I lament Nova’s demise, too…

I think the reason that the tech companies won’t allow us to have our devices our own way ( Microsoft was doing this decades ago ), is “religious”/ideological, not practical:

I think they “need” to keep everybody permanently in a headlock, with our heads all twisted, because only if we are all in permanent learned-helplessness, only then can they automatically get away with everything they intend to be getting away with, in our world.

IOW, our autonomy violates their totalitarian religion, see?

It’s the same as how ANY spirituality grates on Dawkins’ blood: he wants it all gutted/butchered/destroyed, & suicides of ones he destroyed are no problem for him, & no alternative ever can have any validity to him.

Totalitarianism, whether traditionally “religious”, or in any other ideology/prejudice/religion, is the same: it HATES violation of its homogenous dominion.

( comically: homophobic-religions want a homogenous het humankind, with no violation of that homogeneity. The existence of homosexuals is too heterogenous for them )

Autonomy is something that totalitarian supremacism ideology “needs” to obliterate from the whole world.

Consistently.

It seems to be a damn-good diagnostic for it, even!

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Power-consumption.

Also, the vibration produced by the 2.5" drives is less, but they’re more-sensitive to it, to begin with.

I’d not even consider spinning-platter drives, nowadays, though:

SATA SSD’s for a NAS strike me as being the sanest choice.

Samsung what are those called, Evo drives?

excellently-high MTBF, ultra-short ( compared with rotating-platters ) seek-time ( literally orders-of-magnitude quicker ), etc.

I don’t know of ANY reason to go with spinning-platters, nowadays.

( & I’m saying that as a guy stupid-enough to have not realized this in time, & who spent money on such a thing, when SSD’s really were the answer )

My experience is that USB storage sometimes breaks-connection for no discernable reason.

That if one REALLY wants to do USB storage, then put it inside the housing, and don’t use one of the external-connectors, use something you can permanently-fix, so nothing can even sneeze in its direction.

This mayn’t help you with your puzzle, but it’s bedrock and unchangeable, in my experience.

USB-storage is an unreliable joke.

ANY revision of it, that I’ve tried.

hth…

USB-storage isn’t reliable.

Period.

ANY fscking thing that bumps any connection, can break the dam link.

Then your kernel can re-label the device when it re-connects,

and you’ve got to reassemble your RAID.

just my experience.

use ANY other method you can, other than USB.

stick a SATA adaptor on there somewhere, if you can.

Get a different motherboard.

ANYthing, but not USB.

AndroOffice, or whatever it’s called, is a port of LibreOffice to Android.

It’s a little cumbersome ( use it on a big tablet, not on a little phone ), but it’s got the capability that nothing-else has.

I agree with people who hate the UI, on mobile the desktop UI’s … not a wise choice…

… but if you’re using a bluetooth keyboard, it’s much better.

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=androoffice&c=apps

If you want real spreadsheets, it seems the best option around.

I’m presuming its Word equivalency is similar.

I’ve tried multiple alternatives for spreadsheets, & for me, nothing else came close.

Now, however, I think that using Julia programming, instead of spreadsheets, would make everything in the whole world work better.

: P

Reliability’s kinda high on my priority-list.

Try Samsung.

Nowadays I can’t imagine using SATA for anything but archival storage ( get the fastest NVMe you can for your operating-system, and be stunned by how much quicker your machine is ).

Last time I was digging into stats, the reliability-rate for Samsung devices was much higher than that of Western Digital,

and the off-brands … often are a bit of a bad-joke, for reliability ( Adata & Kingston, I’m looking at you, and will never trust such scum again ).

just my experience/opinion, is all.

Read the linked-to article:

Sesame was aquired with Nova Launcher.

They’re both part of the analytics-tentacles company, now.

Having participated in many “charities”, you’d be a fool to believe an operation just because it is registered as a “not for profit”.

Look at the executive-pay, and if it is over 2x the cost-of-living, you’re looking at a money-funneling-to-executives scam, that is masquerading as a not-for-profit.

The amount of spine required to have real integrity, in this planet, is apparently greater than the amount of spine available in a human life?

SanDisk usb-keys work.

You really want to use the thing for read-only, though, if you can:

the writes it takes to kill some portion of a filesystem, vs the writes you get before corrupting things, on a USB driver, don’t line-up.

Use NVMe as your 1st-choice for storage ( future purchases, obviously ), the fastest you can get, and be stunned by how much faster the same motherboard is, with superfast OS storage…

I’d stick /home, not /usr, on the USB.

IF JBOD, && Linux, THEN yes you can know, through SMARTTOOLS, or something like that…

However, I can’t imagine how you’d get 2 separate PCIe

( presuming NVMe devices …

… no, this thing must be presuming SATA, NOT NVMe …

even in SATA, there’s no bifurcator for SATA, I don’t think:

SAS has expanders, which can take a single SAS channel & attach something like 128 SAS devices onto it,

PCIe has some kind of equivalent, and there is a PCIe card which crams loads of NVMe’s into it, out in the last year, but SATA??

Hmm… )

shrug

There was a youtube vid, testing multimeters, & there was a specific condition that produced wrong results in all the meters except Fluke, who had engineered to prevent that wrongness.

That was what decided me on trusting Fluke, in the future.

been years, no idea what channel it was on, sorry, but it should be findable for someone with patience, knowing that only the Fluke got it right, of the ones tested.

Do pay attention to the calibration-certificates, though:

Anybody paying for Fluke who ignores that their handhelds have no more than 2.5-digits of actual-accuracy, is foolish/incompetent.

( the cheap ones are sooo much worse… )

I am trying to lear basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript ( again, last learned HTML back in the 1990’s, am using “JavaScript: The Good Parts” & other books ),

& have discovered that you can have, on the same phone/tablet, Termux/Nginx running,

you have to feed /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/etc/nginx/nginx.conf the root-dir you want it to use

( which is actually in a proot-distro install, down below

/data/data/llcom.termux/files/usr/var/lib/proot-distro/installed-rootfs/ … )

… and then you can have your browser hit

http://localhost:8080/

and it’ll grab index.html.

Notice that that is http, NOT httpS.

None of the browsers I’ve tried can get the default connection to localhost, because they all default to https, & nginx isn’t serving https.

That wasted an entire fscking day, to discover.

Now learning can begin!

it is possible that one of the apps on your phone is a trojan,

and is creating a generic “red herring” in order to hide what it’s really doing.

it also is possible that this is just some Google keep-politically-correct-images-available stuff, and those images are part of your Android’s current install, or part of another app’s current install, and your Android is seeing those images, & is thumbnailing them.

Either way, I think it’s Android doing it, not some app you installed ( Google’s photos app, is most likely culprit )

XOR…

Xaiomi is installing versions with Microsoft-style spyware/malware in 'em…

Same as ISP’s altering the web-pages that people view, for their own commercial-reasons…

Molesting-the-user seems to be THE SurveillanceCapitalism paradigm, in the Enshittocene…

I’m not competent to do the decompilation/analysis required to discover if your new “helpful” versions are spyware/malware, but I’d bet they are not as clean as the original versions are.

Avast has been caught being treason-against-privacy, recently, too, with their “privacy” app that was actually a trojan to enable Avast to sell privacy-information for profit…

( last few weeks in the Tech news, here on Lemmy.world, iirc )

You might want to ask the MalwareBytes people to look into it?

Thanks to this post, and the other comments in here, I’ve discovered that the ultimate ui for ai-models may well be

https://github.com/ParisNeo/lollms-webui

and on HuggingFace ( that name is aweful: to me it is the creepy-horrible FaceHugger, from the movie Alien, that I saw so many decades ago ) TheBloke has some models which are smaller

https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/

so you can choose a model that will actually-work on your hardware.

I think Llama-2 for brainstorming & CodeLlama-instruct for learning programming examples seems to be the cleanest pair, from what I’ve read, and he’s got GGUF versions with different quantizations, so you can choose what will actually-fit on your hardware.

There are other models on huggingface which seem very useful, like

• whisper-large-v3 for speech-to-text,
• whisperspeech for text-to-speech,
• sdxl-turbo for image-making ( for some copyright-free subjects to practice drawing with ), and so-on…

Some models require GPU, not all.

Damn things moved fast!

I read somewhere, years ago, that RAID6 takes about 2 cores, on a working server.

That may have been a decade ago, and hardware’s improved significantly since then.

Bet on 1 core being saturated, min, with heavy use of a RAID6 or Z2 array, I suspect…

I’d go with software raid, not hardware: with hardware RAID, a dead array, due to a dead controller-card, means you need EXACTLY the same card, possibly the same firmware-revision, to be able to recover the RAID.

With mdadm, that simply isn’t a problem: mdadm can always understand mdadm RAID’s.

_ /\ _

I’m in BTRFS, and wish I wasn’t.

Booting into a failed mdadm RAID1 is normal,

whereas booting into a failed BTRFS RAID1 requires competent manual intervention, and special parameters given to the boot-kernel.

mdadm & lvm, with a fixed version of ZFS would be my preference.

ZFS recently had a bug discovered that was silently corrupting data, and I HOPE a fix has been got in.

Lemme see if I can find something on both of these points…

https://linuxnatives.net/2015/using-raid-btrfs-recovering-broken-disks

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/27/openzfs_2_2_0_data_corruption/

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EasyDNS.ca or if they also do EasyDNS.com

GoDaddy was a bunch of sleazebags, back in the day…

Go search http://slashdot.org/ for them, and see…

not only hosting lots of sleazebags, but also having tons of compromised mail machines, so their machines were, according to what I’d read there, the source of much of the world’s spam, and they wouldn’t fix things.

EasyDNS was recommended by one of the SysAdmin reporters on The Register, a few years ago.

He also recommended Linode & Vultr, back then, too.

This stuff in this comment is just my opinion, and my memory of what trustworthy people were reporting a few years ago.

_ /\ _

Replace them with SSD’s?

Your seek-time drops to near-zero,

your throughput increases to SATA ( or your motherboard’s SATA controller ) speed,

and you become absolutely-immune to such vibrations.

I cannot understand using rotating-disk drives in any notebook machine, under any circumstances, ever, for the last decade or so.

_ /\ _