    I can’t say I’ve tested any of my old discs in the past 10 or maybe even 15 years. I copied my most important data into newer media, but I still have a ton of discs I should probably clone to my NAS. One of these years…

    Then came M-discs, which as far as I know are still considered legit. They never really caught on, and production has either halted entirely or is at least limited. I never used them myself.


  • It’s nutty that we haven’t had a proper offline mode in like 20, maybe 25 years. This was something every browser had in the 90s. Loading from cache was the default, even. Now it’s like, I’m not sure why Firefox even has a cache folder. They bend over backwards to prevent you from using it.

    Before you tell me that Firefox has an offline mode, yeah, I know. It’s basically useless.

    I would love a way to have my browser automatically store a local, static copy of everything I view.


  • Back in the 90s, before the DOJ v Microsoft antitrust trial, Microsoft’s licensing terms with OEMs required them to pay MS for every unit sold — even units that did not come with Windows. This meant that if Dell or HP or whoever wanted to offer Linux as an option, they’d still need to pay Microsoft for Windows or else lose the ability to sell Windows at all. It made no sense to offer Linux PCs at that point.

    Just one of many many examples of Microsoft’s illegal anti-competitive behaviors.






  • It’s insane how many things they push as Snaps when they are entirely incompatible with the Snap model.

    I think everyone first learns what Snaps are by googling “why doesn’t ____ work on Ubuntu?” For me, it was Filebot. Spent an hour or two trying to figure out how the hell to get it to actually, you know, access my files. (This was a few years ago, so maybe things are better now. Not sure. I don’t live that Snap life anymore, and I’m not going back.)