partial_accumen

Long ago I ran a Windows Media Center PC in the living room and used the hell out of it. When WMC finally went EOL, I look for alternatives and found Plex. I never got around to setting up a Plex box, and now I see it too is ready for the scrap heap. I think this is what getting old is. You plan on doing something and never get around to it. Time passes much faster up here in age.

assuming I’m worried about a smash and grab

For your specific use case, how about this:

Get a cheap USB thumb drive and a long USB cable. Put your disk unlock password on that thumb drive, and semi-permanently affix the USB drive to your building. You said you’re in a basement. Put it on top of a rafter with a metal fitting that would keep the drive from being taken without removing the screws. Run the long USB cable from the thumb driving in your rafter to the USB port on the machine. Alter your startup script to mount the thumb drive read the password from the thumb drive to unlock your main disk. Don’t forget to immediately unmount the thumbdrive in the OS after the disk is unlocked for extra safety.

If someone is doing a smash and grab, they’ll unplug all the cables (including this USB cable going to the thumb drive) and take your machine leaving the disk encryption password behind on the USB thumb drive.

I don’t have a recommendation for you, but if you exhaust your leads there is a large comparrison table with all kinds (and ages) of remote access solutions that you could search against for your criteria (open source, supported, etc) here:

Comparison of remote desktop software on wikipedia

Ahh so it was the Lyft operators phone recording.

This is a lesson to go through your app permissions to see what has access to your mic or camera and turn off those permissions which you don’t want it to have.

Generally a company doing something bad enough to encourage a large enough boycott to affect the bottom line is making quite a bit of money. They calculate the loss of sales due to the boycott over time and can plot when the value of the bad business is lower than the boycott. Many times they continue with the bad behavior in spite of loss of business from the boycott because the business might be at the edge of viability anyway. So extracting the last bit of value out of the company is a net win before the rotting husk is sold off in pieces for the value of its assets or the brand is sold to the opposing group that actually likes the bad behavior that was being boycotted so it becomes an asset again.

alwayshasbeen.jpg

Thankfully the other two haven’t fallen as hard as Seagate has.

If you want keep thinking that don’t look too hard at Western Digital’s scandals and catastrophic drive failures of the past. In my early working days I made good money swapping out hundreds of failing Western Digital hard drives.

Large enough that management schools are forced to teach about how ever real reform won’t be enough to save you from bad actions.

Sadly, in the world of multinational business, that isn’t how management schools perceive boycotts.

Oh, I agree with that. Part of the cost of a product is how much bother the consumer will have to put forth to get their desired use out of it. That’s part of what a brand is supposed to communicate to a buyer.

Okay, I agree with you that you’re not wrong to be upset at Seagate customer service. Its also perfectly within your rights to stop using Seagate. I just want to point out that if you continue to follow your policy of “one and done”, and the continued deteriorating customer service experience all companies are providing these days, you’ll soon be left with very few places to do business with.

There are only 6 or 7 airlines that fly out of my local international airport. I’ve had disappointing customer service experiences of one degree or another from every single one of them. If I was following a “one and done” approach, I’d have no one to fly commercially with.

Specifically with magnetic hard drive manufacturers, there are only 3 left in existence: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba

If you’ve sworn off Seagate, that means all of your future purchase have to be accommodated by the remaining two. I hope that is enough.

What was Seagate’s excuse for not honoring the warranty when you filed a claim?

My logic was that in 2008 when I bought a brand new seagate hard drive, and it was dead before I plugged it in, they refused to honor their warrenty.

If it was a new drive bought from a retailer, why didn’t you return it to the retailer?

More than a dozen states that legalized marijuana have seen a spike in illegal marijuana grow operations that utilize massive amounts of electricity.

I don’t know what a grow operation looks like, I’m betting charging my Electric Vehicle at home consumes more electricity than plant lights. That EV charging can pull 40 amps for upwards of 6 hours if the battery is dead flat when returning from a long trip. Seems like an easy way to mask a grow operation would be just to lower your EV charge (say to 20A or so) rate to stretch out the duration, then run the grow lights at the same schedule as the EV charging. There’s no way to know from the electrical meter what is consuming the electricity.

Criminalizing porn means that nearly everyone is a criminal. So you can be arrested at any time those in power want to arrest you without having to find a legitimate reason.

Anytime I am filming a protest or anywhere near police, I just tap the lock button a bunch of times in my pocket and I can rest easy.

How does that help if the police are the ones that alert you to their presence? I highly recommend against quickly shoving your hand in your pocket to tap a button 5 times.

You could accomplish what you’re trying by putting the GPU in a second computer. Further, most UPSes have a data interface, so that you could have the GPU computer plugged into the UPS too, but receive the signal when power is out, so it can save its work and shutdown quickly preserving power in the UPS batteries. The only concern there would be the max current output of the UPS in the event of a power outage being able to power both computers for a short time.

Well, my mother has asked me to digitize her collection too and have me host it. Originally, fine, you give your movies to me, I host them, same thing.

Did your mom buy your computer and hard drives? I doubt it. You spent your own money, right? So she’s giving you a whole bunch of stuff which is consuming your space. Quote out the cost of buying components for a separate server for her with her own drives. When she buys the parts, build her her own server and put her stuff on it.

While thats an awesome pile of storage, I weep for your electricity bill.

A bad command execution in large cloud providers can literally make significant portions of the web unavailable, just by the sheer number of services dependent on it.

You can’t have it both ways. You’re trying to call out all of the benefits of running your own infra, but then calling out the downsides of public cloud. Talk apples to apples or oranges to oranges. The point I’m making in the post you’re responding to is that “rolling-your-own” as an organization, specifically a small or medium sized one, comes with risks that far outweigh the costs and risks of public cloud.

The convenience is not worth the risk.

That is not the opinion of non-IT business leaders make decisions to the detriment of the advice of IT departments. You’re ignoring that good IT decisions don’t get to be make by good IT professionals. You’re always limited to the budget and power granted by your organization. That is the practical reality.