I have a few IDE drives around for some of my experimental/ project pcs. 40gb or so.

I have also had to replace a 500gb or two in the raid5 array I use for main storage on my primary NAS.

I try to avoid buying things like 20tb drives on black Friday because if a drive is going to fail, it probably won’t be while there is a sale going on and I do like have a spare drive on hand.

I did pick up two 2tb drives yesterday, but that is because I am finally at a point where I could replace a 2tb drive in an emergency. I still plan to run them mirrored.

Don’t worry, you just need to wait for the EU to mandate EVERYTHING run off usb-c.

“Yes, they are made by the same company, but they are 2 distinct units.”

Yes, this is likely going to be a problem. Not sure why you are using cameras with remotes but point is, if you ever look at a manual for universal remotes, you’ll notice some companies that have thousands of products might have 10 codes in that manual. That is because there is a lot of overlap between models. No need to come up with a completely different code set if both products have only play, pause, fast forward, rewind, stop, and power.

Some people go to Vagas to gamble. Some stay at home and gamble there instead.

Couple of options. If you have a VPS you could install something like Nagios and do passive updates. Set a stale threshold and have the stale check report as a warning.

I have multiple wifi sensors that boot, perform their function, then go into deep sleep for a set time. I set up a passive service type that changes the status to unknown with the message “data acquisition failure” if the stale threshold is hit.

I don’t use cloud storage for backups, but any data I don’t want to change (pictures, music, etc.) on my NAS has par2 automatically created for them on the primary storage device. After that, both the original file and par2 files get backed up.

I would say assumed complexity. Most people think vpns are complicated, so they don’t even try.

This irritates me. My first steps into running a VPN was with an Asus router running merlin-wrt. It took a few minutes and I had separate profiles for my laptop, my phone, etc.i have since upgraded past this router so I now run openvpn on a vm so I don’t have to reconfigure everything next time I upgrade my router.

Same. I run plex on a VPS behind openvpn. Plex’s indirect access makes it really easy to access the media on it even though I can’t open ports across the VPN.