Same. Maybe get a router w/ 2.5G uplink and you’ll get most of the benefits. 2.5G uplink isn’t too expensive, >2.5G is quite pricey.

I mentioned it, but mostly signups bonuses.

For example, here are a few checking accounts I did recently:

• US Bank - $450
• Citi - $325
• Wells Fargo - $325

I’ve closed Citi, but I’m keeping the others open for a bit before closing (branches are convenient for depositing checks around the holidays).

Likewise for credit cards, here are some I’ve done recently:

• Bank of America Premium Rewards - ~$500 net after the annual fee - this is straight cash
• US Bank Altitude Reserve - ~$650 net after annual fee; a little more complicated because i need to redeem for travel
• Wells Fargo Active Cash - $200 straight cash

I actually use 2 banks (Fidelity brokerage for main, and US Bank for cash and zelle) and usually two credit cards (US Bank Altitude Reserve and some 2% card; was my Costco card and Citi double cash before I got the US Bank card). However, I have some category bonus cards I rotate in every so often, such as my Discover card, which is 5% at Amazon and Target through the end of the year.

Anyway, since I have so many accounts, I need something to keep track of them so I don’t pay maintenance fees or miss a payment or something.

It sounds complicated, but I’ve automated pretty much everything, so I just check in every couple months or so. And I think it’s worth the hassle because I make thousands every year on it.

No, JBOD is not the same as RAID0. With RAID0, you always need the disks in sync because reads need to alternate. With JBOD, as long as your reads are distributed, only one disk at a time needs to be active for a given read and you can benefit from simultaneous reads on different disks. RAID0 will probably give the biggest speedup in a single user scenario, whereas I’d expect JBOD to potentially outperform in a multiuser scenario assuming your OS and filesystem is tuned for it.

RAID0 is pretty much never the solution, and I’d much rather have JBOD than RAID0 in almost every scenario.

RAID1 gives you redundancy while preserving the ability for disks to independently seek, so on competent systems (e.g. Linux and BSD), you’ll get a performance speedup over a single disk and get something that rivals RAID0 in practice. You wouldn’t use it for performance because JBOD is probably just as fast in practice without the storage overhead penalty (again, assuming you properly distribute reads across disks), but you do get some performance benefits, which is nice.

I’m old enough to know that governments should care about taxes and payment traceability.

And cryptocurrencies (esp. the bigger ones) are perhaps the most traceable store of value and is highly regulated. At least in the US, cryptocurrencies are regulated like stocks, so any transaction needs to be properly reported as either a capital gain or loss or you’ll run afoul of the IRS.

Also - all it does it raises energy prices for me and makes GPUs more expensive for me.

It really doesn’t. Crypto mining is only profitable if energy prices are very low, especially if you do it at any kind of scale. Crypto mining in the US is estimated at 0.6-2.3% of total energy use, which is a drop in the bucket.

And mining on GPUs isn’t very profitable, with profitability timelines at ~3 years assuming a very low energy cost of $0.10/kWh. So it’s not really a good option. The big miners have pretty much all moved to ASICs, which won’t impact your GPU prices at all, so the only ones buying GPUs for mining are hobbyists, which are a pretty small market.

Why should I support that?

There are a lot of good reasons to support cryptocurrencies, such as:

• low cost international transactions - sending to my neighbor and sending across the world costs exactly the same
• essential for people like journalists and minorities in repressive areas - this is also why you should support Tor
• many parts of the world don’t have stable money, and crypto is easier to access and store than foreign currencies (like USD or Euro)
• not impacted by inflation, so theoretically they can be a cash alternative to other inflation hedges like gold; fluctuation is a bit of a problem ATM though
• sidesteps the massive payment networks like Mastercard and Visa, who charge something like 3% of every transaction; many cryptocurrencies have lower transaction costs

I think there are a lot of good reasons to support cryptocurrencies for everyday transactions, I don’t see much point in supporting it as an investment option. So if a vendor supports transactions in cryptocurrencies, I’ll go out of my way to pay w/ crypto, but I’m not interested in trading cryptocurrencies as an investment.

Yup, I have a ridiculous amount (like 8? bank accounts and 15? credit cards), so having something that automatically pulls in transactions is nice.

That said, my main “bank” is a Fidelity brokerage, so I don’t really need those other bank accounts to sync since they mostly exist for temporary transactions, such as Zelle and cash transactions (Fidelity doesn’t support those) and transfers for bank account bonuses (I net a >$2k/year on that). And for credit cards, I mostly use 1-2 credit cards these days, the rest are mostly for signup bonuses.

So for me, the $1.50/month is totally worth it to keep track of all that nonsense. If I only had 3-4 accounts, I’d probably use something like GNUCash instead, but I have >20, and I will for the foreseeable future.

Actual Budget, because it supports SimpleFIN to import my transactions.

It’s still not “automated,” but I have a lot of rules now so it’s getting there.

I’m not super happy w/ how it works, but I’m too lazy to do anything about it. Maybe I’ll end up adding SimpleFIN to something else, idk.

When my internet goes down, my devices can still talk to each other. So while I can’t use the internet, I can still stream my shows and access my files and whatnot.

That’s not what a UPS is for though. If everything between you and the ISP had a UPS (including all the infra under the roads and whatnot), you could probably keep the internet going in a power outage. But that’s incredibly unlikely.

Read perf would be the same or better if you didn’t add redundancy

RAID 1 can absolutely be faster than a single disk for read perf, and on Linux it is tuned to be faster. It’s not why you’d use it, but it is a feature of RAID. Intuitively, since both disks have exactly the same data, each disk could read different things. Likewise, for writes, you don’t have to write at the same time, as long as they’re always correct (e.g. don’t flip the metadata segment until both have written the data), so you can even get a write boost.

If performance is all you care about, then yeah, go ahead and use RAID 0. But you do get a performance boost with mirroring as well.

Yes, a backup should be tested, but it shouldn’t be relied on. Internet can go down, services can have maintenance, etc, so it’s a lot better to never need it. If you can afford a mirror, it’s having.

Yup, probably.

But hey, there are free options (Actual and Firefly), so there’s no harm in trying them out. If you can replicate your setup in YNAB, you might just save yourself some money. But definitely don’t ditch it until you’ve gotten everything set up first.

Yeah, it’s not perfect, but it works well enough to get what I wanted: see unexpected expenses from my vast array of credit cards. I’ve caught fraudulent transactions my bank didn’t, so that’s nice.

I don’t actually do strict budgeting with it, I mostly just want to see generally where our money is being spent, and I prefer to keep those transactions as private as possible (well, outside of my banks selling my transaction data to data brokers, that is…).

AOOSTAR WTR PRO AMD Ryzen 7 5825u 4 Bay Nas Mini PC

Huh, I’ve never heard of them, that looks like a pretty cool box!

The main issue I see is no PCIe slot. My current NAS runs over Wi-Fi (I know, I should run cable to it), so I would need to put this next to my router, which is in my bedroom. And even though it’s pretty quite, I don’t want to hear that all night. A minor issue is that it uses laptop RAM, so I probably can’t reuse the modules in something else.

That said, definitely a cool find, thanks!

JONSBO N4

The N2 and N3 also look pretty neat, but they’re mini-ITX, so I’d need to either buy a new mobo or wait until I upgrade one of our SFX PCs.

My current NAS box is way too big, since it’s basically a full tower and I only have one GPU and 3 drives in there, so 80% of the space is completely wasted. It’s also idle most of the time and never does anything intense, so it’s not like I need the cooling either.

I’d highly suggest getting a case with at least 1 more free HDD bay

Good call. I currently only have 2, and I was shopping for a 4-bay so I could run a second mirror pair, but getting 5 makes a lot of sense to replace a failing drive w/o yanking it out (maybe it’ll function well enough to help copy to the new drive).

Firefly

Nope. I found AB and saw that they had experimental support for SimpleFIN, which supports financial institutions in my country (USA), and it was cheaper than my old, non-selfhosted solution (Tiller). SimpleFIN provides a pretty simple API, so there’s no reason Firefly couldn’t support it as well (and there’s an issue for it).

I also really hate PHP, so the fact that Actual Budget is written in node.js is a plus.

Yeah, I’ve been looking for a replacement for my NAS, which is currently my old PC (Ryzen 1700 w/ mATX board). But everything I’ve found either has poor performance (e.g. N100 devices), poor expandability (e.g. mini-PCs), or are way too expensive. So I stick w/ my ghetto NAS box for now.

I’d really love a smaller footprint, but I really don’t want to spend more than a couple hundred on it. I’ve upgraded our (SO and I) computers to mini-ITX, so I’ll probably end up upgrading the NAS once we upgrade one of our PCs. That way I’ll just need a case and maybe a PSU and I’m off to the races.

But if anyone has found any diamonds in the rough that are small, support at least 2 HDDs and 1 SSD (can be NVMe) for pretty cheap, I’m interested. I’d prefer 4 HDDs so I have an upgrade route, but in all honesty, I’ll probably end up replacing both HDDs instead of adding a second RAID.

Hmm, not sure if it’s lesser known, but Actual Budget is pretty neat. I pay for SimpleFIN to get transactions and whatnot, and it has been awesome to keep track of my finances.

I absolutely would, for a few reasons:

• restoring from backup is a last resort and involves downtime; swapping a disk is comparatively easier and less disruptive
• it’s possible your backup solution fails, so having some redundancy is always good
• read performance - not a major factor, but saturating a gigabit link is always nice

wasting stuff just because it’s cheap is how we got here

Not really, at least if we’re talking about electricity use.

We got here by expanding our standard of living. Most residential electricity use is heating, cooling, and other major appliances, and we’re not going to make up for that by cutting a few watts here and there.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely in favor of small wins, but it’s important to not miss the forest for the trees. For example, don’t throw out good hardware just to save a few watts. If your goal is to help with climate change, there are much better ways to spend your time than cutting a few watts here and there.

Lemmy doesn’t meet my needs, but it’s closer than Reddit is. As soon as something better comes along (or I build a replacement), I’m out. I still use Reddit occasionally, I just don’t have an account there anymore because I’m unwilling to feed them more data.

Likewise, Forgejo partially meets my needs, and since automatic syncing a/ GitHub is a thing, I’ll probably use both. I don’t hate GitHub, I just prefer to self-host, so I’ll probably go that route instead of buying into GitHub’s ecosystem.

Good luck!

That sucks about freight forwarding.

I’m considering getting a Framework for my next laptop as well. But my current laptop works well enough, so I’m in no hurry. If they offered a Trackpoint option or at least put physical mouse buttons above the trackpad, I wouldn’t have any hesitation because I love that on my Thinkpad.

But honestly, I use my laptop a few times/year, other than my kids playing Minecraft on it (hence wanting to get them a computer of their own). Most of my gaming is on my Steam Deck or Switch, so I only really use the laptop when we travel or if we have guests over and I need to get something done when everyone is watching a movie or something, and a lot of the time I’ll use my work laptop instead since my kids often use both my desktop and laptop.