I’ve always relied on multiple aspects for my used drives (currently ZFS raidz2 which itself provides multiple checks, but I also do backups of the really important stuff). It doesn’t matter though, all drives new or old are going to fail and you just have to be ready for it. The worst case is multiple drives failing at once, and I had that happen several times when using a weak power supply.

So far I’ve been really happy with the refurbs from Amazon though, plus the NAS is nothing to sneeze at. I upgraded the server to a newer machine, then realized that allowed me to step up in families for my SAS cards. Basically went from a machine that could push data at 70MB/s (and was constantly behind) to a new machine pushing 450MB/s or more with almost no lag. I run a lot of stuff on my home network so it’s been nice having the new speed, and the zfs pools are providing around 92TB on one set and 22TB on another set so I have room to go crazy. If I had to buy new drives I’d have maybe half that amount of space.

Check the SMART info on the drives you receive, if they already show signs of failure then return them immediately.

For “reputable” sellers, I typically go with ones who are selling drives in bulk and have a history of more than five minutes with lots of recent good reviews. I took a chance on a good deal for a “new” drive once and received an obviously used drive where the previous person had cut out the SAS bridge (these pins are required to power on some SAS models like what I bought, so the drive was a paperweight). You’ll get some lemons, but I’ve been running mostly used drives on my fileserver for the past twenty years and had reasonably good luck from bulk sellers (and easy replacements when I got a bad drive from one of them).

Oh, you might also check refurbs from Amazon. My current fileserver is running a set of eight 18TB refurbs which were significantly cheaper at the time, but the drive model itself was only a year old so I knew there couldn’t be much wear on what I received. And Amazon has a good return policy.

Some don’t, I’m not sure about “most”. Regardless, I’m not waiting around to see what kind of passengers I’m traveling with. If everybody plays nice and works together then that’s great, we all have a better chance for survival. You still need to protect yourself against any hostile natives or wildlife because everything you know about what’s safe and what’s dangerous just went out the window.

Finding a weapon is definitely the highest priority. As soon as everyone starts freaking out they’re coming after anyone who has something they want. After the bloodbath you can use your weapon to get food or possibly help with making shelter, and you’ll be ready to meet the natives once they arrive – just in case they’re not friendly and are at a lower technological level than what you have available.

Any $5 laser mouse with a scroll wheel from ebay/amazon is fine for me. Plug it in and it just works. I prefer certain shapes for comfort but I’ve never had a mouse NOT work in linux.

Waze has popped up ads on me plenty of times while I’m driving. Yes it knows I’m driving, the map is still scrolling along my route. At one point it was bad enough that the ads were remaining after every stop light, and finally clearing about half way to the next light. I haven’t seen it happen in awhile though, maybe they finally got it fixed.

Actually I AM that guy with a small font size and super-packed density. The more information on the screen, the faster I can take it in at a glance and find what I need. Sorry your brain doesn’t work that way, but less clicking and scrolling absolutely does affect my productivity and my idea of usability. For example, I find it highly annoying when a website changes to a larger spacing on a drop-down list and suddenly something I used to be able to immediately click on now requires me to scroll down several times to find the option I want. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to increase usability.

Heh I just ran into the invisible icons issue recently, for whatever reason I am no longer able to accept Teams meeting. Yeah that’s definitely a shitty thing. But more whitespace? In other words, less visible information on the screen which requires more scrolling or clicking to other screens? Sorry, that just sounds annoying and less productive.

What do you find “old-fashioned” about Thunderbird? Do you not consider an interface “new” if they don’t change it and hide all the common features every five minutes like Microsoft does? It’s an email client, you read your emails in it. How would you do it better?

Thanks, I’ll try that too. I had another completely off-the-wall one pop up today. Typed the word “good” followed by a period, and when I looked back it had auto-corrected to “Goodwhich” with the capital G. I don’t know if that’s a name brand somebody is trying to sell me on, or what, but don’t change the shit I actually spelled right!

Oh, the suggestion from above the keyboard? I had no idea those could be worked with like that… Thanks, I’ll give it a shot!

Is there a way to do that??? I can’t find anything other than adding new words to a personal dictionary, but I do have an older version of android.

Hell I’m still trying to figure out why the spell checker changes “i’ll” to “i’LLC” every time I type it. Auto-correct on phones is just worthless and I spend far more time correcting it than I do trying to correct actual mistakes.

I’m not in the least bit surprised, most of these bastards aren’t willing to live by the same rules they impose on everyone else.

Yeah that’s what made me think of this… before you go indoctrinating children against their will (and the will of the parents), maybe you should become better role-models first.

What was I thinking? Oh that’s the problem, I was thinking…

Obviously it’s time we started!

Since our politics cannot hold one religion above another, I say we have a scoreboard for every religion with a final board listing how good or evil each politician rates overall.

I was kinda thinking the same thing… Since we can’t trust the various networks to be equally honest about both parties, maybe we could do something on lemmy similar to how reddit does livestream news feeds, except we put the scoreboard on the side and let participants vote on new additions for each delegate.

Scoreboards have buzzers, lets make it obvious every time they ‘score’ a new sin!