Dust, fingerprints, etc.

Allegedly they may check these things under black lights at the factory for any evidence of opening to attempt to deny warranty. With drive prices having doubled since I bought it and all capacity bought out they’d be extra eager to find any excuse to attempt to deny. Magnuson–Moss warranty act should prevent them from doing that but I don’t have a high power law firm on retainer to sue and intimidate western digital into compliance if they tell me to pound dirt.

Thanks for the kind offer.

Funnily enough I have a WD HDD enclosure that I shucked a drive from not too long ago. I do recall someone mentioning the circuit boards on those being functional as a USB to SATA bridge but I suppose I presumed they need mains power and didn’t want the extra mess. That and I guess I wanted to keep the one I had pristine in case I need to RMA after putting it back together again as I’ve heard people have real mixed experience with RMAing shucked drives and with prices the way they are well I’d rather not take chances given I’ve only the one.

You don’t understand.

The alternative to device based private attestation which is what this is or could be part of is constant online verification by Palantir.

Is every time you want to view porn or adult content you have to verify your real identity so evil corporations and the government who pays them know exactly what your fetishes are and can blackmail you. So they know exactly what you’re posting online because you have to face-scan and ID-scan to set up an email account, a social media account, any account with anything that allows posting content online. Is training the population not to enter a date for their kids or themselves when setting up a computer or device account for the first time, once but upon demand scan their face, scan their ID, comply, sit meekly in fear because everything they do online is known.

What does this know? Your birthday. That’s nothing. As it stands it you can enter anything you want. Fight them when they come to add a verification system to this and point out parents would be in a position to set this up for their kids anyways and its just spying. Fight on stronger ground.

We’ve already lost the maximalist position. The internet scanning and ID verification has already been enacted in several states and countries and we risk a world where it becomes the norm and hosting companies drop anyone who doesn’t implement it because they’re made liable as well. This stuff won’t be repealed. People don’t live in democracies. They live in a dictatorship of the wealthy and the corporations. Your dissent doesn’t matter and it cannot reach most tech illiterate people who have far more pressing concerns than to riot over this.

This is a compromise solution and I wish more people would see it. If you can bend you don’t break. If you don’t bend and your enemy is the government they are stronger than you and they will snap you like a twig.

Linux desktop market share is too small to matter. And if you make this push fail then the only alternative, the only viable solution these politicians who are being cajoled and urged to implement this will see is online live-scan face and ID verification and it’ll sweep everything. You’ll have destroyed the internet and having saved Linux won’t matter. After that it’ll be a quick move to ban encryption that the government cannot break and ISPs will block traffic they can’t inspect. Game over. A simple maneuver from the place you force them to by refusing to cooperate and enact this compromise, privacy-preserving solution. We need strong defensible positions to protect privacy and the internet and free software and to understand that the old ways have been lost, they’ve died, they’ve been strangled and a compromise position must be taken up to endure and avoid a total loss.

No thank you. I like Firefox the way it is. I hate big changes for the sake of designers keeping their jobs changing my tools and workflow and making things ugly.

Edit: To be clear, I agree with you in general. I just got bugged a bit by those three things 😅

You do not. You are misinformed and propagandized. Your choice of examples revealed that clearly and nothing you say can refute that fact. Read Marx, read Lenin, your understanding of the state is lacking.

For one, anyone educated would understand that Americans are the best example of sheep in the world and that many Europeans are good second examples. The British for example with their high tolerance for a surveillance, laws that criminalize all manners of small trivialities, etc, etc. Educate yourself.

“We have to comply with the law”. This has become Russia or China where the sheep people do whatever an oligarchy dictate.

“What are we a bunch of Asians?”

Also China isn’t run by an “oligarchy” but by a dictatorship of the communist party via a mandate of the masses (they execute CEOs and rich people there, we let them rape kids and commit horrific crimes of greed and fine them less than they made off that crime). Russia is but so is the west and I prefer the term capitalists or if you prefer the original French “bourgeoisie”.

There was a study from one of the big ivy league universities that showed that in the US the people don’t get what they want, popular policy is consistently not passed nor popular will acted on. Princeton I think.

So it’s not what people per se want, it’s what the ruling class (capitalists in the west) wants. And they’ve decided that because the rate of profit falls and their demand for profit grows that they need to put the population under lock and key because they’ve made economic conditions worse and they’re going to get worse yet. They need a police state to control the workers who might want better conditions or gasp to take some or all of their wealth. This is part of that.

This is also because China is rising and they are terrified of people seeing a more equal, just society that can be created through socialism. They are terrified of dissenting voices so they want to remove anonymity so they can terrorize dissidents and opponents into silence. They saw what happened with their attempts at narrative shaping in Gaza, they are deeply alarmed that tik tok won’t be the last thing, a new one could pop up anywhere, right now they play whack a mole, they want to control the whole thing top to bottom.

As to people being sheep. It’s more like they’re beaten down. You defeat this today they come back in a year and then again and again. They have all the money, all the time and are willing to wear people down, use their capitalist owned media to propagandize and sensationalize for this until the people are exhausted and stop fighting it so hard. People work long hours, they take home less money than ever, the government openly abuses people, the police don’t act fairly and persecute black people, there’s a sense of there being no fairness and not enough time. The people are also mis-educated. They’re led to believe there’s this big problem, they don’t understand technology and passively accept their leadership has some amount of good will in how they pass laws and govern to address real problems the bourgeois press has done its job of propagandizing them for. They can’t see the whole picture because of these facts.

You can buy an all in one “wireless router” or buy a wired router and connect to that a wireless access point.

CMR performs better under all workload types.

Shingled Magnetic Recording overlays the tracks on top of each other like roof shingles. This means you can fit more tracks on the same platter which means you can fit more data. Unfortunately this also means whenever writing data you have to rewrite tracks adjacent to the track you’re rewriting which leads to a lot of reshuffling of data which leads to very slow writes when this is taking place (say you edit a file or replace it, delete some and copy over others).

SMR allows more storage for less money but it takes a serious performance hit (right now about the largest CMR disks you can get as an example are about 28TB in size, by contrast you can get 40TB SMR disks so it can significantly amplify storage). It shouldn’t be used for many scenarios. For archival backup it’s fine. For disks that are having data changed on them anywhere near regularly it’s not great.

I want to underline that for USB powered portable 5200RPM disks they’re already slower disks when CMR, so as SMR they get a lot slower in write performance (one I had would drop down to sustained low 20MB/s write speeds when over 60% full). A 7200RPM SMR disk with proper 12V power from a PSU rail or an AC adapter would likely be double that at worst by contrast.

So SMR has its uses, it has its place. It’s just a lot of people who don’t know might use it in places where CMR is more appropriate and would give them a better experience. So by all means if you’re using SMR in back-up disks to your primary ones to create back-up snapshots that are updated infrequently continue to do so, they’re fine for that especially if the tasks are done on machines that can be left running for days while the data is slowly written.

Use the IMDB ID for search in that instance.

The ID is the part of the URL that starts with “tt”. Lots of sites support that and for instances like that it’s the best bet. Do include the double t when searching.

Note: this works via API with jackett. It will probably work otherwise but worth trying the searcher plugins in qBittorrent using this method even without jackett.

Some WD red drives (particularly under 16TB) are SMR. There was a whole scandal with this and you can look up a list. WD Red Pro are always CMR and I think the plus typically are too but you can easily search up a list of SMR models.

SMR in those. Also typically 5200RPM vs 7200RPM speed.

From experience I can say you can’t reliably play back high bitrate content from those. Read and write speeds get bad after you’ve used 1/3-1/2 the drive. Oh 8-14MB/s should be fine. But forget playing a 4K encode at 20MB/s with a 2MB/s audio track.

As backup drives they’re acceptable as long as you can accept much longer write times to refresh data.

Bigger drives with power supplies generally are 7200RPM. Many of the lower capacity ones (under 14TB) are still SMR but you should be able to play back higher bitrate content and get a bit better read/write performance.

There are various bluetooth remotes that can be paired with computers, as well as air mice with remote-like features. There are also IR receiver USB dongles you can buy which allow you to use an IR remote with them with some 3rd party software installation and configuring. (FLIRC for one makes one of those).

If most of your content is self-provided (through whatever means) then a mini-PC may offer a decent experience (subject to certain limitations even there compared to hosting on one PC and streaming to a dedicated streaming device of decent quality which together cost significantly more).

Most commercial streaming services due to DRM will not work with a min-PC, at least not above 720p resolution and only through a browser interface which is not the greatest to try and navigate with a remote control. So if a significant amount of content is watched via streaming services I could not recommend a mini-PC by itself as a solution.

IMO with the info you’ve given I say get a decent streaming box. Some you can replace the Android default launcher on to remove ads or otherwise root (though beware these methods have been patched more and more so someone saying they did so successfully in 2024 does not mean you’ll succeed with the 2025/26 model). There’s also options like Apple TV, not $60 (twice that) but it comes with no ads by default and is pretty overpowered with a smooth experience if you already have an iPhone (you can use the phone as a remote). If you don’t have an iPhone or other apple devices it’s a toss up, ATV 4K is still a very nice device but you might want to go with the Android side of things.

You have to give them your phone number to sign up.

That phone number is tied to a real person by government records. Sure if you’re in say Russia it makes it a lot harder for the FBI to identify you because Russian phone companies won’t necessarily respect a US legal request. But if you’re anywhere within the west (US, Canada, EU, Australia, NZ) they can ID you unless you go to the trouble of getting an anonymous phone number that works with the SMS verification services they use and maintaining that number for when they lock your account and demand to verify you again all while accessing it over a VPN. That plus no encryption by default makes it not very secure at all.

But fundamentally you could do the same thing securely with any service, you could do that with Facebook, with Twitter, and the list goes on if you can get good reliable anonymous phone numbers. Telegram isn’t special in that way.

All that would happen absolute worst case scenario if MS breaks this is your users would get a whining complaint about not being activated. Get a small “Activate Windows” logo stuck in the lower right hand of their screen and would lose the ability to change wallpapers, customize windows colors, etc.

To be clear it wouldn’t break the install and it would leave it in a state in which you could use an updated version of MAS (reminder MAS supports multiple activation options) to fix it remotely.

Is your liberalism no longer making sense? Lofty promises of justice for all, equality and all that turning out to be a big farce with those at the top openly doing the most horrendous crimes and just getting away with them in a way that leaves you seething and wondering ‘what about justice’?

Try old time original Marxism (fortified with Leninism for clarity and taste) today!

Turns out that stuff they were talking about a hundred years ago is still true today and the old brand promise still holds true!

Not ready to check out just yet? Still nervous about Marxism? That’s alright. As economic conditions worsen, your buying power lessens, and you’re given the shaft in the work-place and an empty wallet at the grocery and/or electronics store you can always remember this fine product and revisit when you’re ready!

When all other solutions have failed, when liberal and social democrat reform turns out to be a dud, remember there’s original strength Marxism (fortified with Leninism). We’ll be waiting for you.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=376035

This is in the hardware section of the Kodi forums. Massive thread near the top. Some technical discussion on pages 225-250 about this matter.

Devices include Vero V, Ugoos, Homatics. (Apple TV is indeed an option as well)

Check the spreadsheet linked on the first page.

I will mention DV is a premium experience and you’re not going to pay less than Apple TV prices for a box that can do it. $150 really isn’t much.

There is DV -> tone-mapped to HDR output stuff but it’s not true DV. That you can do on a Linux mini-pc and so on.

If you’re going intel you can check the ark.intel pages for the processors in the devices you’re looking at. Intel does pretty good documentation so it’ll show you what integrated graphics they have and all that.

Ideally you want a chip that can do hardware decoding (and if possible encoding if you’re serving media to others and intend for it to transcode and not direct-play) of common codecs so you’re not eating a massive power bill or generating tons of heat or getting bogged down in resource utilization.

AV1 support is the only tricky part when it comes to hardware decode support. Maybe you don’t use it yourself but typically only the newer chips support hardware decode of AV1 files. Something to consider if that’s likely to be an issue for you if you have or plan to have lots of AV1 encoded files. (Though there is software decode of course)

The Intel N150 can do a 4K desktop, you won’t be doing 4k gaming on it at all but it can do the desktop and video playback and is a low power consumption chipset. Should be able to support at least 2-3 4k transcodes as well. A lot of enthusiasts use it for just this purpose in fact and it’s fairly snappy for uses like these.

Anything more powerful than an N150 will be fine as well for 4K video viewing, transcoding, 4k desktop, etc. So if you want to spend more and get a more powerful Intel chip you can. Just avoid 13/14th generation i series (i5/i7/i9) especially used because of the hardware damage bad design did to those and there are a lot of messed up ones floating around from people trying to offload.

144hz may be the really tricky part. Lots of these mini boxes are capped at 60hz so definitely double-check that. There’s always the option of displayport to HDMI cables too if it has a DP output that supports the necessary 4k framerate. N150 might struggle driving that to be honest.

Oh and be aware of thermal throttling. Lots of manufacturers stuff Ultra 9 series in things like laptops and minis with inadequate cooling and they thermal throttle like crazy so you pay $800 and get something with the same performance as a properly cooled Ultra 7 or 5 series.

To loop back around to whether you need a dedicated GPU. You have to ask yourself are you transcoding streams for others or is it mostly direct-play without transcode? Integrated GPU on the CPU die should be good enough unless you have an awful lot of streams going at once or some other pressing need.

You can run whatever distro you want. There are extremely specialized distros like OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) which is basically kind of like Kodi running on Debian but without a desktop environment (extremely media center focused).

Actually the shutdown bug was part of a security patch and I can confirm it affects Windows 10 machines with ESU.

There’s definitely something to be said for building up a tolerance to heat. I put peppers, especially ground hot peppers (various varieties) on a lot of my food. I’d say at least 5/7 dinners a week in an average week I try to find a way to work in some sort of spicy.

The point though isn’t just heat, it’s about flavor too in combination with the heat sensation. I’ve eaten and enjoyed buldak noodles but they are kind of mild to my tastes. I tend to make mine by adding oil and stir frying them longer at the end as well as adding additional ground hot peppers while preparing to increase the heat level to something fun for me. I’ve tried 2x and it’s fine but it has more heat than flavor, the other Samyang offer a better flavor and heat profile and I can doctor them up on my own. I do like the Samyang black sauce to add to protein like tofu before baking/frying it and it can produce an interesting flavor especially when used with a few other things like soy sauce and some spices.

So I think it’s just exposure and building tolerance. If you keep eating foods at that spiciness level you’ll get used to them. You may still experience a little sweat but it’ll be more tolerable and less intense as you acclimate.