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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • The Epson Eco-Tank printers are probably one of the most infuriatingly mislabeled products ever, though. They come with self-destruct timers.

    If their software counter device that their excess ink sponge pad is full (which can happen rather quickly depending on printing behavior and the amount of cleaning cycles), they turn themselves into e-waste. Epson considers the sponge non-serviceable and the only official solution is to buy an entirely new printer with a clean sponge. Absolutely nothing Eco about that.

    There are (paid!) counter reset hacks available now, though.

    So, yeah, fuck Epson, but for very different reasons than op is listing.


  • Made good printers. They were one of the last bastions of sanity, but last year that one fell, too:

    As far as I know, they finally pushed firmware updates to block 3rd party toner to most of their printers - which is pretty evil, given that most people purchased Brother devices exactly to avoid that kind of bullshit and nobody expected it from them.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

    That said, I love my Brother DCP-9022CDW. It has been an indestructible workhorse, eats any toner I want and lets me reset the counter and keep printing another 2000 pages on an “empty” toner. Heck, I’ve had third party toner that I could reset three times before actually running out. That latest firmware update will stay far away from it, though.



  • It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.

    There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.

    I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.




  • Same here. One of the biggest issues is that Lemmy is currently terrible at surfacing content from niche communities: no weighted activity, no “multi-reddit-syle” community grouping - pretty much any main view mode is dominated by a few large communities only. This makes the death of the small communities a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    The next version of Lemmy is making some very tepid improvements in that regard, but it’s nowhere near enough.




  • As someone with “founder” status in both services, Stadia’s user experience was far better. It also had the best latency with its direct connect controllers.

    While GeForce Now made some steps towards mitigation and cooperation, with 2FA it’s often still a mess of tediously logging into PC launchers before finally being able to play. And because the hardware changes every time, this repeats before every session.

    GFN’s library of compatible games is still stupidly limited, yet has all remaining competitors beat by a wide margin. And it has by far the most powerful hardware.

    Both of those things probably make it the best streaming service right now, and outweigh the shortcomings. But “good” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.




  • Are you seriously suggesting running a Plex server on the Steam Deck in addition to the Plex media player? Because last I checked, the Plex media player can play (I think) but not index them. I’m a happy Plex user with lifetime Plex pass, but that’s just stupid.

    Kodi is a solid standalone solution for exactly what OP is asking, with controller support. Kodi wouldn’t be my first choice for networked media playback, but it’s brilliant for exactly OP’s use case. And it really isn’t laggy unless you overload it with plugins.




  • Unraid 6.12 and higher has full support for ZFS pools. You can even use ZFS in the Unraid Array itself - allowing you to use many, but not all, of ZFS extended features. Self healing isn’t one of those features, though, it would be incompatible with Unraid’s parity approach to data integrity.

    I just changed my cache pool from BTRFS to ZFS with Raid 1 and encryption, it was a breeze.

    I generally recommend TrueNAS for projects where speed and security are more important than anything else and Unraid where (hard- and software-)flexibility, power efficiency, ease of use and a very extensive and healthy ecosystem are more pressing concerns.


  • Unraid is also awesome for places with high energy cost: Unlike with your typical RAID / standard NAS, it allows you to spin down all drives that aren’t in active use at a relatively minor write speed performance penalty.

    That’s pretty ideal for your typical Plex-server where most data is static.

    I built a 10HDD + 2SSD Unraid Server that idles at well below 30W and I could have even lowered that further had I been more selective about certain hardware. In a medium to high energy cost country, Unraid’s license cost is compensated by energy savings within a year or two.

    Mixing & matching older drives means even more savings.

    Simple array extension, single or dual parity, powerful cache pool tools and easily the best plugin and docker app store make it just such a cool tool.