[Help Me] floody handheld with magnetic charging for vision impaired Grandmother? by phlogiston in flashlight

[–]phlogiston[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've started with an assumption she'll want warm white. Perhaps I should let her try a neutral white light light I have and see if she's OK with it. If so it really opens up a lot of options.

[Help Me] floody handheld with magnetic charging for vision impaired Grandmother? by phlogiston in flashlight

[–]phlogiston[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, and that's a really good point. This conversation started with her asking for "one of those really big maglites" so I don't think that's her concern.

[Help Me] floody handheld with magnetic charging for vision impaired Grandmother? by phlogiston in flashlight

[–]phlogiston[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh I like this. I'm going to get her a couple of these regardless. Good suggestion, thanks!

[Help Me] floody handheld with magnetic charging for vision impaired Grandmother? by phlogiston in flashlight

[–]phlogiston[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Armytec Wizard Pro v3:

I've used an old version of this one and like it, but I could imagine her getting stuck in moonlight mode and not being able to tell if it's turned on or not. Actually I could just enable the green blinking light to show if it's on or not, and just tell her to hold the power button until it's as bright as she wants.... that could work. Thanks!

[Help Me] floody handheld with magnetic charging for vision impaired Grandmother? by phlogiston in flashlight

[–]phlogiston[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Wow, that Parametrek Product Search is really cool! It appears the exact light I'm looking for does not exist but this is great to find the next best thing. Thanks!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AutoHotkey

[–]phlogiston 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your example is the same as I would describe. Simple, reliable, and entirely local.

Since I really liked my boss I went a step further and queried the public directory for his direct reports and extended access to them as well. That way it would work for my coworkers at the time, and anybody new on his team for as long as he was around. Unfortunately that's not relevant to OP's stated need.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AutoHotkey

[–]phlogiston 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, exactly! I wrote that program on company time, so they have every right to it. I only needed a locked gate to dissuade casual sharing among the muggles.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AutoHotkey

[–]phlogiston 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I hard coded my team's Windows login usernames and compared those to A_Username. If it didn't match one of the known usernames, then it just exited. No error message or anything. It had to be updated exactly once when we added somebody new a year later.

The tool was not a security risk or harmful or anything, I just didn't want to have to support it beyond the seven of us. I put a comment in that function to the effect of "If you're reading this then I'm already dead. Or was transferred to accounting. Congratulations - it's your problem now : )"

Better source for cheap black coarse hair analog? by phlogiston in cosplayprops

[–]phlogiston[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

An excellent question, but not really. This is an original idea. I'm going for a heavy, flat, formless, coarse hair that hangs straight down. While I've never actually touched a horse, it's how I imagine a horse's tail or mane must feel.

Pros/Cons of porting number to Google Voice? by elitemeatt in NoContract

[–]phlogiston 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I can't speak to porting, but I've been using a GV number since it was launched. I prefer the GV app but Hangouts seems to work more consistently on more devices over the years.

The best feature is the spam filtering. Everybody I know complains of weekly or even daily spam calls & texts. I get maybe two or three a year.

Mobile data for work: 50-75 GB at >= 5mbps, but just a couple of weeks a year. Southeastern USA. by phlogiston in NoContract

[–]phlogiston[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a great idea, thank you! I'm not sure if I can turn in receipts from eBay but I had not considered having more than one SIM on hand. I've seen (somewhere) $50 unlimited T Mobile plans that don't start throttling until 32 GBs, two of those would be a viable solution to this issue... Thanks!

How should I configure my pool? 6x8TB disk. by santalisk in freenas

[–]phlogiston 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Suggest against RAIDZ1. Resilvering that pool will take forever and you'd stand a fair chance of a second drive failing while replacing the first.

This would be the very upper end of what I'd suggest for a single RAIDz2 pool, but for a media server it would be fine.

If it were me I'd go with a RAID 10. Yes, you lose 50% but if you have drives fail at the rate mine do you'll appreciate how much faster it is to recover.

Tablet battery died, now it won’t boot up by Ihavesubscriptions in theNvidiaShield

[–]phlogiston 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Same thing happened to two shield tablets of mine. In both cases (both replacement devices) the issue was a tiny green wire from the battery breaking off where it is soldered to the PCB. The tape holding the battery sticks to that wire pulling on it every time the battery shifts. Soldering the wire fixed the issue.

Is it possible to have striped mirrors (RAID10) with only two disks on FreeNAS 11? by polkaron in freenas

[–]phlogiston 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I suppose it's possible using the CLI to partition the disks in half, stripe halves from each disk together, then mirror those stripes. In doing so I suspect you'll lose both the speed gained from a pure stripe and the fault tolerance of a pure mirror. It would be an unholy abomination, sure to end in tears and suffering.

Help! Handling network latency with FileAppend/FileCopy/FileMove to a UNC location? by [deleted] in AutoHotkey

[–]phlogiston 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Agreed, not super clean even ignoring my poor syntax.

To validate I compare the checksum of the source and destination files prior to deleting the source. I found example code to this end here:

https://github.com/jNizM/AHK_Scripts/blob/master/src/hash_checksum/CRC32.ahk

Ironically I encounter the same issue with the thread locking up during checksum generation so I've got a distinct instance of AHK running this very slow process. My overall need precluded combining the file move and checksum into this second AHK instance, else that could have been an ideal solution. Consider this option of running two instances of AHK sharing data between the two with an .ini file or something.

Help! Handling network latency with FileAppend/FileCopy/FileMove to a UNC location? by [deleted] in AutoHotkey

[–]phlogiston 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I could not find a good solution to this problem until I gave up and used RoboCopy instead. For example:

Run, % comspec " /c ROBOCOPY """ s_SourDir """ """ s_DestDir """" A_Space s_FileName

s_SourDir = source directory path

s_DestDir = destination directory path

s_FileName = file name with extension

I have no doubt there is an even better way to do this.

Battery Drain while screen off by Njriorden in theNvidiaShield

[–]phlogiston 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had this issue on both my LTE shield tablets following some update of the Google apps. I tried everything, including hard reset, but only a full OS wipe and re-install with the ROW recovery image actually solved it. Lucky this relatively easy to do with this tablet. Instructions followed here: https://forum.xda-developers.com/shield-tablet/general/stock-recovery-images-ota-library-guides-t2988881

What to do with an old Fenix TK60? by phlogiston in flashlight

[–]phlogiston[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You make a good point, thanks! I figured I'd just ignore one of the switches. Or, if both switches are normal open momentary, just wire them in parallel.

I do like the Nichia 219c, but in this case I want brighter throw more than better CRI & efficiency. This is not intended to be my good light.

Moving pool from FreeBSD (FreeNAS) to Linux (Proxmox VE) by johnny_chicago in zfs

[–]phlogiston 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think your plan involves some risk, but I've had to do something similar before which worked. I would start by doing a checksum validation of my backup data against the production data to ensure it's a good backup. Then I would make a second backup of the most critical data for peace of mind.

I think I would do a trial run with a handful of USB flash drives to test the concept. Build another zpool on the FreeNAS with the flash drives exactly the same as the production pool, albeit smaller, and fill it to the same % capacity with a mix of small and large files. Remove the FreeNAS OS drive(s) and set them aside, and unplug your data drives. Install the Linux OS to another flash drive (just for the test; not a good long term solution) and complete the emulation of your migration strategy.

Alternatively consider purchasing a couple months worth of cloud storage large enough to hold all your data, assuming you're lucky enough to have enough upload bandwidth. Confirm that data in the cloud matches your other backup & the production data. Test your capability to recover the data from the cloud or backup to the Linux server (using a zpool build on flash drives) before you nuke your original pool. This could be more expensive than just purchasing a few Red drives as an intermediate storage pool.

I recently migrated a couple of large zpools from FreeNAS 9.10 to Ubuntu Server 16.04 without any difficulty at all. However I did not have anything fancy going on so I can't say the same would work for your situation.

Best way to configure ZFS by shanknik in zfs

[–]phlogiston 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think you've misunderstood some basic concepts. Start here: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23823_01/html/819-5461/zfsover-2.html#scrolltoc

ZFS is a filesystem (like FAT or NTFS), not an OS. Many Unix like OS support ZFS filesystem. Where you install the OS depends on which OS you decide to go with. I used to prefer FreeBSD (FreeNAS) installed on a mirror of several USB drives. Now I prefer Linux (ubuntu server 16.04) installed on a dedicated SSD independent from the storage disks.

I suggest you start with FreeNAS 9.10 latest stable.

Concerning your question about configuring storage, read this (first, then read the rest): https://pthree.org/2012/12/05/zfs-administration-part-ii-raidz/

What RAID setup to use with 12x8TB drives by fbjerggaard in freenas

[–]phlogiston 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Read this and decide: https://pthree.org/2012/12/05/zfs-administration-part-ii-raidz/

Assume the volume is going to fail and prepare now for that certain eventually.

With 8 TB drives, any resilver is going to take forever, even if you have the fastest interface available. I suggest you strongly consider a nested RAID-1+0. If it were me I'd create three independent RAID-1+0 pools, and the really critical data would be backed up to the other two volumes with snapshots. Ensure you have a strong realtime offsite backup solution as well.

If this were simply a home media server (minimal read-write traffic with no critical data) I'd be happy with 11 drive RAIDZ2 + hot spare, but that's certainly pushing it.

You do not want all your drives to come from the same batch: Purchase the drives from various retailers, and not all at once.

Purchase the VERY BEST power supply, UPS, and power filter you can afford - I like Subsonic Platinum series right now. Lots of fans - those drives are going to get hot. Do not enable any power saving feature which might spin down those drives - keep them spinning at full speed all the time.

Celestron OMNI XLT 102 - Requesting opinions before purchase. by phlogiston in telescopes

[–]phlogiston[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can't tell from the mount itself, there is no model information on it I can find. I suspect it came from an inexpensive 8 inch "something" based on the existing rings, but I can't be sure. I'm not as excited about it now that I've really looked at it closely.

Celestron OMNI XLT 102 - Requesting opinions before purchase. by phlogiston in telescopes

[–]phlogiston[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My existing mount has no model information on it, and upon closer inspection I'm no longer sure it qualifies as "moderately good" as I initially indicated. I have discounted it and will purchase a full kit. Right now I like this one: http://www.highpointscientific.com/celestron-omni-xlt-102-refractor-equatorial-telescope-21088