One of those tiny low power PCs with OpenSense is a good alternative, but a bit more work. The only downside is that you need a separate switch and wifi access point.

Skill issue of the developer to fix it or skill issue of the submitter?

Not OP, but there is value in having competition. DDG is just a bing front-end. The big search engines have a major problem with the quality of results going down, as the internet is SEOd to death. The companies behind these engines don’t seem to be very eager to fix it, they are just hoping to replace them with AI. We’ve also seen how these engines have been turned into ad platforms, which changes the incentives… Instead of ranking quality, they are ranking who pays more.

Taking a different approach to ranking results that isn’t ad driven, that can punish AI generated content and low quantity results would bring a huge value.

If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge and want a distro with longer support, CentOS Stream isn’t bad. Sure, there was some controversy surrounding it, when Red Hat killed the old CentOS. But ignoring that, the distro itself is pretty good and stable.

You can’t hard link across docker volumes. In the second example, you need to remove the /media/movies and /media/downloads volumes, only keep /media.

After fixing this, only future downloads will be hard links. Use a deduplication tool like jdupes to create hard links for the already downloaded files.

There are a lot of things people do while driving that are dangerous but very common. Things like driving with the high beam, speeding, tailgating, using a phone while driving etc.

The problem is that enforcing the rules is hard. You would either need a large percentage of the population to be police officers, or to put traffic cameras on every street.

Much better. SSDs and HDDs do monitor the health of the drives (and you can see many parameters through SMART), while pen drives and SD cards don’t.

Of course, they have their limits which is why raid exists. File systems like ZFS are built on the premise that drives are unreliable. It’s up to you if you want that redundancy. The most important thing to not lose data is to have backups. Ideally at least 3 copies, 1 off site (e.g. on a cloud, or on a disk at some place other than your home).

PhotoRec and TestDisk are probably the best, but they don’t recover file structure.

Fuck up #1: no backups

Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives.

Fuck up #3: no backups.

I read that like 5 times as satanic error.

Give Solid Edge (from Siemens) a try. It has a free for hobby use edition. It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it, and none of the stupid restrictions of Fusion.

If you store them properly and create fresh backups on new discs every couple of years, they can last a long time.

The biggest disadvantage of physical media is DRM. With the exception of music which isn’t usually locked, pretty much all optical discs have some form of region locking. Software/video games also typically have additional DRM schemes. Some are easy to bypass (e.g. nocd cracks). Online activation is the worst because it relies on the game publisher keeping the servers alive.

You can find a password checking utility on haveibeenpwned.com (the tool doesn’t send your password to the server, but only the first 5 characters of the hashed password, which is very safe). There are CLI tools on GitHub you can use to bulk test passwords. They also provide a downloadable list of hashes.

Alternatively, check if your password manager has a built-in tool for checking for passwords in known databases.

Google isn’t any better. And there aren’t a lot phone operating system options you can choose from.

Android is not privacy respecting by design. Your best option is to use a normal PC running Linux. However that has its own drawbacks, like lack of HDR support, no Dolby Vision or TrueHD, incompatibility with streaming services DRM.

And the bad part is that it is being forced upon us. You can’t even find non-smart TVs to buy anymore.

I wouldn’t be surprised if appliances come with their own data plan, because the data they collect is valuable.

While in this particular case I agree with you, I’ve noticed a frustrating trend that just keeps getting worse. On one hand, search engines are failing to adapt to content farms. On pretty much any topic, you will find these generic sites that have poorly written articles that are hard to distinguish from AI. Try searching for “best linux distro” to see what I mean. Even on programming topics, you will find many sites that simply copy the content from stackoverflow and github.

On the other hand, people aren’t making websites and blogs anymore. More and more people are only using social media platforms, which aren’t being indexed by search engines. I hate seeing that so many discussions are now on Discord instead of forums. How many Twitter threads have you seen that should have been blog posts?

I wouldn’t recommend Optiplexes… HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts use proprietary parts making them a pain in the rear to work with. I recommend getting a PC made with standard parts.

Personally I prefer older PCs in standard formfactors. I avoid HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts because they use proprietary power supplies and motherboards, making them difficult to upgrade. Laptops aren’t really upgradable, they don’t have enough SATA ports, and USB isn’t reliable enough for storage. Raspberry Pies, while power efficient, are too underpowered. Old server hardware is also an option, but they are generally too noisy.