“Lossless” isn’t the term you want; that refers to not lossily compressing the main data. Lossless compression or storage of media is very rare outside of text and sometimes audio, because it ends up so large.

You want to preserve metadata. That applies regardless of how lossy the data compression is.

Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

B key vs M key. Laptop likely needs a SATA M.2 using B or B+M keying, you have a PCIe x4 drive with M keying.

I’ll take ‘Violations of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act’.

It’s pretty common to own a domain but not actually host the email server; doing on-premises email is a security PITA and most providers simply blacklist large swathes of residential and leasable (e.g. VPS) IPs.

Unfortunately, if you get someone else to host your email, they often charge by the account, not by the domain. Setting up a new mailbox is therefore irritatingly expensive.

A catch-all email works well, though, and is free from most of the hosting providers. Downside is you get spam…

Jane@JaneDoe certainly seems more common than mail@JaneDoe.

Indeed, the US has a major lack of fixed-line competition and lack of regulation. Starlink doesn’t really help with that, at least in urban areas.

I’m not familiar with the wireless situation. You’re saying that there are significant coverage discrepancies to the point where many if not most consumers are choosing a carrier based on coverage, not pricing/plans? There’s always areas with unequal coverage but I didn’t think they were that common.

Here in NZ, the state funding for very rural 4G broadband (Rural Broadband Initiative 2 / RBI-2) went to the Rural Connectivity Group, setting up sites used and owned equally by all three providers, to reduce costs where capacity isn’t the constraint.

Starlink plugs the rural coverage gaps, but in urban areas it’s still more expensive than either conventional fixed-line connections or wireless (4G/5G) broadband. Even in rural areas, while it’s the best option, it’s rarely the cheapest, at least in the NZ market I’m familiar with.

It also doesn’t have the bandwidth per square kilometre/mile to serve urban areas well, and it’s probably never going to work in apartment buildings.

This is a funding/subsidisation issue, not so much a technical one. I imagine Starlink connections are eligible for the current subsidy, but in most cases it’s probably going to conventional DSL/cable/fibre/4G connections.

Aggregate bandwidth now rivals or slightly exceeds gigabit wired connections.

Where that aggregate bandwidth is shared amongst large numbers of users, bandwidth per user can suffer dramatically.

Low density areas may be fine, but cube farms are an issue especially when staff are doing data intensive or latency sensitive tasks.

If you’re giving employees docking stations for their laptops, running ethernet to those docking stations is a no-brainer.

Moving most of the traffic to wired connections frees up spectrum/bandwidth for situations that do need to be wireless.

Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

It honestly seems like these are questions that don’t need asking.

You’ve provided no context about what you like and don’t like, so you won’t get any kind of a personalised response.

What are you expecting to get out of asking this as a question, that you don’t get by simply going to Rotten Tomatoes?

This would be a waste of commenters’ time, and that’s why it’s being downvoted.

It’s most likely that it’s related to the original manufacturing. These will be machine wave-soldered, not hand soldered, and having quality vary across the board isn’t impossible if the setup/operators were less than ideal.

Local AdBlock (UBlock Origin) should be fine for anything browser based. It’s really only consoles and smart TVs, where you ‘own’ the hardware but have no control over the software.

They should for most purposes. YT has started to try and make it much harder to block their ads, which I think has made Pihole ineffective for that.

Connecting the Pi up to the TV and using it as the player should be an option.

You’re also potentially blocking a seat that could be used by a paying passenger, and the operator will statistically run more/longer trains at higher cost to cope with increased demand.

Hmm. They’re very common in NZ now, however it appears that document is talking about modulating the actual normal shop lighting, not just an independent transmitter.

I redid the electrical in a supermarket already fitted out with Pricer gear, and we went from dumb electronic-ballasted fluoros to dumb-driver LEDs, no DALI and certainly no comms uplink or modulation smart enough for that. I’m aware that the document suggests power-line communication to the drivers, but these were off the shelf dumb drivers/ballasts.

The ceiling mounted Pricer transceivers would have been doing all the transmitting, and as I never saw any visible light coming out of them, and the HF ripple and instability from the shop lighting would have been significant, I think it’s pretty safe to say they were using some form of IR.

Yup. They use ceiling-mounted IR transmitters that are a bit like a big multi-directional TV remote control.

Have you considered emailing/PMing the developer? Especially with a donation?

Running APKs from random people is not the best policy.

FYI: This has been going on for about a month. If you still see warnings, update your ad blocker, switch to UBlock Origin, and/or check their FAQs.

Many of these are defaults dating back to the Unix days, particularly tar (tape archive) and gzip.

Krita (KRA), GIMP (XCF), and Photoshop (PSD) save files in a lossless internal format that preserves layers etc. Every time you open and save a jpg, it gets worse, and that’s not acceptable for professional use. If all you want is to crop/draw on images, something like KolourPaint is probably a better choice.

MP4 is/was patent encumbered depending on jurisdiction.