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  • 2 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • There are websites detecting adblockers that instruct you to disable them in order to view the website. It’s a constant game of cat and mouse between ad companies and adblockers.

    And I would like to not watch and hear 3 x 10 seconds unskippable ads when one of my parents wants to show me some 30 seconds funny cat fails clip on their phone.








    1. because CC companies incentivize us to do so

    That was my point, yes. Also, see my other comment, I live in Europe where credit lines (we do have the so-called “shopping” cards offering fixed installments for purchases but also overdraft at an ATM) aren’t the norm here and people opening up such an account take it more seriously and pay attention not to overdraft. “Building your credit score” isn’t a thing here. Confusing terms and scum agents promoting those cards do trick people into overdrafting and paying huge monthly interests (30% / year) instead of fixed installments, though.


  • I guess it does work differently, and it depends on the bank. I’m in Europe. When I make a payment, let’s say Saturday, that will actually be processed on Monday, the sum doesn’t show up in my account anymore and I see it as a pending transaction. So I can’t spend more than I have on a debit account.

    The only time I would owe the bank are card reissue fees every few years, which could take the balance into the negative. But if you have multiple accounts with the same bank (including savings accounts) the fee is automatically withdrawn from other accounts. Also, no fees for the negative balance if it’s a debit card. You can have it pending for months without issue.

    I actually take advantage of not being able to overdraft by having a separate account and attached card that I only use for online payments. It normally stays on 0, and I only move money there before making an online purchase. If my card details are leaked / stolen, transactions would get refused (no money in the account), I would just close the card and request another one.

    PS Given the downvotes, I understand I might have a wrong understanding and might confuse banking terms a bit, but I don’t live in the US and I certainly wasn’t taking the side of banks regarding the overdraft fees.




  • Where do you keep your KeepAss master password?

    In my head. If you use a long passphrase, it’s easy to remember, easy to type, and secure.

    The pregenerated book of codes is used since ancient times and it is interesting, but I would much prefer to educate people to use passphases instead.

    And everybody has a phone with them at all times, you can have Keepass on it. It doesn’t use the cloud, it’s local, and if you need to sync the password database file automatically with your PC it’s safe to keep it in the cloud, it’s encrypted and only decrypted locally. But I myself use a self-hosted instance of Nextcloud.



  • True, but it depends from person to person and it counts if you have a small or big drive, how often you watch and rotate your media, how large the media is. If you only have a 1TB SSD, and often download and watch blue-ray quality, 20 movies will fill it. It won’t be long until the same blocks get erased, no matter how much the SSDs firmware tries to spread the usage and avoid reusing the same blocks.

    Anyway, my point is, aside from noise and lower power consumption advantages, I wouldn’t use SSDs for a NAS, I regard them as consumables. Speed isn’t really an issue in HDDs.



  • Failure rates for sdd are better than hdd

    I’m curious on where did you find this. Maybe they have lower DOA rates and decreased chances to fail in the first year, but SSDs have a limited usage lifetime / limited writes, so even if they don’t fail quickly, they wear out over time and at first they have degraded performance, but finally succumb in 5 years or less, even when lightly used (as in as OS drives).

    To avoid DOA / first year issues with HDDs, just have the patience to fully scan them before using with a good disk testing app.


  • From my experience, SSDs are more prone to failure and have limited writes. They are ment for running the OS, databases for fast access, and games / apps. They are not ment for long time storage and frequent overwrites, like movies, which usually means download, delete and repeat which wears the memory quickly. One uses electric current to short memory cells and switch them from 0 to 1 and viceversa, the other uses a magnetic layer which supports a lot more overwrites on the same bit.

    If keeping important data on them, I would use them only in a redundant RAID configuration and/or with frequent backups so I wouldn’t cry if one of them fails. And when they fail, there are no recovery options as with HDDs (even if very expensive, at least you have a chance).

    I also wouldn’t touch used server SSDs, their lifetime is already shortened from the start. I had 3 Intel, enterprise-grade SSD changes in our company servers, each after about 3 years - they just wear out. For consumer / home SSDs the typical lifetime is 5 years, but that takes into account minor / “normal” usage, ie. if used as OS disks. And maybe power users could extend that with moving the swap/pagefile and temporary files (ie browser cache, logs, etc) on a spinning disk, but it defeats the purpose of having an SSD for speed in the first place.

    If you have media (like movies) in mind, you’ll find sooner than later that you’ll need more space, and with HDDs the price per GB is lower than SSDs.

    If you have no issue with 1. noise, 2. speed (any HDD is fast enough for movie playback and are decent for download), 3. concurrent access, or 4. physical shocks from transport, go with HDDs, even used ones.

    My two, personal opinion cents.