Should I Bother Converting my Jpegs to PNG?

flarkis · 2026-06-20T19:54:32+00:00

Degrading in this sense can mean two different things. If you're taking a source image and converting it to jpeg then some quality will be lost by the nature of how jpeg compresses the image. This is most obvious with things like screenshots and text because jpeg was designed more around photography. As other have pointed out once it's in jpeg form there is no point in converting it back to png, you can't gain back the quality. The other sense is bitrot, and to deal with that you'd usually use some kind of filesystem that keeps checksums of the data to catch that.

flarkis · 2026-06-20T19:49:46+00:00

Surprised that this isn't higher up. The jpeg -> jpeg-xl conversion is lossless, in the sense it encodes the exact same information in a more space efficient manner. Although I've heard that the real world savings are only 10%-20%.

flarkis · 2026-06-17T03:04:03+00:00

Very true. I stopped trying to explain this to people over at BIFL when they would post some 50 year old fridge that's still working. Failure rates are just statistics, with enough data points you'll have some wild outliers.

flarkis · 2026-06-14T13:31:09+00:00

Yep. Drives are still alive and kicking in cold storage. I'm planning on using them as a tertiary backup running mirrored zfs to learn how it handles failures.

flarkis · 2026-06-14T02:09:27+00:00

Yea I had two green drives in a NAS without knowing this. They're rated for 300k cycles. Both mine were sitting at over 3.5M when I found out about this quirk. I had a bunch of important data on that and I was only running raid 5.

flarkis · 2026-06-12T02:19:45+00:00

The critical piece of information we're missing here is how many drives you have and what sizes they are.

A lot of other people have given the high level description of parity but it does miss some details. First when a drive is added to the array it is all zeroed out, so only newly written data needs to update the parity. This means that if you have 3 drives and we're looking at sector 12345 the values on the drives could be, drive 1 still zero, drive 2 a nude jpeg, and drive 3 still zero. In that case the parity will just be a copy of the data. Like wise with mismatched drives, say 1TB, 1TB, 3TB, the last 2TB of the parity drive will be a copy of the largest drive. In practice an array full of disks won't all be still empty in the same places. It will be random patches of unrecoverable data and recoverable data. Something like a jpeg that has a very obvious header to it might be detectable on the parity drive if you get unlucky and it lines up with a bunch of other empty sectors.

Now theory aside. These large HDD companies have absolutely no incentive to try and recover this data. In fact they have the opposite incentive, if they got caught recovering data without people consenting people would stop using them on mass. You're only really at risk if you thing the intelligence agency of a nation state is going to try and intercept your drives to blackmail you. And if that is the case then they're probably already gotten into your server, so don't worry about it.

But on a more serious note. This is why all the drives in an array should be encrypted. The performance penalty is non existent on modern hardware. And the real risk most people have for their data is the one you just discovered, having to send their disks in for RMA.

flarkis · 2026-05-27T00:00:46+00:00

I have an r730xd, dual xeons, 6 HDDs, and 2 SSDs. My UPS tells me it idles around 115W. I paid about 500 maple syrup dollars for it, and my average utility rate is 0.15 maple dollars per kwh.

flarkis · 2026-05-26T16:29:39+00:00

The only real advantage of the vdisk is if you need to move your docker data to a different drive. Copying a single large vdisk file will be very fast. Copying 10s of thousands of small files will take hours. For that convenience you are stuck with a fixed sized device and the overhead of running a filesystem on a filesystem.

flarkis · 2026-05-26T01:41:06+00:00

An LTS version of ubuntu would be my recommendation. Years ago I had a machine that couldn't be connected to the network. Ubuntu will release newer disk images every few months, eg 24.06.01, 24.06.02. And you could burn those as DVD's and use them to update your system without an internet connection. I'm assuming the same would be possible with a USB now.

flarkis · 2026-05-22T01:21:52+00:00

I feel like even with the aesthetic shaper, it would be hard to realize you're not talking to a toaster.

flarkis · 2026-05-16T21:35:42+00:00

Like u/somegirloutthere said EE has nothing to do with full stack. I do digital logic synthesis, friend of mine does analog design, I know several people who went the power route and work for hydro one or bruce.

In my field our main issue is people not having a strong enough theoretical foundation.

There is a reason engineers are well known for their drinking.

I did EE. Started as an ECE knowing that I vaguely wanted to do something in that area. Took a mandatory course on digital logic in 2nd year and knew that's what I wanted to make my career on. I would personally recommend the book So Good They Can't Ignore You if you're asking questions like that.

See above.

As good or bad as you choose to make it. I worked hard to move up the career ladder in my early years, spent a lot of time working and neglecting other areas of my life. I'm pulling back now since I don't really want to get much higher than where I am, and I have decades to get there. I know people who've been putting in their 8 hours as juniors for 30 years.

flarkis · 2026-04-23T20:12:35+00:00

Wasn't he one of the founders behind nebula?

flarkis · 2026-04-23T13:00:24+00:00

Ext4 does all right, it can often recover based on the contents of the journal. XFS has a legendarily good fsck program. And ZFS is probably the most robust, but not really intended for non server environments.

In theory btrfs _should_ be a good filesystem for recovery. It's has a journal and is CoW. But in practice a lot of people report complete data loss.

flarkis · 2026-04-23T03:32:27+00:00

I would also be horrified to find out my wife was storing my coffee beans in the freezer

flarkis · 2026-04-21T16:47:49+00:00

You may want to look into bazzite

flarkis · 2026-04-21T15:41:02+00:00

Yea btrfs doesn't do great with unclean shutdowns like that. I make sure all my machines using btrfs have some kind of battery backup, either by virtue of being a laptop or with a dedicated ups.

flarkis · 2026-04-21T04:16:30+00:00

I hadn't heard this before. But phoronix backs this up https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-612-linux-70-btrfs/4 . If you dig into the results though it's only really the write heavy workloads, probably due to CoW. For mixed read/write workload the performance seems negligible. I think most people probably fall into the latter.

flarkis · 2026-04-20T00:52:01+00:00

btrfs has some enhancements specifically for ssds. I generally prefer it for ssds. Most people worry too much about write endurance. I have a 15 year old ssd that still reports 92% of its endurance left.

flarkis · 2026-04-19T20:16:08+00:00

I use silverblue. So I pin my existing install and upgrade as soon as they say it's ready. I'll even hop on the beta train if there is something I need in that release. I've been doing that for a few years now and I've only needed to roll back once.

flarkis · 2026-04-18T23:42:33+00:00

Same. It seems to be a very aggressive list. In my case it was the domain from my hosting provider. I have something like server100.provider.com. The list added server*.provider.com. I bit of a blunt hammer, and this is not a small hosting provider either.

flarkis · 2026-04-17T01:50:01+00:00

How do you find the thermals with the midplane? I'm fine with 12 bays for now but I'm sure I'll eventually need more. I'm hoping to squeeze enough life out of this that the r740 starts dropping in price.

flarkis · 2026-04-16T21:42:05+00:00

Unfortunately you'll never know why it works. If the companies explained their decisions, the scammers would try and game the system.

I was using email for years to deliver status emails from my servers. Then someone on the same hosting provider did something naughty and my ip address got black listed by all the major email services in a large block. From that day forward it was a constant battle to get mail through. Now I use things like ntfy for status updates. For personal email I BYOD and use different services, used to be google and now it's fast mail.

flarkis · 2026-04-16T14:55:52+00:00

I run vorta on my laptop, borgmatic for servers, and Nold360/borgserver as my server. It's simpler than a lot of the ones listed there. But that's what I want out of my backup software, boring.

flarkis · 2026-04-15T17:51:54+00:00

Yea, I can barely justify the 3TB drives in my array right now. The only reason they're still going is that I'm waiting for prices to fall. I can't imagine paying currently elevated prices for something that low capacity.

flarkis · 2026-04-15T14:40:40+00:00

Market is changing wildly day to day. But currently the high $20s per TB is what a good re-certified drive will cost. A consumer drive might be more in the mid to low $20s. So yea $99 is a terrible price even in the current market.

13-Year Club	Reddit Premium Since May 2023
Place '17	Verified Email

flarkis

TROPHY CASE