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Hello everyone,

I usually do my own research, and then I try to find multiple matching results and afterwards, read specifically in detail about each recommendation, but, I have to be honest that for UPS recommendations that I’ve seen, it seems to be a very personal recommendation depending on the wattage and connected devices.

First of all, most people recommend CyberPower or APC, but I’ve also seen some recommendations for Eaton. Is there any other brand that I should be looking into?

The devices I would like to connect to a UPS would be: desktop, TV, Apple TV, NAS, router and probably my Nintendo Switch.

There are some general things I've found out while searching that I think I would like some confirmation:

• I actually think I should buy two UPS's, or? I think just one for the desktop and another one just for the remaining devices, since the desktop uses a lot more wattage.
• Pure Sine Wave: It does not matter for smaller stuff (routers, etc) but it seems that anything above 70 W, it should use a UPS with this. So, that would mean I need pure sine wave, since my desktop and TV definitely use more than 70 W of power.
• Some people said to search for a UPS with line conditioning so that you always get a perfect sine wave. Would you agree?
• USB connection (not a faux USB!) so that the NAS detects the power failure and shuts down gracefully.
• It is important that the UPS has removable battery for better longevity.

How would I choose a UPS? Do I need to see the total wattage of all my devices and then pick the UPS accordingly? Anything I'm missing?

My budget would be up to €100 or €150 in case it is really worth it.

Thank you in advance for all replies.

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I'm curious what experiences people who game on linux have had, what your favorite distros are, and why. Mind sharing them in this thread? I'm in the market.

My old GTX770 just bit the dust. I picked up a Radeon 6600 to replace it, only to discover after installing it that while the 6600XT has Windows 7 drivers, the 6600 itself does not. The desktop works, but that's it. A little strange, but not entirely unexpected.

My ancient frankenstein Win 7 Enterprise has got to go (into a VM, already on its way) and there is simply no way in hell I will ever use any version of the spyware/bloatware mess that Windows has become today. They lost me forever the second they put a marketplace and ads into my start menu. Ain't nobody got time for that, or at least, I don't.

That means it's finally Linux time, for real - no going back. I'm rather excited. :D

Side note: My original install date for Windows 7 Enterprise was 11-12-2011, it's lasted nearly eleven years without a BSOD or the need to reinstall. They really did fix windows decay syndrome in v7. That's the longest I've ever had a desktop OS last. Can any desktop linux distro manage to go that long, I wonder?

The last time I ran a linux daily driver was Ubuntu for two years around '08, until I got sick of the pulseaudio issues. I'm not worried about that anymore, linux is ready for primetime now. That begs the question of which distro to use. I've toyed with or supported just about all of them at work (mint, redhat, suse, ubuntu, arch, deb, slack just to name a few). I'm a sysadmin by trade so I'm not phased by the learning curve, I know linux cold already.

It's more a question of which distro is going to bother me the least acting as my daily driver. I like to tinker at work, but if I have to do it all the time at home I get cranky. I prefer the 'it just works' experience. The primary requirement is linux gaming, as this is my main gaming rig. That means lots of Skyrim Special Edition, Stellaris, Rimworld, emulators, etc.

There's so many choices out there I'm not sure how to tell which one is the best and I don't particularly feel like putting a dozen of them through their paces over a month to find out - so I'm asking Tildes. ;) I don't mind trying a couple. Steam is required. Good support for WINE is a bonus. Ditto virtual desktop support - is Compiz still a thing or is there something better?

Here are the system specs. I'm sure it's all fully linux compatible.

1. Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z
2. Intel i7 2600K (3.2GHz, OC'ed to 4.2GHz with a Noctua air cooler, never breaks 60'C)
3. Sapphire RX6600 GPU w 8GB of DDR6
4. 16GB of G.Skill DDR3 2400MHz memory
5. 500GB Samsung SSD, 4x4TB WD Red NAS drives

Yeah, it's long in the tooth, and I'm glad I went for the Z/K combo so the new GPU isn't entirely gimped plugged into a much older PCIe 2.0 mainboard. I'll pick up a Ryzen sometime to replace it, but not until after the chip shortage shakes out. It was hard enough getting that 6600 in this market without getting scalped.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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I want to switch out the name of a certain "technology" on any website with "sand castle" in the hopes that my daily browsing gets a lot funnier. if it works i will as well think of a good word for any POTUS and maybe musk and bezos :'-)

I thouht it might maybe work with ublock? i have never done anything advanced with it so i dont know.

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This is a total longshot. I moved away from a WD My Cloud EX4100 w/ 3x WD Reds to a new box. I bought two more drives for the new one to make the move easier.

After the move I took the drives out to format them only to find that each 4TB drive shows a partition of 1.8TB on any other system (diskpart with W10 LTSC, Disk Utility MacOS, and GParted with Ubuntu.) Inside the EX4100 the drives show their full capacity.. and I just don't get it.

I reached out to their support, but I don't expect much of a response.

Anybody have any idea why the heck this could be happening? This seems crazy. I don't mind buying more drives, but it seems like a waste when I've got 12TB just sitting there.

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Right now I've got a shitty WD EX4100 and everything was sort of running along nicely with docker and all, but today it rebooted and decided that it didn't want to do anything with docker anymore. I got the thing before I got into Linux and its time to move on.

Someone locally is selling the following for $250CAD

• Quad core Celeron @ 2Ghz
• 8GB RAM
• Fractal Node 304 case
• 2x WD 2TB Red 3.5" hard drives
• 120GB Kingston SSD
• 700 watt semi-modular power supply

All I run are the following:

• nzbget
• sonarr
• qbittorrent (but I'll switch to a better one)
• serve up content to my HTPC (running Kodi, so no transcoding or anything)

I don't need the drives that come with it. I'll be putting in 4x 4TB WD Reds. Right now the box is running Open Media Vault 6, so I'll give that a swing, otherwise it'll just be Ubuntu server.

How does this sound? I'm not opposed to spending some money on a new NAS, I just want something simple that I don't have to fuck around with too much.

I ended up going with the HP Proliant

OS: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS x86_64
Host: ProLiant ML310e Gen8
Kernel: 5.11.0-43-generic
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 (8) @ 3.700GHz
GPU: 01:00.1 Matrox Electronics Systems Ltd. MGA G200EH
Memory: 32GB

It's pretty good so far. Thanks everybody!

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Is anyone here familiar with crawling the web? I’m interested in broad crawling, rather than focusing on particular sites. I’d appreciate pretty much any information about how this is usually done, and things to watch out for if attempting it.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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I picked up 20 NFC tags (link) and they seem to be alright with iOS after I (re?)format them to NDEF.

Anyway, I have a few things setup:

• tap to play music in the dining room over a Google Home speaker
• tap to turn off some lights and prep for bed etc
• tap to change some Hue scenes

... and that's about it. I don't have trouble waking up to an alarm, so I don't need to go down that route. Anyone have any fun things you're doing with tags?

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This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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Hi all. I am asking this open-ended question (bottom of this post) because I am considering making contributions to an open-source project that would directly benefit me and other users.

Some background:

I have worked with an engineering simulation software called Ansys MAPDL basically everyday for the last 4 years, in both an academic and a professional capacity. It's not necessarily relevant whether you are familiar to that program to participate in this discussion. The relevant thing is that the GUI for MAPDL is written in Tcl/Tk and I don’t imagine it is going to be modernized (because of more modern, but distinctly different, replacements). This is a screenshot of the GUI for reference.

Why do people put up with such an old interface?

The power of the program is not its GUI, but the scripting language that can be run to setup and solve simulations. The program name is really the scripting language name, Ansys Parametric Design Language (APDL). It's somewhat like Matlab. The program also offers an enormous amount of control when compared to the more modern GUI that's been released, since the modern GUI holds a totally different philosophy.

The older GUI is really helpful in certain circumstances because it will spit out a file containing commands that were used in the session. This is a great demonstration of how to run a command or use a setting/config command, but a lot of newer features are buried in the documentation and aren't available in the older GUI.

My coding experience

I know the MAPDL language very intimately, but my experience beyond it is limited to some Perl scripting, and a bit of Python exposure.

Motivation

Open-Source Ansys API

Recently, Ansys started supporting an open-source Python project called PyAnsys. MAPDL is otherwise fully closed source, and this is really the only public-facing API. PyAnsys has basically converted a lot of MAPDL script commands to a pythonic format, hence Python can now be used to interact with MAPDL. This is great for several reasons, but is limited regarding interactivity. Interacting with MAPDL via Python is basically happening in a fancy console via Jupyter notebook or IDE like Spyder. Certain commands will bring up Python-based graphics displays of solid models and results plots, but there isn't a dedicated GUI open all the time.

The Question(s)

My question is whether it is feasible to write a frontend GUI to a bunch of python commands. If you were going to do it, how would you do it? What might you write it with? Would you even do it? Is this a stupid endeavor?

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So I'm looking to do an improved version of this project from a couple of years ago that rebuilt the dreamcast VMU into an emulator system that could even interface with a modified dreamcast controller using the original connector. That project was really neat, but it used a raspberry pi zero, which is frankly anemic for running any emulators past the SNES, and I'd like to find one that's powerful enough to emulate the dreamcast itself, but small enough to fit inside a VMU. To that end, my requirements are:

• Must be of a similar size to the pi zero. Smaller would be better, but it absolutely cannot be more than 40x65mm.

• Must have a processor at least as powerful as a cortex A53, preferably something more powerful like the A72.

• Must have a release of armbian (or similar) with drivers for full video acceleration.

• Must be able to drive a display over SPI.

• Must be available. The NanoPi NEO Core 2 is pretty close to what I need, if maybe a bit underpowered, but it seems to be discontinued and I can't find it anywhere but aliexpress at double the list price.

• Composite video out would be nice.

• Analog audio out would be nice.

• Availability without soldered headers and large ports would be nice, like the pi zero or nanopi neo.

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Let me start by saying this is a space I am not at all familiar with. I didn't grow up with IRC, my first text editor was Sublime (I'm not from the "EMACS vs. VIM" generation,) so I feel kinda outta touch with what all is going on.

Is there a winner? I feel invested in this topic after seeing a whole slew of posts, blogs, and medium articles posted all over Reddit and HN breaking down how these folks have personally been impacted over the past month or so. It seems to have died down which leaves me with the question of what the outcome was. An even 50/50 split? Libera destroying Freenode? Or Freenode able to hold onto users by successfully preventing efforts to organize a transition?

Without being in the Freenode community, I don't have a feeling for whether Freenode is dead, Libera Chat is "winning" and I don't think there's a good way to get metrics either.

Anyone in this world who can help the uneducated out on the outcome of all of this?

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My Goal

I am applying to Canadian universities for fall admission as a CS major. This will be my second degree, and one of the requirements of getting admitted for a second degree is to show that you have a significant interest in the subject. My plan is to get online certificates to show that I am actually dedicated to learning CS and getting a job in the field. I am actually dedicated, I just need a way to show it on paper. I have some experience with software development (only the basics), but there aren't any records of it since it was just informal study.

My Problem

I can't decide which certificates I should pursue. I am torn between EdX and Udemy. I would Tilderinos' help in choosing between the two. I would also appreciate any general advice you may have.

Here are the courses I plan to take on EdX (prices in USD):

UBC's MicroMasters Program in
Software Development - $832

Harvard CS50's Web Programming with Python and JavaScript - $199

IBM's Professional Certificate in
Cloud Application Development Foundations - $169

Here are the courses I plan to take on Udemy:

The Ultimate 2021 Fullstack Web Development Bootcamp - $15

The Complete 2021 Web Development Bootcamp - $15

The Ultimate MySQL Bootcamp: Go from SQL Beginner to Expert - $30

Angular - The Complete Guide (2021 Edition) - $15

Comparisons

To reiterate, I have two goals going into this. One is to actually learn web development, since I would like to become a fullstack developer (but my options are semi-open). The other is to prove to the Canadian universities that I am dedicated to learning and to give myself an edge over applicants.

If I go with EdX, then I have to pay a much steeper price for the certificates. These courses also take a long time to get through and the projects don't seem as relevant to real word applications. But I will also be learning from established institutions like Harvard and UBC. EdX certificates also come with the distinct advantage that a human is checking the problem sets you submit. This will show the Canadian universities that I have actually spent the time and effort to go through the courses and pass them.

If I go with Udemy, I will get through the courses in less time and their projects seem more related to real world projects. If I go through the courses faster, I will also have more time to start on some personal projects, and I can show my dedication to learning through those projects. Personal projects and also volunteer work will also help establish a resumé for future work. The courses on Udemy are a lot cheaper too. But they don't have the same level of verification or prestige that EdX does.

So in summary, EdX has prestige and quality courses, but a steep prices and a huge time commitment. Udemy is cheaper and gives me more opportunities to do personal projects and volunteer work, but it's certificates aren't fully trustworthy from the Canadian universities' perspective.

Final Words

What do you think? Which path should I take?

For those of you wondering, why I am going to university instead of a bootcamp, it's because I plan to immigrate to Canada and becoming a student seems the straightest way of getting PR. I need to leave my third world country as soon as I can, for mental health and economic reasons. I have been mostly unemployed ever since the pandemic started so I can't get work in Canada (or the U.S.) on my first degree (a management degree). I already tried that route. I can't find proper work here either.

Also, I am sorry if I posted in the wrong group, or if I shouldn't have posted it anywhere at all. I desperately need advice on what to do and I don't have a trustworthy network here that can help me through this. I'm sorry and thank you for your help.