Other What's ruining your life right now?

The reason legalised weed is so expensive is because, while sale to the public and consumption is legal, production and distribution isn't necessarily, except particular cases with special licenses. They can't just buy from some nut with a farm in his grans attic much less from the gangs that bribed a farmer to use his barns.

 

Totting up how much it'd cost to flip over to completely SSD storage (One of the spinning rust drives is on the way out, and if I'm replacing the larger one I might as well do the smaller) in the PC has landed around 600 Euros.

Which, in itself, isn't that much (M.2 500gb to replace the 256 boot, 2tb 2.5, 1tb 2.5) but when you add it to the ~600 for a pair of WD red 8TB's for the NAS .. Storage is am much money.

Although if I ever get lucky on a 4-bay Synology, I could do 4x 4TB for about the same and end up with slightly more storage space and at least one drive of redundancy.

I need a job.

 

I see a lot of you guys have NAS and storage servers numbering in the tens of TB's and i'm wondering what the hell you're all storing?!

I don't think I've ever touched the sides of a 1TB drive over the span of 1 machine...

 

Yes, spot on. Everything (reliable) that I have seen, heard, and read, points towards cannabis being good for managing symptoms rather than being a cure.

(more anecdotal stuff incoming...) I know that it won't cure my back issues, but I do know that the pain is alleviated. A very dear friend of mine is currently going through her second stage of chemotherapy following a double mastectomy and uses it to help her get through the side effects of that. She has had numerous people jump on her saying "why do you even need the chemo if you're smoking cannabis too? Don't you know that cures cancer by itself? Stop poisoning yourself" (we travel in some pretty new-age circles). Thankfully she is is under no such illusions, but knows what smoking does FOR HER.

As for the recreational side of things, again yes, I am in favour of legalisation there too. As you said, young people (18 since 1/10/2007) can easily go into a supermarket or newsagent and buy tobacco, or booze, and the detrimental effects to health of both of those are VERY well documented, which is why, should things ever change here, I would want to see cannabis controlled and sold in the same way, even if just for fairness. Personally, I'd also like to be able to legally grown my own, just a couple of plants at a time would be fine.

 

Yeah, I vaguely remembered something about it, but having never bought any myself I had to go look it up. I remember hitting 16 (in '93 so well before the change) and thinking "yay now I can buy cigarettes", then feeling almost a bit disappointed when my next thought was "but I don't want to"

 

Aye, I have 1.25TB of storage on this PC and I've used up less than 500GB (and the vast majority of that is game installs, most of which I'm not currently playing).

 

I like having digital rips of things so when the lady is occupying the lounge TV I can watch it elsewhere without needing a bluray drive or what have you. I've only got about 2.5-2.8TB of stuff in reality, I could just bump up to 4TB rather than straight to 8TB in a twobay, but that seems to be a waste of time compared to just bunging in 8's and being done with it for another three years.

I used to rock a FreeNAS box with 10TB over 12 1TB drives (Some of which were sold on here as it happens..) back when super high capacity drives were beyond the reach of mere mortals. That was when I pirated mz weasly black guts out and downloaded everything that was complete for the sake of downloading it. I've become slightly more discerning in my old(er) age.

Not sure what @Mister_Tad stores, because last I saw of his latest purchases posts he was buying tens of terabytes. Backup destination possibly? I know I want a second NAS for backups so the lady's laptop actually gets a backup before it shuffles loose this mortal coil. And so I don't have a USB drive hanging off my desktop like some old-hat plebian type.

Getting used to a German keyboard is producing a lot of Z's instead of Y's and silly characters, which is mildly frustrating.

Although at least I can type µ-ziq super easily now I suppose.

 

In a word, everything...

Main NAS is 6x6TB, dual parity, 21TB usable
- Movies. I insta-rip as soon as I get them, for both accessibility and convenience. I rip both the UHD and BD discs straight-up, and this takes up exactly as much space as you think it might. I'll only reach for the disc occasionally for those that are Dolby Vision encoded (since afaik there's no way to rip/play that).
- Music rips. I have a relatively large CD collection... in the loft, and a CD player that sits unused, kept for sentimental value. I've not bought a CD since first subscribing to Spotify a long, long time ago, and I've barely used any of my local music since switching to Tidal a long time ago, but it's nice to know it's there.
- Multiple VMs on an NFS datastore
- Stuff: personal, work, important, rubbish, financial, whatever. Home "cloud" drives for me, my wife, parents, and a couple of mates
- Photos/Video
- ISOs/installation media and so on, but having just checked this is only ~100GB
- Client backups

Secondary NAS is 2x8TB, JBOD, 14.5TB usable
- Short-interval versioned backups of important data
- Backups every few days of important-ish data, or stuff that's on balance worth backing up vs the hassle of re-creating it (e.g rips)

Cloud storage, 1TB
- Nightly backup of important data, encrypted on my side

 

Saving money. It's so bloody boring

 

If I could afford the storage (and the NAS unit.. I'd want an RS2418 because overkill and I'm a sucker for full-rack length kit with a brazillion drive bays) I too would be ripping in the highest quality available. I've only ripped new CD's, so there's still a few hundred to go, but at ~600mb a rip that'll eat more storage than I have to hand. Plus it currently fits on a 256gb MSD card, which is nice.

 

"Snow alert"

In other words the whole office finds excuses not to come to work tomorrow, those that do will then come up with reasons to go home early (likely as soon as it get cloudy).
Seeing as I live within walking distance I'm expected to come in despite 95% of the office not. Also I'll have to do a longer shift without extra pay to deal with all the extra people using remote access. I may fall over on some ice.

 

FLAC helps with music, generally clocking it at 3-400MB per album.

I would have gone for the 2418+ too if not for the depth. My next house is going to have a much bigger "datacentre", enough for at least two full size racks with room to manoeuvre around them easily, and AV gear in a separate rack/room.

On the other hand I don't think I can drum up the appetite to move house for at least another 10 years, so I'm not sure it makes any difference what my "plans" are

 

The BBC seem to react to snow and the possibility of -1 as if it's the coming of a new ice age.

 

Ha, I said that up until about three minutes before the movers arrived to move me to Germany, I dunno if house moving plans are ever concrete..

Yeah, I vaguely recall your IT/AV room being somewhat shallow.

My FLAC rips tend to lean on the uncompressed end of the scale - Honestly, sometimes I might as well just leave it all as WAV and sod the compression.

 

True, any being surround but soft southerners I'm a southerener but ill still go out in the snow etc, was on the bike yesterday 40mph winds -3c not a soul about for the most part.

Baffles me though we had some light wet snow, the stuff that wont settle, it was very light but it ground traffic to a halt making a ten minute drive into 45 minutes, if said snow actually comes to anythigng I'll bike in

 

Slight tangent here.

How do you find Tidal compared to Spotify? Aside from the headlines (quality levels, music videos), that is: is there a vast difference in how much content is available, how "good" are the curated playlists, is there an equivalent to the Spotify "Made for you" stuff like Daily Mix, Discover Weekly, etc? Y'know, "quality of life" type stuff.

I've been a Spotify user since... hell, since you had to be invited to sign up for it and I've had a subscription for probably close to a decade now. I've never used Tidal, and I do like the idea of higher quality streams and better revenue shares for artists, but I fear that switching from Spotify will be a ball-ache since I'm so entrenched in it. Plus there's the WAF question: our Spotify account is a "household" account and the other half has loads of massive playlists she's put together...

 

The space is ~2.5x.8m but intruded upon by an inset from the next room over for the centre speaker. So the rack is quite close to the wall, and was originally intended to mainly house AV gear in a 2-poster with front-cantilevered shelves: sources, AVR, HTPC along with a small shelf for the usual home networking gubbins. There was plenty of space and no problems with finding room for expansion (ha!)

And in the last 4 years "room for expansion" has turned into "needing to get creative to maximise space"
I've continuously toyed with the idea of doing something in the garage for a full rack and to be done with it, but it would need to be enclosed since the garage is half-workshop, and doing that seems a lot of work, and would probably need to be torn out and made good if the house were to ever go on the market.

Taking any element of quality out of the equation, I prefer Tidal.

I too used Spotify since forever, and actually had both for a couple of years as well.

I've never noticed any difference in availability of content or the quality of the curated playlists. Tidal has just launched a genre-based radio feature that I've used a few times and found to be very good. I've used artist-radio a fair few times and found some new stuff that way as well. I never really used Spotify radio as I found I'd often be wanting to advance the track or wondering what insane algorithm was at play that would suggest the tracks that it is.

There are a few services out there that will pull your playlists/saved tracks from one and get them in the other, which will come in handy.

I find the Tidal app a bit better to use now, however some of the navigation is a bit weird. Once you get used to it it's fine, but when you're (or she is, particularly) first using the app it just throws you a few curve balls. I've found the Spotify app to work more reliably with in-car integration, however since having my V30 I've been using aux anyway as the quality beats BT/USB enough that the trade-off in convenience is worth it.

I've even used the TV apps for music videos playlists in the background on occasion as well. I'd use them even more often if it weren't for the fact that I often have a 6yo kicking about the house and I've not noticed a way to filter explicit songs/videos.

Third party support is better with Spotify, but I don't have any problems with Tidal and the things I use. You can send music from the app to Sonos or Airplay much like Spotify connect, but the list of compatibility is shorted. Similarly there's no integration with Alexa and so on. I'm using Roon for everything in the house now anyway (which works with Tidal, but not with Spotify)

I have a Tidal Hi-Fi family sub, which is just an entitlement for 6 separate accounts - this is good and bad. Good because they're full accounts, and no problems with music ever cutting out due to sharing with the Mrs - I have one, She has one, Roon has one separately, as does Sonos (though that's not used any more), and my Daughter will have one eventually.

Bad because the only "family" aspect of it is that there's a master account that has access to billing and creating/cancelling accounts - no sharing/integration between accounts. I'd like to have playlists accessible across all users and the like, but it would need a separate playlist sync service. There's not even a "share playlist" or social function like with Spotify, so you can't add the other family accounts as friends and do it that way.