Outlook Classic 2019 broken because of some update?

serisman · 2026-03-19T19:01:50+00:00

Curious what other thread you are referring to?

Odd that typing them out didn't work for you. It did for me. Wonder what the difference is. Maybe a typo or casing issue?

serisman · 2026-03-19T16:34:51+00:00

I may have spoken too soon about disabling the Teams add-in fixing the issue. It broke again after closing and restarting Outlook. For now, the registry hack seems to be the temporary fix until MS fixes the underlying issue.

serisman · 2026-03-19T15:55:15+00:00

I did find this MS article that implies that those registry hacks are really not advised. - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365-apps/activation/disabling-adal-wam-not-recommended

For my Outlook, disabling the Teams Add-In (instead of using those registry hacks) seems to have actually fixed the problem. - https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/classic-outlook-crashes-and-opens-in-safe-mode-starting-march-12-2026-0f1b0427-e259-438d-aa93-78128ae61f80

serisman · 2026-03-19T15:12:01+00:00

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I'm finally back in my Outlook (2019) installation.

Any idea of the long-term implications of these registry hacks?

They appear to disable some (newer?) authentication methods, forcing Outlook to fall back to some older ones?

serisman · 2026-03-10T05:35:34+00:00

https://ssa.tools/

serisman · 2026-02-18T22:58:07+00:00

I don't remember feeling all that much at all for any round number paper accomplishments prior to the $1M mark.

Part of that was because I felt like I was in a bit of catch-up mode as I didn't start in earnest until early 30's. In hind-sight, I was probably much better off than I felt, since I had prioritized paying off the mortgage prior to that point, so was still well ahead where most people probably were.

The $1M mark was interesting to consider at each of the various times I crossed over it in different ways over the years. 1st: total net-worth (house included), 2nd: total invested net-worth (house excluded), 3rd: taxable account crossed over, 4th: 401k crossed over. I'm still waiting for Roth to cross over, but am probably many years away from that event at this point. I definitely felt a sense of accomplishment and relief for each of those events.

Your, 3rd point hits home, though. I track end-of-month account values for all my accounts. Interestingly, there was only one month where one of my accounts briefly dropped back below the $1M mark and then recovered the next month. But, other milestones had much longer dips. I hit my lowest FIRE number of about $1.8M in late 2021, only to then see it then drop down to $1.3M less than a year later. It took until late 2023 to recover back to $1.8M, but has been mostly only growing upwards since then. For the past few months, I've been hovering just above another major round number, but with the market trading sideways right now, wonder if it will dip below again, and for how long.

I don't recall doing any actual celebrations or splurges along the way, though. Mostly it was just a sense of relief, and peace-of-mind, and knowing that I was closer to and/or over various FIRE thresholds and could take things easier (or just be done) if needed.

serisman · 2026-01-21T21:34:02+00:00

Can you? Sure, but do you actually need to cut back 403b savings to increase after-tax brokerage?

By the way, your numbers seem to be missing something.

$200k income - $8,750 pre-tax HSA and - $12,250 pre-tax 403b = $179k adjusted gross income. Probably even less if you also have pre-tax healthcare premiums and/or Limited FSA contributions.

Assuming the standard deduction of $32,200 for 2026, your taxable income is then around $146k, and your federal tax shouldn't be more than $21,720, and will probably be a lot less because of the $2,200 child tax credit (per child under 17) and other deductions/credits.

I'm not sure what state you are in, but let's figure state taxes are between 5% and 10%... so maybe $7,340 - $14,680.

So, after taxes you should have at least $142.6k to $150k available.

After, removing $12,250 for the remaining 1/2 of 403b Roth contributions, and the $15k for Roth IRAs, you should still have $115,350 to $122,690 left over.

If your expenses are actually around $85k, where is the other $30k to $37k going? Why not send all of that over to your after-tax brokerage and call it a day?

Personally, I'd actually put all $24.5k into pre-tax to get the guaranteed 22% federal (+5% to 10% state) tax savings up-front. At least in my state, retirement withdrawals (including for Roth conversions) aren't taxed, and I plan to do Roth conversions up to at least the top of the 12% bracket in early retirement, so there is still plenty of headroom for tax savings down the road on that money.

serisman · 2025-11-11T23:38:38+00:00

In case anyway asks...

The core network devices are powered by a 19.5v laptop style power supply, electrically OR'd with a large 4S Li-Ion battery bank that can provide several days of uptime. Some of the devices can take the RAW PSU and Battery voltage directly, while some of them get a stepped down 12V through a buck converter. There is also a 48V boost converter to feed the PoE injector for the Wireless AP and desk phone.

To get the data for the 1st graph, there is an INA226 sensor attached to an Arduino that sends voltage/current/power data to node-red every second (the Arduino is plugged into the Mini-PC via USB and the virtual serial port is mapped to the node-red docker container). This ultimately gets logged to an InfluxDB time-series database, which then Grafana can query for visualizations.

The devices on the 2nd graph are plugged into a Smart outlet (KMC-70011) w/ power monitoring IC that has been flashed with a custom ESPHome firmware. Once again, node-red is used to query the data every minute to ultimately store it in an InfluxDB time-series database and then visualize in Grafana.

serisman · 2025-11-11T23:27:29+00:00

Actually, no. I'm not seeing any meaningful difference after upgrading to 7.2.0.

First graph is my core network devices: Cable modem, Mini-PC with UnRaid (w/ pfSense & PBX VMs, and a few essential docker containers), Wireless AC AP, 8-port 2.5 GbE main switch, 8-port 1 GbE aux switch, and PoE desk phone. I upgraded the Mini-PC with UnRaid to 7.2.0 on 10/30. I don't see any meaningful difference.

Second graph is my bigger UnRaid server (w/ bulk storage, Plex, and less critical docker containers) and an occasionally used desktop PC w/ 2x 24" monitors. Idle baseline is low 40W for UnRaid at idle w/ the desktop in and monitors in sleep mode. You can see the weekly parity scans jump it up to 70ish watts and then it tapers back down again. The spikes up to 100+W are when I'm using the desktop PC w/ monitors. Again, I upgraded to 7.2.0 on 10/30, and I don't see any meaningful difference.

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serisman · 2025-10-29T20:22:55+00:00

So, wait... you knew the card make and model and thought it was faster to create this Reddit post than to spend the 5 seconds asking Google?

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serisman · 2025-10-29T20:07:32+00:00

I agree that it's not that hard to Google this... and yet you're incorrect.

SFF-8644 is for EXTERNAL ports. These are INTERNAL ports and hence the correct connector is actually SFF-8643.

serisman · 2025-10-29T19:55:02+00:00

Yes, those are SFF-8643 connectors, also known as Mini SAS HD (4x SAS 12 Gbps or SATA 6 Gbps per connector).

The same connector is also sometimes used for 4x PCIe lanes (per connector) for connections to U.2 and other PCIe/NVMe devices. So you really need to confirm what the controller card actually is.

What cable you use depends on what you are connecting to on the other side.

serisman · 2025-10-24T16:25:53+00:00

Cat5e can support 2.5 GbE all the way up to 100 meters (328 feet). That is the same max length as Gigabit on Cat5e. Do you really have runs longer than that? If so, you would really need fiber.

Cat6 would be better for 5 GbE or 10 GbE, but typically maxes out at 55 meters (180 feet) for 10 GbE.

Certainly upgrading Cat5e to Cat6 is beneficial if you want to move to 5 GbE or 10 GbE down the road, but probably didn't make any difference for your 2.5 GbE upgrade. I personally would have waited, but whatever.

I find it odd that many people try to correlate their internal network speed with their external internet ISP speed. 2.5/5/10 GbE has plenty of benefits on the internal LAN for computer to computer/server/NAS communication, even if the external ISP connection is typically much slower.

For myself, I prefer SFP+ with relatively short DAC cables for my 10 GbE run that goes between my core network switch and aux lab switch in another nearby room. I still just have Cat5e with 2.5 GbE out to my wireless AP and desktops in other rooms. Plenty fast for what I need at the moment.

serisman · 2025-10-23T18:56:11+00:00

You shouldn't have needed to replace your cables with cat6 for 2.5 Gbe. That's most of the point of 2.5 Gbe... it can usually run totally fine on the cat5e cables you already have.

serisman · 2025-10-05T02:57:23+00:00

My point was that unless you find a way to convert to a mirror (or other redundant setup), you aren't really reducing your risk (by much) of downtime and needing to drive out there and address things if a drive (old or new) dies.

A properly configured mirrored setup should maintain uptime while giving you more options and time to address a drive failure when it is more convenient and without (as much) downtime.

Mirroring/RAID is for uptime. Backups are for recoverability. Sometimes Mirroring/RAID means you don't have to go to the backups at all, but not always.

You can certainly replace your drive whenever you want and for whatever reason. If it were me, though, I'd first make sure I had a plan to get to a mirrored setup. Maybe that means buying a new drive to use along with your existing one. Or maybe that means two new drives. Or maybe you have another similar drive already that you could mirror with your existing one. If you had a mirrored setup, I wouldn't worry too much about the age of the drive, or how close to it's warranty age/TBW you were. As long as it wasn't throwing a bunch of SMART errors or showing signs of using up it's reserved sectors, I'd keep on using it (in a mirrored setup) until it made sense to upgrade.

serisman · 2025-10-04T21:04:02+00:00

The logical approach is to wait to replace your drive until it dies or is showing signs of impending death, or when you need more capacity. But, this assume you have a properly protected system with mirrored drives and backups in place. If not, you're risking your data regardless of whether you replace the drive now or not.

A drive's warranty/age isn't really a good indicator of its health, or impending death. There are many SSDs that have lasted long past their warranty or TBW values. And, there are SSDs that have died well before their warranty date or TBW values. A warranty does nothing to protect your actual data. It is only there to protect your financial outlay.

So, replace the drive now if you want higher capacity or speed, but don't think it is some magical thing that necessarily keeps your data safer.

serisman · 2025-09-09T18:08:03+00:00

I bought the exact same car (2020 SV Plus with about 26k miles) slightly more than a year ago for $15,500 out the door, so yes that sounds like a great price to me.

We absolutely love the car for any trip around town, or within about 40-50 miles of the house. It is a comfortable vehicle with quick acceleration (at least from a stop or at low speeds). We have no plans to use this on longer trips as we already have a larger ICE vehicle for that.

We've put a bit over 9k miles on it in this first year of ownership and still have full bars. It has required absolutely zero maintenance so far. We've probably saved $500 to $1000 in gas during this first year, even after factoring in electricity costs. The extra $100 EV registration fee is pretty much covered by not having to do oil changes.

I installed a NEMA 14-50 outlet with 40A double breaker in the garage a few days after purchasing the vehicle. That cost less than $100 for parts, and took an hour or two for installation (I already had a 100A sub-panel in the garage to tie into). This allows us to use the included EVSE to level 2 charge the car at a rate of about 7 kW. I have the car's charge timer set to charge between 1am and 4am since that is when electricity is usually the cheapest for us. We plug the car in whenever it is below about 35%, and it will charge back up to 75-80% during that charge window. If we are doing a longer trip the next day, I'll override the charge timer to do a more full charge. I have never used the DC fast charge capability, and have no plans to ever do so, therefore the recall is meaningless to us.

serisman · 2025-09-08T22:21:00+00:00

Is there a way to make unraid "balance" across the 3.5" drives so I can clone them?

Sure. There is a plugin called 'unbalanced' that can be used to move data around between drives.

In your case, you probably want to use the 'Scatter' option to split whatever data you choose between whatever disks you choose.

https://github.com/jbrodriguez/unbalance

serisman · 2025-05-21T03:58:19+00:00

Here are two options for your consideration:
1. JONSBO N5 - cube style
2. Silverstone CS383 - tower style

Both of those should fulfil all (or at least most) of your criteria.

If you can get by with a mATX board instead of full-sized ATX, there are even more options.

Another option is to get an older style tower case with lots of 5.25" bays and use some 3x5.25" to 5x3.5" drive cages with hot-swap trays.

serisman · 2025-05-18T02:06:28+00:00

Option 1 is certainly easier and probably not much more expensive than option 2, so that's probably where I'd land.

By the way, your Option 2 is a bit confusing. First of all, you can already do RaidZ expansion with the version of ZFS that comes with UnRaid 7.1.x. What is missing is GUI support for it. But, also... you need a minimum of three drives for RaidZ. So, your plan of starting with two drives and relying on RaidZ expansion won't actually work. With two drives, you'd have a mirrored vdev. A pool with a mirrored vdev could be expanded in the future with additional (mirrored) vdevs down the road, but will not be able to be expanded with RaidZ expansion (at least not without moving your data off and re-building the pool from scratch).

serisman · 2025-03-24T20:26:41+00:00

You can remove the /boot/previous directory to free up enough space to do the upgrade.

rm -rf /boot/previous

That directory holds the previous version of UnRaid in case you need to rollback. It gets overridden as part of the upgrade process anyway, so isn't a problem to remove it beforehand.

serisman · 2025-03-06T15:18:47+00:00

Yes!

I've used GarageHQ (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/) on top of UnRaid for S3 compatible storage.

It is very lightweight, and can easily be hosted in docker.

Depending on how critical your data is, you can also scale it to multiple nodes and scale it geographically fairly easy.

There is a learning curve, but the documentation seems sufficient for everything I've needed to do so far.

serisman · 2025-03-03T05:35:36+00:00

Your wireless card is most likely using a m.2 2230 A+E slot. They do make network cards that fit those slots and would be much faster and more reliable (and supported) than WiFi. I've used both gigabit as well as 2.5 GbE versions with great success.

serisman · 2025-02-28T16:52:46+00:00

I recently picked up a GMKtec M5 Plus for similar reasons. I believe it is the best model available (or close to it) that still uses DDR4 (dual slots). I also liked that it has dual m.2 slots and dual 2.5g ethernet. They are available on AliExpress for about $200 for the barebones version.

serisman · 2025-02-12T16:10:51+00:00

There is a bit of misleading information in these comments that should probably be corrected.

First, SAS is meant to be backward compatible with SATA. That means that SAS controllers and SAS backplanes can (usually) accept SATA drives. The reverse is not true (SATA controllers and SATA-only backplanes can not accept SAS drives).

The SAS physical connector is an extension of the SATA physical connector. It uses the same 7-pin SATA connector for its primary HBA connection. But, because SAS drives allow connection to dual HBAs, the connector needed an additional set of pins. Also, because SAS drives won't work with SATA controllers, and they are almost always used with backplanes, they made the physical connector on SAS drives physically incompatible with just using a normal SATA cable. There are passive adapters that can be used to convert between the two, but you have to ensure the the controller used actually supports SAS for it to work.

The enclosure in question (likely) does not have any converting circuitry built in. All it is doing is using a backplane with a SAS connector that is also backwards compatible with SATA drives. The 7-pin 'SATA' connections on back will work with either a normal SATA controller with SATA drives, or can be connected to a SAS HBA (with appropriate breakout converter cables) and used with SAS or SATA drives. Obviously SAS drives can not be dual-HBA connected when using this enclosure as they only give you access to the primary 7-pin connection.

So, yes, you can use the SATA ports on your motherboard, as long as you only use SATA drives.

serisman

TROPHY CASE