spencer

Yeah it was 2006 and that was how you got the MP3 files onto your iPod Nano. This was back when “mobile internet” consisted of “m.website.com” links that loaded a page without a style sheet at dial-up speeds that was designed to be navigated with a D-pad.

The year was 2006, and the 80 GB HDD in my Dell Optiplex 790 was full of podcasts, stolen music, and episodes of Dr. Who…

Stealing other people’s cultural heritage is their cultural heritage

This is why they removed the apps. They want to be driving traffic through the app, and the 3rd party apps prevented that from happening.

Honestly the way I always look at it is just take the lifetime cost and divide it by the yearly cost and if I think the product/license deal will exist for that long (and I’ll use it for that long) it’s worth it otherwise not. Like, I have lifetime Plex and frankly I don’t expect the, to exist forever but I like the premium features and I’ve had lifetime for long enough that I’ve saved money.

Honestly, if you’re doing regular backups and your ZFS system isn’t being used for business you’re probably fine. Yes, you are at increased risk of a second disk failure during resilver but even if that happens you’re just forced to use your backups, not complete destruction of the data.

You can also mitigate the risk of disk failure during resilver somewhat by ensuring that your disks are of different ages. The increased risk comes somewhat from the fact that if you have all the same brand of disks that are all the same age and/or from the same batch/factory they’re likely to die from age around the same time, so when one disk fails others might be soon to follow, especially during the relatively intense process of resilvering.

Otherwise, with the number of disks you have you’re likely better off just going with mirrors rather than RAIDZ at all. You’ll see increased performance, especially on write, and you’re not losing any space with a 3-way mirror versus a 3-disk RAIDZ2 array anyway.

The ZFS pool design guidelines are very conservative, which is a good thing because data loss can be catastrophic, but those guidelines were developed with pools that are much larger than yours and for data in mind that is fundamentally irreplaceable, such as user generated data for a business versus a personal media server.

Also, in general backups are more important than redundancy, so it’s good you’re doing that already. RAID is about maintaining uptime, data security is all about backups. Personally, I’d focus first on a solid 3-2-1 backup plan rather than worrying too much about trying to mitigate your current array suffering catastrophic failure.

Would they make it worse than watching ads?

Hey… it sorts properly alphabetically

This is true, but I don’t know if you’d be counted as a seeder on that list though if you don’t have the full torrent.

Something I've found very helpful is time tracking. I have an app on my phone that is always running a timer where I input a task and a project (basically a category for the task). What this has forced me to do is to consciously decide when I'm doing a thing, and it acts as a kind of lightning rod for my attention. When I start a new task, I need to decide that is what I'm going to do and put it into the app, and if I find myself drifting from the task I must either stay focussed or decide that I'm not able to focus on the current task and instead focus on what is distracting me. It helps me remind myself that "now is the time for X, not for Y."

The thing with cats is that they just kinda know themselves and offer you the deal of “yeah these are the three nice things I like to do and the three annoying things I like to do and if that jives with you, we’ll work. Otherwise, I guess just let me back outside and I’ll go back to eating birds and shit.” So every cat owner is like “yeah sure he vomits in my shoes every 2-3 days so I just turn them upside down when I take them off but he likes to sleep on the couch beside me when I watch TV and that’s our special time, you don’t really need to get it.”

I'm personally a big fan of OpenAudible. It's not free, but it's not crazy expensive and it does all the work for you. You sign into your Audible account in the app, it will pull your library, download each book, decrypt it, and convert it to the format of your choice (I usually do M4B). I've been using it for years and it makes downloading your Audible library in an ongoing basis a breeze.