APC Back-UPS 850.

I’d guess that those maybe don’t use the same protocol as an APC Easy UPS. There’s a (widely-used) Linux software package, Network UPS Tools, which can talk to the APC UPSes that I’ve seen in the past.

https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html

It has Back-UPS devices listed in the hardware compatibility list as well as devices from many other manufacturers, but I don’t see any reference to an “Easy UPS”.

Right now when updates get applied to the NAS, if it gets powered off during the update window that would be really bad and inconvenient require manual intervention.

You sure? I mean, sure, it’s possible; there are devices out there that can’t deal with power loss during update. But others can: they’ll typically have space for two firmware versions, write out the new version into the inactive slot, and only when the new version is committed to persistent storage, atomically activate it.

Last device I worked on functioned that way.

you might lose data in flight if you’re not careful.

That’s the responsibility of the application if they rely on the data to be persistent at some point; they need to be written to deal with the fact that there may be in-flight data that doesn’t make it to the disk if they intend to take other actions that depend on that fact; they’ll need to call fsync() or whatever their OS has if they expect the data to be on-drive.

Normally, there will always a period where some data being written out is partial: the write() could complete after handing the data off to the OS’s buffer cache. The local drive could complete because data’s in its cache. The app could perform multiple write() calls, and the first could have completed without the second. With a NAS, the window might be a little bit longer than it otherwise would be, but something like a DBMS will do the fsync(); at any point, it’d be hypothetically possible for the OS to crash or power loss or something to happen.

The real problem, that I need an nas for, is not the loss of some data, it’s when the storms hit and there’s flooding, the power can go up and down and cycle quite rapidly. And that’s really bad for sensitive hardware like hard disks. So I want the NAS to shut off when the power starts getting bad, and not turn on for a really long time but still turn on automatically when things stabilize

Like I said in the above comment, you’ll get that even without a clean shutdown; you’ll actually get a bit more time if you don’t do a clean shutdown.

Because this device runs a bunch of VMs and containers

Ah, okay, it’s not just a file server? Fair enough – then that brings the case #2 back up again, which I didn’t expect to apply to the NAS itself.

As things stand, mobile OSes have some pretty decent out-of-box ways for apps to be isolated. App A can’t fiddle with data private to app B. That Android video game you just downloaded can’t extract data from your web browser or generally fiddle with it.

Desktop OSes today don’t normally have software install and work like that. Yeah, you can manually set something like that up with containers or VMs, but your typical user isn’t going to do that.

I’d guess that those OSes may not permit arbitrary software without administrative privileges to initiate shutdowns. That’s the case on Linux.

I’m assuming that your goal here is automatic shutdown when the UPS battery gets low so you don’t actually have the NAS see unexpected power loss.

This isn’t an answer to your question, but stepping back and getting a big-picture view: do you actually need a clean, automatic shutdown on your Synology server if the power goes out?

I’d assume that the filesystems that the things are set up to run are power-loss safe.

I’d also assume that there isn’t server-side state that needs to be cleanly flushed prior to power loss.

Historically, UPSes providing a clean shutdown were important on personal computers for two reasons:

• Some filesystems couldn’t deal with power loss, could produce a corrupted filesystem. FAT, for example, or HFS on the Mac. That’s not much of an issue today, and I can’t imagine that a Synology NAS would be doing that unless you’re explicitly choosing to use an old filesystem.

• Some applications maintain state and when told to shut down, will dump it to disk. So maybe someone’s writing a document in Microsoft Word and hasn’t saved it for a long time, a few minutes will provide them time to save it (or the application to do an auto-save). Auto-save usually partially-mitigates this. I don’t have a Synology system, but AFAIK, they don’t run anything like that.

Like, I’d think that the NAS could probably survive a power loss just fine, even with an unclean shutdown.

If you have an attached desktop machine, maybe case #2 would apply, but I’d think that hooking the desktop up to the UPS and having it do a clean shutdown would address the issue – I mean, the NAS can’t force apps on computers using the NAS to dump state out to the NAS, so hooking the NAS up that way won’t solve case #2 for any attached computers.

If all you want is more time before the NAS goes down uncleanly, you can just leave the USB and RS-232 connection out of the picture and let the UPS run until the battery is exhausted and then have the NAS go down uncleanly. Hell, that’d be preferable to an automated shutdown, as you’d get a bit more runtime before the thing goes down.

Your age 30 is fine. Age is always an excuse, but mostly not true.

It’s fine for single-player shooters, which are less demanding, but speaking as someone who has packed on some decades, your reaction time definitely becomes a noticeable factor over the years for competitive multiplayer games. I definitely can’t play competitive twitch shooters nearly as well as when I was 18, which is about when your reaction time is at its best.

That being said, there are shooters where twitch time is less-critical or roles or play-styles that focus less on it.

And I don’t see how someone couldn’t learn to play with a dual-stick or trackpad (or trackball, for that matter), which is what I think OP is talking about. I haven’t had any problems picking up new input methods…that just takes time. Took time to learn when I was 18, too.

I mean, twin stick gamepad or to lesser extent touchpad just isn’t going to be as good as a mouse for an FPS. A good mouse player will beat a good touchpad or gamepad player.

And the problem with the Deck is that it has a PC game library, and a lot of those are designed with a mouse in mind. Console FPSes usually adjust the game difficulty so that playing with twin sticks are practical. Enemies give you more time to slowly turn around without inflicting enormous amounts of damage. Auto-aim assist is common. Ranges are shorter. Stuff like that.

If this is a single-player game – which it sounds like you’re playing – you can reduce the difficulty to compensate for the input mechanism.

There’s an input mechanism that some people developed for twin-stick gyro controllers called Flick Stick, which someone else mentioned; Steam Input supports this. The mouse is still going to win, but it’s an improvement over traditional pure-stick input.

There’s also some input mechanism which I think was different from the “Flick Stick” approach – though maybe I’m wrong and misremembering, didn’t have an interest in exploring it – that IIRC someone put together using Steam Input. The way it worked, as I recall, was that one could tap the thumbstick in a direction and it’d immediately do a 90 degree turn. The idea was to provide for a rapid turn while keeping sensitivity low enough to still permit for accurate aiming. But I’m not able to find the thing with Kagi in a few searches, and it’s not impossible that I’m misremembering…this was only a single video that I’m thinking of.

I don’t think that there’s any trick to learning this, just playing games and picking it up over time. I mean, I was atrocious at using a keyboard+mouse when I first started doing it, and ditto with twin-stick FPSes.

You could also attach a keyboard and mouse, though I think that that kind of eliminates the point of the Deck, at least as long as one also has a PC to play on – it might make sense for someone who just uses a Deck and a phone.

is there an easy FPS game where I don’t have to move or shoot too fast

Play games that are designed for consoles or which have a gamepad mode, rather than a keyboard+mouse PC game. They’ll be tuned for controller limitations. Like, can you play Halo comfortably with the Deck? That was designed for a gamepad originally, and it’s available on Steam (though I’d note that it requires a Microsoft account, which you may-or-may-not be willing to do).

https://old.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/8f7oyr/the_core_reasons_thumbsticks_are_inaccurate/

This also talks about some limitations of thumbstick aiming (if you’re using thumbsticks and not trackpads). It might be possible to tweak some of these, like sensitivity or dead zone, but I’d assume that for a given game, the developers have already chosen pretty reasonable defaults.

For those who haven’t played the series, VATS is an alternate aiming mode where one can pause (or in later games in the 3d series, greatly slow) the game, select a certain number of targets depending upon available action points, and then have all those shots taken in rapid succession, with the game aiming.

I’d say that VATS is kind of a “path” than a purely alternate input method in those games; you need to make a VATS-oriented build, though it’s true that it makes it possible to play the game with minimal FPS elements. Like, in Fallout: New Vegas, VATS provides major benefits close-up. While VATS is active, there’s enormous damage reduction applied to your character, IIRC 90%, so for short periods of time, they have enormous damage output and little risk. They can also turn rapidly and target multiple enemies, probably better than a player manually-playing could. At close ranges, VATS is just superior.

But VATS suffers severe accuracy penalties at range. Whether-or-not a target is moving doesn’t affect VATS accuracy, but range does a lot, whereas with manual aiming, whether-or-not a target is moving makes a big difference and range doesn’t matter much. As a result, VATS isn’t great for sniping, which is also an aspect of the game. You can do it (especially, oddly-enough, with pistols, in Fallout 4, where the Concentrated Fire perk lets later shots in a flurry of pistol shots at range be very accurate.

In Fallout 76, VATS provides such dramatic damage benefits that I’d say that it’s impractical to play a non-VATS build – VATS is required to get damage up to a reasonable level later in the game.

Yes. I wouldn’t be preemptively worried about it, though.

Your scan is going to try to read and maybe write each sector and see if the drive returns an error for that operation. In theory, the adapter could respond with a read or write error even if a read or write worked or even return some kind of bogus data instead of an error.

But I wouldn’t expect this to likely actually arise or be particularly worried about the prospect. It’s sort of a “could my grocery store checkout counter person murder me” thing. Theoretically yes, but I wouldn’t worry about it unless I had some reason to believe that that was the case.

IIRC Russia was talking about detaching their modules and using them to help bootstrap some new station. So I dunno if those will get brought down.

That being said, that was also when that rather pugnacious guy was running Roscosmos, and I dunno if doing a new space station is the top of Russia’s priority list for their limited budget.

kagis

Dmitry Rogozin.

kagis further

It looks like they canceled the idea of reusing the Russian ISS modules back in 2021. So I guess those are destined for SpaceX’s deorbit too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Piloted_Assembly_and_Experiment_Complex

The Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (Russian: Орбитальный Пилотируемый Сборочно-Экспериментальный Комплекс, Orbital’nyj Pilotirujemyj Sborochno-Eksperimental’nyj Kompleks;[1][2] ОПСЭК, OPSEK) was a 2009–2017 proposed third-generation Russian modular space station for low Earth orbit. The concept was to use OPSEK to assemble components of crewed interplanetary spacecraft destined for the Moon, Mars, and possibly Saturn. The returning crew could also recover on the station before landing on Earth. Thus, OPSEK could form part of a future network of stations supporting crewed exploration of the Solar System.

In early plans, the station was to consist initially of several modules from the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS) of the International Space Station (ISS). However, after studying the feasibility of this, the head of Roscosmos stated in September 2017 the intention to continue working together on the ISS.[3] In April 2021, Roscosmos officials announced plans to exit from the ISS programme after 2024, stating concerns about the condition of its aging modules. The OPSEK concept had by then evolved into plans for the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS), which would be built without modules from the ISS, and was anticipated to be launched starting in the mid-2020s.[4][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Orbital_Service_Station

The Russian Orbital Service Station (Russian: Российская орбитальная служебная станция, Rossiyskaya orbital’naya sluzhebnaya stantsiya) (ROSS, Russian: РОСС)[3] is a proposed Russian orbital space station scheduled to begin construction in 2027. Initially an evolution of the Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (OPSEK) concept, ROSS developed into plans for a new standalone Russian space station built from scratch without modules from the Russian Orbital Segment of the ISS.[4]

I still dunno if they’re gonna get the money for a new space station. Like, deciding to have a war in Ukraine may have kind of killed off the viability of doing a new space station.

What hardware and Linux distro would you use in this situation?

The distro isn’t likely to be a factor here. Any (non-super-specialized) distro will be able to solve issues in about the same way.

I mean, any recommendation is going to just be people mentioning their preferred distro.

I don’t know whether saltwater exposure is a concern. If so, that may impose some constraints on heat generation (if you have to have it and storage hardware in a waterproof case).

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity.

Thru.

EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.

I think I’d have a category for both.

You can’t call an SNES cartridge a service, but similarly, you can’t call, oh, an online strip poker service a good.

I suspect that most good-games have at least some characteristics of a service (like patches) and most service-games have at least some characteristics of a good (like software that could be frozen in place).

I think that the actual problem is vendors unnecessarily converting good-games into service-games, as that gives them a route to get leverage relative to the consumer. Like, I can sell a game and then down the line start data-mining players or something. I think that whatever policy countries ultimately adopt should be aimed at discouraging that.

If there’s a better way to configure Docker, I’m open to it, as long as it doesn’t require rebuilding everything from scratch.

You could try using lvmcache (block device level) or bcachefs (filesystem level caching) or something like that, have rotational storage be the primary form of storage but let the system use SSD as a cache. Dunno what kind of performance improvements you might expect, though.

The AI trials used a combination of “smart” CCTV cameras that can detect objects or movements from images they capture and older cameras that have their videofeeds connected to cloud-based analysis.

Enough of these linked together coupled with facial recognition, and Amazon’s got the means to track people at scale.

Hmm. They might have gotten that discount because of using their alternate payment system as leverage, so might have been worthwhile.

Make it thicker.

Battery: 61Wh

No 100Wh battery. :-/

I’m with you on wanting the big, upholstered chair, but also liking the desk.

I kind of wish that easy chairs at desks were more of a thing. As it is, a typical desk doesn’t really fit them: you have “office chairs” and “living room chairs”, and the two don’t meet much. Couple problems:

• A big and top-heavy chair is gonna tip more easily, so you have to extend the base and casters.

• A big chair isn’t gonna roll as easily, so you can’t push back from a desk.

For years, I’ve been thinking about switching to a table or workbench with a higher top or something.

I think that the answer probably has several elements.

• Maybe the desk can just…go away. Desks are important for paperwork, were important for supporting heavy CRTs, but I rarely actually need one now.

• Monitor goes on an table/desk/floor-mounted arm. I’ve been diong that, and I’m happy with it, but still have the “cubbyhole” desk from the CRT era. Maybe just swing the thing into place every time you sit down.

• Keyboard and mouse need to be attached to the floor or chair, not the desk. This is a bit harder. There are keyboard and mouse trays, but if one reclines in a chair, they also tilt the tray, which I don’t want – the mouse surface has to remain horizontal. If you can live with a trackball or trackpad, that might be tolerable. It might be possible to have some kind of leveling attachment that fits over the arms, or have a free-standing keyboard/mouse tray that fits over the chair, pole on each side of it. Something like this. If reclining adjusts the required height of the keyboard/mouse and the mount is freestanding, then it has to be trivial to adjust the height.