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    1. Advice for anger management when dealing with frustrating technology?

      I'm curious how you tech oriented people handle this and whether you react in the same way to tech frustrations as I do. Advice is welcome. I hate hate hate the black box aspect of dealing with...

      I'm curious how you tech oriented people handle this and whether you react in the same way to tech frustrations as I do. Advice is welcome.

      I hate hate hate the black box aspect of dealing with computer technology. When I try to do something and it fails to work for reasons that are opaque or inscrutable it causes me to react with rage. I haven't quite thrown my computer out the window when something fails to work as expected, but I want to and it ruins my mood and makes me irritable and difficult to deal with until the problem is solved.

      Do other people react the same way? How do you mitigate this? I'm currently needing to learn and use more tech skills and interact with more programs than I have in the recent past. What advice do you have?

      Thanks

      53 votes
    2. Need help finding a monitor

      Sometime this year, probably around the middle of the year or later depending on my welfare, I want to replace my two monitors with an ultra wide. I do have some preferences, such as: OLED...

      Sometime this year, probably around the middle of the year or later depending on my welfare, I want to replace my two monitors with an ultra wide.

      I do have some preferences, such as:

      • OLED Preferably
      • Built in KVM
      • 120hz or above refresh
      • Has the ability to show two separate computers screens at once. Just in case I'm not being clear, two separate computers are plugged in as inputs and it can output the display for both on the same screen by dividing the screen in half. I've only seen this feature on one monitor, an ultrawide ASUS one but that was roughly $2000. This is probably the most 'nice to have' feature.

      Would appreciate any suggestions or recommendations. Thanks.

      Also, I have two monitors I would like to sell when I replace them, these being an ASUS VG27AQ, and a Dell S2721QS. Both of them are in perfect condition, other than being slightly dusty. What would be a fair price to list them for when selling?

      15 votes
    3. Teams bluetooth audio compatibility sucks. What options do I have?

      Hey! So I used to be fairly warm to MS Teams but I utterly despise its call handling. I have three Bluetooth audio devices that I used regularly - a set of Edifier earbuds, my expensive Sony...

      Hey! So I used to be fairly warm to MS Teams but I utterly despise its call handling. I have three Bluetooth audio devices that I used regularly - a set of Edifier earbuds, my expensive Sony WH-1000XM5 pair, my CX-5 audio, and my Bluebus that integrates into my old BMW's hands free system. All of these work perfectly fine when I call someone via regular-ass phone calls. When I use Teams, all hell breaks loose. The edifiers work perfectly fine, so I know Teams is QUITE capable of handling these all ok. My CX-5 system won't do microphone audio when Android Auto is connected, but works fine on Mazda's infotainment call handling. In my BMW it won't handle the microphone but plays audio. On my Sony pair of headphones, it works great... And then about every ten minutes it disconnects, consistently, so I can't use them.

      In theme with the other ongoing thread, nothing gets my gears moving like tech not doing what I'm asking it to. Teams barely has any options on Android for audio, so there isn't much of anything to tweak. Does anyone have any ideas of where to start? Is there something similar to Windows solutions like Virtual Audio Cable which could set up a virtual BT device to pipe audio through and simulate it being something else for Teams? Thanks all!

      19 votes
    4. Is fandom.com actually getting worse?

      I have been a frequent visitor of the various websites that are now under the Fandom.com umbrella, going back to when it was called Wikia. And if there's one thing that's been a consistent...

      I have been a frequent visitor of the various websites that are now under the Fandom.com umbrella, going back to when it was called Wikia. And if there's one thing that's been a consistent irritation with the platform, it's just how intrusive and annoying the advertising is. (For a sense of how long this has been a problem, see here.)

      But worse than the intrusiveness of the sites' ads, their biggest problem is their performance. They can bring Firefox to a crawl.

      For a while, it seemed like Fandom had been making some improvements. I could visit, say, Memory Alpha without the CPU on my computer spiking like crazy. But I just tried to look something up on the Forgotten Realms Wiki and, good god, it was terrible.

      (And before anyone says anything, no, I have no intention of using an ad blocker to deal with it.)

      Am I imagining it or is the platform actually getting worse again?

      57 votes
    5. Question about GDPR

      I am in the EU. I asked a company in which I had an account to delete my account. They told me they would do that as long as I sent them an ID and a postal address. This is to ensure that "I am...

      I am in the EU.

      I asked a company in which I had an account to delete my account. They told me they would do that as long as I sent them an ID and a postal address. This is to ensure that "I am the right person".

      I never gave them an ID and a postal address in the first place so how would that verify anything, and I'm using the email that I used to sign-up with them to ask for the deletion.

      Am I in the wrong to believe that this should be easier? Are they misinterpreting the GDPR or am I?

      What are my options if I do not want to send my ID and postal address?

      --

      Their arguments are:

      Article 5(1)(f) of the GDPR requires us to meet security obligations in data processing. Since data deletion is permanent, we need to ensure that the request is indeed from the person concerned.

      Furthermore, Article 12(6) of the GDPR states: "…when the data controller has reasonable doubts concerning the identity of the natural person making the request referred to in Articles 15 to 21, he may request the provision of additional information necessary to confirm the identity of the data subject."

      10 votes
    6. Are there other good aggregator sites?

      Tildes and Hacker News are my go to sites for general conversation, and information and I find being largely text based is what keeps the quality of the sites from devolving. Are there other...

      Tildes and Hacker News are my go to sites for general conversation, and information and I find being largely text based is what keeps the quality of the sites from devolving. Are there other similar sites?

      64 votes
    7. I'm about to start my first ever job as a Software Engineer. I'm terrified about losing it in a layoff.

      I wanted to be a SWE ever since I was a young kid, and now after a undergrad + masters degree I was one of the first people in my batch to get a job. I just moved to a new country for my first job...

      I wanted to be a SWE ever since I was a young kid, and now after a undergrad + masters degree I was one of the first people in my batch to get a job. I just moved to a new country for my first job and I love it here already, it just feels sad imagining if I do get laid off and I'd have to go back to where I was doing my Masters (and even that would be limited time visa before I have to go back to my very under-developed home country). I do want to just mentally let go of the anxiety and just focus on performing good at my job but with all the recent layoffs it feels hard, my own company laid off a lot of people last year and because of that their glassdoor rating is kindof bad. I've been spiralling a bit just reading the glassdoor reviews of people blaming the management of uprooting their lives. Other people who changed cities or countries and were left jobless and were trying to navigate in a extremely bureucratic environment.

      I have a 6 month probation in which I can be laid off pretty quickly, I just need to learn to not worry about the stuff I can't control.

      34 votes
    8. Reducing the friction of publishing online?

      I'm looking for ways to make it easier to publish on my personal blog. I've had WordPress blogs in the past, and I find that they set up a constant grind of upgrading — upgrading core, upgrading...

      I'm looking for ways to make it easier to publish on my personal blog. I've had WordPress blogs in the past, and I find that they set up a constant grind of upgrading — upgrading core, upgrading plugins, reconfiguring the upgraded components, fixing the things the upgrades break...

      It was stealing too much of the little time I have to devote to my blog. So, when I built my current blog, I built in on a static site generator (11ty). It took longer to set up than just writing HTML and CSS, but it does make it a bit quicker to get something up since it will build pages from markdown, and it doesn't require a ton of upgrading every time I want to sit down and write something. Sure, I could upgrade a library or two each time I sit down with it, but it's just spitting out HTML so I don't really need to.

      That said, it's still more friction than I want. I'm currently obsessed with mmm.page. I love the playful UI. I love the design language it encourages. I love how it makes the tech get out of the way and puts you closer to getting your content out. That said, there are several things I don't love:

      1. It's not accessible. I can't pick which elements to use. I can't write alt text for images.
      2. It's not open source. This means a lot of things. It means when the developer loses interest, it will die. It means we can't evaluate it. It means we can't self-host it. Speaking of these...
      3. Development seems to be slow. There's one item on the roadmap. It was suggested in April. I have a feeling it's not making the money the developer had hoped and they've lost enthusiasm for it.
      4. We can't self-host it. Now, this means I'm stuck paying $10 a month. Tomorrow, that could go up to $20, and there's nothing I can do about it.
      5. There's no easily apparent escape hatch. I guess I could just download the pages it wrote and host them elsewhere, but that's probably not ideal. If the developer does decide to close up shop or double the price, I want an easy way to take my site and go somewhere else.
      6. As far as I can tell, it doesn't support RSS. I am a staunch believer in RSS, and I believe the web sucks without it. I won't want to run a site that doesn't offer it.

      All these problems leave me with a web site that provides too much friction and a solution to that problem that leaves many others in its wake. Does anyone know of an alternative that's similar that could address some or most of these issues? I'm a developer and I still would like to be able to publish online without doing developer-y stuff, so it's easy to see how social media has been able to bottle up so much content on the web. I'd love to think there's something that could bring us out of this dystopia... or at least make it easier for me to share a list of the games I've been playing recently. 😅

      26 votes
    9. ZFS is crud with large pools! Give me some options.

      Hey folks I'm building out a backup NAS to hold approximately 350TB of video. It's a business device. We already own the hardware which is a Gigabyte S451 with twin OS RAIDED SSD but 34 X 16TB SAS...

      Hey folks

      I'm building out a backup NAS to hold approximately 350TB of video. It's a business device. We already own the hardware which is a Gigabyte S451 with twin OS RAIDED SSD but 34 X 16TB SAS HDD disks. I used TrueNAS Scale and ZFS as the filesystem because... It seemed like a good idea. What I didn't realise is that with dedupe and LZO compression on, it would seriously hinder the IO. Anyway, long story short, we filled it as a slave target and it's slow as can be. It errors all the time. I upgraded to 48GB of RAM as ZFS is memory intensive but it's the IOPs which kill it. It's estimating 50 days for a scrub, it's nuts. The system is in RAID6 and all disks dedicated to this pool which is correct in so far as I need all disk available.

      Now I know ZFS isn't the way for this device, any ideas here? I'm tempted to go pure Debian, XFS or EXT4 and soft raid. I'd rather it be simple and managed via a GUI for the rest of the team as they're all Windows admins as well as scared of CLI, but I suppose I can give them Webmin at a push.

      I'm about ready to destroy over 300TB of copied data to rebuild this as it crashes too often to do anything with, and the Restic backup from the Master just falls over waiting for a response.

      Ideas on a postcard (or Tildes reply)...?

      UPDATE:

      After taking this thread in to consideration, some of my own research and a ZFS calculator, here's what I'm planning - bear in mind this is for an Archive NAS:

      36 Disks at 16TB:

      9x16TB RAID-Z2
      4 x VDEVs = Data Pool
      Compression disabled, dedupe disabled.

      Raw capacity would be 576TB, but after parity and slop space we're at 422TB usable. In theory, if we call it 70% usable, I'm actually going to cry at 337TB total.

      At this moment, the NAS1 server is rocking 293TB of used space. Since I'm using Restic to do the backup of NAS1 to NAS2, I should see some savings, but I can already see that I will need to grow the shelf soon. I'll nuke NAS2, configure this and get the backup rolling ASAP.

      My bigger concern now is that NAS1 is set up the same way as NAS2, but never had dedupe enabled. At some point we're going to hit a similar issue.

      Thank you for all of your help and input.

      16 votes
    10. Core Internet – what sites and services should we permanently preserve?

      Looking ahead, the commodification and degradation of the Internet is continuing to take away digital resources that we have come to depend upon over the last 20 years. Whether it’s email or...

      Looking ahead, the commodification and degradation of the Internet is continuing to take away digital resources that we have come to depend upon over the last 20 years. Whether it’s email or Amazon or YouTube, the decline of all our favorites has been well documented.

      But we don’t want to live without these sites and services. Tildes itself is an attempt to preserve one such resource but in a better and more stable way. What other parts of the Internet deserve similar treatment?

      Whether it’s open source eBay or community banking or nonprofit versions of Facebook… what would you choose and how would you go about preserving its character and making it workable in the long-term?

      36 votes
    11. My phone just won't let me click things once anymore

      I'm hoping someone else has had this problem and has found a solution. I have turned on visibility of taps/clicks, and I've also turned up screen sensitivity. I've turned off all animations. I've...

      I'm hoping someone else has had this problem and has found a solution. I have turned on visibility of taps/clicks, and I've also turned up screen sensitivity. I've turned off all animations. I've restarted it. I've installed the most recent update. Nothing changed it. I can see it registering my taps with the visibility feature, but it won't do anything the first time I tap.

      My phone is an Galaxy A52. I don't have a screen protector.

      What's happening is a lot of times (more than half) I will click something, and it won't register. So I have to click again. Usually it's only twice, but sometimes it can be up around five times before it will register that I've clicked the screen. This also sometimes happens when I'm scrolling a webpage, so it's like scroll, scroll, try to scroll but it gets stuck, scroll, etc.

      It happens pretty much everywhere, in every app, except the keyboard letters and numbers (thank god). But even the word suggestions sometimes need to be clicked more than once.

      I'm SO sick of it. I've looked as much as possible to find a similar situation with a fix, and I can't find one. Does anyone know what else I can do?

      18 votes