I'm considering buying one of those commercial style tv's that can be kept on for long periods of time, so I can put my entire plex library on shuffle in the background while I do other things throughout the day. But I'd prefer if the "shuffle" was a little more customizable than what plex offers at the moment. Are there any projects that attempt to mimic the old-school channel-style setup from before the internet? i feel like such a setup would be ideal, since I could create several channels for different styles of media, but still have the randomness.

I'm a cashier, and it's really strange just how easy it is to spot a criminal. It's like they go out of their way to fit as many stereotypes as possible into their identity.

Someone tried to pay with fake bills earlier today at work, wearing a baseball cap, reflective glitter sunglasses, a leather jacket, and jeans, smelling of cigarettes talking in a heavy accent with a silent large guy following behind him, and pretending to not understand English even as he pulls fake bills out from a bulging pocket.

Like, wtf

Shouldn't the air pressure crush them until the density inside equals the density outside? Why does helium balloon behave so differently from a vacuum-filled balloon?

It just seems so backwards that making a concrete mailbox can get you sued by a jerk that intentionally drove into it. I can understand banning pitfalls and other actual traps, but why passive defensive deterrents? After all, it's not like a bystander accidentally wandering onto your property is going to be injured by a random bolder you placed between your garden and the street.

(Edit): It seems I had a fundamental misunderstanding of US law. Thanks for indulging my curiosity!

I recently purchased a new NAS / Server and while I'm waiting for it to arrive I'm planning out my storage and RAID configurations.

I'ce mostly decided on using 5 20TB or 24TB drives in RAID z2 as my primary storage pool. I'll just use a 500GB nvme as a read cache. But I still have a gen 4 by 4 nvme slot available, and I'm considering buying a stupidly large nvme drive to put in it.

Problem is, I want some fault tolerance, so I'm wondering if I can just make a virtual drive in my primary pool and use a RAID mirror between the nvme and the virtual drive to make my secondary pool.

Would this work? Or would the performance overhead and instibility make this a fool's errand?

I'm pretty new to self-hosting, and the NAS I'm using right now has been a pain since the moment I bought it. The Synology DS220+ just doesn't have enough CPU power for my needs, and I've recently used up all the disk space I installed, so I'm looking for a new server.

Unfortunately, all the options I've found online prioritize storage space over CPU, and I haven't had much luck finding anything that fits my needs.

Requirements: CPU: Intel Core i3 or higher, but preferably Core i5 GPU: Not needed RAM: max 64 GB, min 16 GB Storage: max 32 TB, min 10 TB Network: 10 GB SPF+ Price: max 6K CAD, preferred 3K CAD

I'm hoping to run TrueNAS Scale with Plex and Nextcloud installed, and my media library isn't likely to get larger than 5 TB, so CPU is really the main limiter of my current NAS.

As an example of something almost perfect: The TrueNAS mini X+ and R varieties would work excellently, but don't meet the CPU requirement. I wanted to look at the other systems on offer from TrueNAS, but they don't list out CPU specs for anything more advanced than the Mini line.

Of the Lenovo stuff, since it was one of the few websites with a filterable picker, the ThinkSystem SR630 V2 was the closest of fitting my requirements. It comes short on the CPU, though, and is verging on the price limit too. I also don't need 12 TB of RAM, or 1.2 PB of storage.

What do you use? Can you recommend any websites I can go to find something that fits my needs better?

I'm finding it really difficult to tell whether a particular air conditioner is supported by Home Assistant, since all the ones I've seen in stores don't seem compatible. I mean, I'm probably wrong in that, I'm sure that with enough work anything will work, but I didn't see any integrations with Midea air conditioners, for example.

All my windows in my house slide sideways, so most of the in-wall air-conditioners won't work, and I rent the place, so I can't make large alterations. This pretty much limits me to portable ACs, which don't tend to have much smart home functionality.

Any help would be appreciated, as I'm pretty new to using Home Assistant in general, and I'm still trying to figure out how things work. I only bought my Home Assistant Yellow last year, and I don't yet have any smart appliances to connect it to.

What brands do you avoid at all cost? I don't keep up with the news all that much, and many of the reasons to avoid something don't make it there anyway. So I'm asking here to make a big list of things to avoid. It could be anything from bad security practices to really frustrating packaging. Working as a cashier myself, I definitely know there are plenty of brands I avoid purely on the basis that their product is a pain to stock.

On the flip side, what's the alternative? If you avoid Pepsi, for example, what do you turn to instead?

I'm getting really tired of my food expiring before I make anything with it, and I want to quit buying anything that can't be frozen or last several months in the cupboard.

It's a personal philosophy that I've come to use as my own form of religion, and while I'm aware other people have researched the idea, I'm having some trouble finding the name for the concept.

I love browsing crates.io and blessed.rs for interesting and useful crates to experiment with. What are your favorite?

I'm especially interested in those simple ones that do one thing and do it will, like uuid, tempfile, and notify.