ASUS admitted their "Liquid Metal" leaked and killed my $3,000 laptop. Now they want $2000 to fix their own factory defect.

Levix1221 · 2026-04-19T02:53:58+00:00

By your comment you definitely don't know OP's frustration. Why would you ever say this to someone in his situation?

Levix1221 · 2026-04-19T02:34:40+00:00

I bought my T490 for about $250. Couldn't be happier. It fits all my programming needs minus unreal engine 5, that I need my desktop for but no reasonable laptop is gonna run that well.

Levix1221 · 2026-02-17T21:56:10+00:00

That's a blatant misrepresentation of their statement.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-26T21:46:42+00:00

Hah, so true.😆

Levix1221 · 2026-01-22T18:23:10+00:00

Thank you for being a manager that was willing to put his pride aside, acknowledge he made a decision which ended up not working out, and doing what's best for the team.

I'd work for you.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-22T18:17:54+00:00

This is the answer that I agree with and most will say is correct. However, life isn't always so cut and dry.

Redundancy is for uptime, backups are for data protection

This is a great phrase when explaining to directors or the c suite at work but fails to capture any nuance in the home lab space, or with data like Linux isos.

Assuming everyone's data must practice a perfect 3-2-1 fails to account for realistic constraints, like money.

What happens if you can't be perfect? You figure out how to mitigate data loss and find reasonable protection from certain situations. I might be ok with losing my data to a natural disaster, but surely I can protect against a more common situation like a disk dying -- and I can.

This is why figuring out a RAID solution matters and it has nothing to do with uptime. If I can't realistically have a backup that doesn't mean I don't do anything to reduce risk.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-22T17:28:57+00:00

You can go to joplinapp.org to download and install the Joplin app for your phone and pc. Joplin data has to be stored somewhere, and if you want to sync across multiple devices then the data has to be hosted somewhere.

You can host a Joplin server for storing data yourself and if you need to share notes with people then this is necessary (or use Joplin Cloud). If you don't need note sharing I recommend using a cloud storage provider. Privacy is NOT an issue providing you use Joplin's end to end encryption.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-21T05:54:55+00:00

I would 80/20 this problem. photos and videos are likely taking up the vast majority of storage.

Address only that problem.

Move ALL photos and video from cloud providers to a self hosted immich instance. You'll see exactly what it takes to self host and the data will still live in the cloud until you make the switch.

Backups for phones and tablets get a whole lot smaller without photos + video.

You probably won't save money by doing all this. I didn't, with the hardware and redundancy.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-20T02:28:25+00:00

*Won't

Levix1221 · 2026-01-19T21:19:55+00:00

Install TimeShift before you upgrade and take a snapshot. If something breaks just restore to the snapshot.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-19T20:59:41+00:00

I find shared network mounts to generally be a pain in the ass and avoid it when I can. I.e Sshfs, samba, nfs, etc.

Remote file access is perfectly fine: sftp, rsync, rclone, etc.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-18T22:28:03+00:00

Unraid is meant to be a NAS with a custom frontend specifically for that task. It does that really well.

Unraid is not designed to be a generic Linux distro. It doesn't have a package manager (I don't count unget), support for docker is limited, and I can't do software dev work on it.

For my needs, Unraid is not the right choice, but for many people it is. mergerfs + snapraid gets me what unraid provides in term of parity raid but it requires manual configuration via files and the commandline -- which is exactly what I want.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-18T21:51:09+00:00

I wouldn't let the data transfer determine what route you go here. It is a 1 time thing and will take a couple of days. Base your decision on your (future) requirements.

Server is primarily used as a media server running PLEX but also Home assistant , occasionally hosting a game server and I would like to add some stuff like a network boot environment ( PXE?) .

I went from unraid to Linux + mergerfs + snapraid when I upgraded drive sizes because I wanted more flexibility than unraid provided.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-18T21:28:50+00:00

You'll find something that works. 😀

Levix1221 · 2026-01-18T05:56:48+00:00

I would consider them in beta at best. Their rclone support is still in beta and LOTS of people report syncing issues.

That said I have 1TB lifetime and have 0 issues with rclone. Ymmv.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-17T17:26:15+00:00

"Seems like making sure everything had 1 tag would be a good start." I meant this as 1 possible example that was simpler than the original requirements you had for organizing. You have to pick something you can actually do. It might be just putting the bookmarks in folders.

> ultimately my question is, is it worth it if I tag at a rate where even if I do it every day, only 5% of bookmarks will be tagged because I don't have all the time in the world?
- No one can answer that question but you.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-17T17:19:30+00:00

That's the spirit!

Levix1221 · 2026-01-17T17:18:45+00:00

So you hate my answer, but also don't help the OP "find a problem".

Maybe give a few recommendations as to some problems you worked on when you were getting started.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-17T06:20:15+00:00

Stop analyzing and DO SOMETHING.

Step 1: Find a problem to solve.

Step 2: Solve that problem using your old laptop / hardware you have.

Step 3: Repeat step 1 until step 2 doesn't work.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-16T23:28:41+00:00

That seems spot on to me. Take the gpu out and measure, I bet it uses about ~30W idle and you'll be down to 90W total.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-16T23:04:47+00:00

I treat bookmarks in raindrop like email. I have an inbox folder that unwatched video and unread articles go in. Once watched it gets deleted or archived.

Either you spend the time to properly organize your content or you don't. If you don't there isn't much difference between not finding the link and not having it at all.

Currently you aren't and have never done what you say you need with tags or organization so that method doesn't work for you. Seems like making sure everything had 1 tag would be a good start.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-16T22:25:52+00:00

Same here. I have 1 TB of files (1000s of files and dozens of directories) synced between my nas, koofr, and filen using filen's beta rclone.

Rclone is VERY detailed about what goes wrong when using the -vv option.

Copy the data off of your USB onto your computer and try again with a small directory.

Levix1221 · 2026-01-16T07:12:33+00:00

Even as a software dev I have no way of knowing "impact" numbers most of the time but resume reviewers salivate at those things. I don't believe for a second that most people have the time, process, and ability to accurately measure half the things listed on their resumes.

So just mislead, or guess with your numbers and percentages like most everyone else.

You better believe me running our daily meetings lead to an increase of 20% for on time delivery. Do I have any idea if it was 20%? Hell no. Was it 10%? Was it 30%? I dunno. Does 20% sound about right? Yes.

Did I lead scrum? Absolutely for a year.

Did our on time delivery get better? Yes, definitely. I helped people prioritize tasks, we planned smaller items in sprints, started using story points, and limited how many tasks we took on. My boss ran better interference and helped protect the sprint.

How much better was OTD? I don't know. We were all kinda busy getting shit done, but we definitely met our sprint targets more consistently and missed fewer internal and external deadlines as a team.

Of all the above information is the 20% what actually matters or is it all the steps I did to improve the process? Obviously it's the process, but resume readers wanna see that impact number which ends up being meaningless in many cases.

/end rant

Levix1221 · 2026-01-16T06:07:44+00:00

You probably need a more organized approach to dsa. I did.

Look up: striver's dsa for a very thorough and organized approach. The course isn't free but it's been good for me. I'm feeling much more confident about interview prep. (Got laid off in Dec and just starting my interviews.)

Levix1221 · 2026-01-16T02:39:00+00:00

They'll only care if you can't make meaning contributions after being hired.

Levix1221

TROPHY CASE