IMHO Arch is actually a great choice. They do have a minimum update frequency you need to maintain (I don’t recall exactly, I think it is somewhere between 1 and 3 months) but if you do, and read the news before updates (and you are usually fine if you don’t, usually the update will just refuse to run until you intervene) things are pretty seamless. I had many arch machines running for >5 years with no issues and no reason to expect that it would change. This is many major version updates for other distros which are often not as seamless.

That being said I am on NixOS now which takes this to the next level, I am running nixos-unstable but thanks to the way NixOS is structured I don’t need to worry about any legacy cruft accumulating from the many years of updates.

And after all of that I don’t think it really matters. I think any major distro you pick, weather stable, release-based or LTS will be fine. They all have some sort of update path these days. (unlike in the past where some distros just recommended a re-install for major updates).

That’s true. And I’m not saying B2 is bad, it is just something that you should be aware of.

Their automatic replication isn’t quite as seamless as GCS or S3 though. For example deletes aren’t replicated so you will need a cleanup strategy. Plus once you 2x or 3x the price B2 isn’t as competitive on price. My point is that it is very easy to compare apples to oranges looking at cloud storage providers and it is important to be aware.

For me B2 is a great fit and I am happy with it, but I don’t wan to mislead peope.

I think it depends on your needs. IIUC their storage is “single location”. Like a very significant natural disaster could take it offline or maybe even lose it. Something like S3 or Google Cloud Storage (depending on which durability you select) is multi-location (as in significantly distinct geographical regions). So still very likely that you will never lose any data, but in the extreme cases potentially you could.

If I was storing my only copy of something it would matter a lot more (although even then you are best to store with multiple providers for social reasons, not just technical) but for a backup it is fine.

I’ve been using Restic to Backblaze B2.

I don’t really trust B2 that much (I think it is mostly a single-DC kind of storage) but it is reasonably priced and easy to use. Plus as long as their failures aren’t correlated with mine it should be fine.

The circuit power doesn’t matter for the example. I was just picking easy numbers. You can have the same problem as long as the rating of the extension cord is less than the circuit breaker. (And as you pointed that out this is a very common case due to the frequently low rating of extension cords.)

Yeah, there are two components here

1. Adding extra length.
2. Adding more outlets.

2 is the main problem, but you need a little of 1 to have it fail in an unsafe way (ie. not just tripping the circuit breaker).

If you just add a lot of extra outlets and plug lots of stuff in then you will simply trip the circuit breaker. (Assuming that everything is properly set up according to code.) In order to create a problem you need some extra wiring that is rated for less load than the wall wiring. (Now in practice every splitter has some amount of wiring, so these can be the same device, but most power bars are rated to be “fully used” or have a fuse internally). So the problem looks something like this:

1. Have a 20A wall circuit.
2. Plug a 10A extension cord into it.
3. Plug a power bar or other splitter into the extension cord.
4. Put enough devices into the splitter to generate 15A of current.

Now you are overloading the extension cord and risking fire.

Yes, you will have double heat output due to twice the resistance which causes twice the voltage drop and more or less the same current. But this heat output is spread across twice as much wire, so unless the extension cables are coiled together on the ground each will heat up the same amount as a single one would.

To clarify a bit, the benefit of the UK system isn’t the end device having a fuse, but the cable itself having a fuse.

In the US the setup would be something like

1. Wall has 20A wiring.
2. Electrical panel has 20A fuse to avoid the wire in the wall from overheating.
3. Extension cord is designed for 10A
4. You plug in 2 10A devices to the extension cord.
5. The wall wiring is fine, it can take 20A.
6. The circuit breaker doesn’t trip as it is also 20A.
7. The extension cord overheats and starts a fire.

In the UK the 10A extension cord will have its own 10A fuse in the plug. So when you turn on the two 10A devices the fuse in the extension cord will blow and prevent the extension cord from overheating.

But unless coiled up on the ground the longer cable also has more area to dissipate heat, so the longer cable doesn’t change anything here. The heat output will be consistent for any section of the cable no matter how much more cable there is on easier side of it.

The only think that the different resistance would affect is the voltage drop to the end device. But voltage drop varies wildly so you are unlikely to have a meaningful difference caused by a few extension cords (unless maybe you are already a bad case like an apartment building to start).

The others have made great points about how any amount adds up. Especially with compounding.

But the most important reason me just be making it a habit. If you are saving $50/month you have a place to put your savings and an investment strategy for that money. The next time you get a pay raise or get rid of some recurring spend it will be natural to start saving $60/month, then $100 and more and more. It is much easier to improve an existing habit than starting a new one. So as soon as you have the chance start that got habit.

I wouldn’t call a nail hard to use because I don’t have a hammer. Yes, you need the right hardware, but there is no difference in the difficulty. But I understand what you are trying to say, just wanted to clarify that it wasn’t hard, just not widespread yet.

which is hard to decode using hardware acceleration

This is a little misleading. There is nothing fundamental about AV1 that makes it hard to decode, support is just not widespread yet (mostly because it is a relatively new codec).

Just to be clear it is probably a good thing that YouTube re-encodes all videos. Videos are a highly complex format and decoders are prone to security vulnerabilities. By transcoding everything (in a controlled sandbox) YouTube takes most of this risk on and makes it highly unlikely that the resulting video that they serve to the general public is able to exploit any bugs in decoders.

Plus YouTube serves videos in a variety of formats and resolutions (and now different bitrates within a resolution). So even if they did try to preserve the original encoding where possible you wouldn’t get it most of the time because there is a better match for your device.

From my experience it doesn’t matter if there is an “Enhanced Bitrate” option or not. My assumption is that around the time that they added this option they dropped the regular 1080p bitrate for all videos. However they likely didn’t eagerly re-encode old videos. So old videos still look OK for “1080p” but newer videos look trash whether or not the “1080p Enhanced Bitrate” option is available.

It may be worth right-clicking the video and choosing “Stats for Nerds” this will show you the video codec being used. For me 1080p is typically VP9 while 4k is usually AV1. Since AV1 is a newer codec it is quite likely that you don’t have hardware decoding support.

I’m pretty sure that YouTube has been compressing videos harder in general. This loosely correlates with their release of the “1080p Enhanced Bitrate” option. But even 4k videos seem to have gotten worse to my eyes.

Watching a higher resolution is definitely a valid strategy. Optimal video compression is very complicated and while compressing at the native resolution is more efficient you can only go so far with less bits. Since the higher resolution versions have higher bitrates they just fundamentally have more data available and will give an overall better picture. If you are worried about possible fuzziness you can try using 4k rather than 1440p as it is a clean doubling of 1080p so you won’t lose any crisp edges.

Your Firefox install contains a file called omni.ja. For example on many Linux machines it will be at /usr/lib/firefox/browser/omni.ja. This file is a ZIP archive and contains your places.xhtml as well as other browser files. The exact paths are not always obvious as there is some remapping taking place (see the .manifest files in the archive) but I think the vast majority of chrome:// paths come from this archive.

Warning

Never extract archives from untrusted sources without prior inspection. It is possible that files are created outside of path, e.g. members that have absolute filenames starting with “/” or filenames with two dots “…”.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/tarfile.html#tarfile.TarFile.extractall

I would be careful if using this as a general purpose tool.

A better alternative would likely be to use the regular command-line tools which have been hardened to this type of thing (and are likely much faster) and then just inspect the result. Always create a wrapper directory, then if the result is only one directory inside of that move it out, otherwise just keep the wrapper. I would recommend that the other updates their tool to do this rather than the current approach.

We did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it would be easy.

I switched to Immich recently and am very happy.

1. Immich’s face detection is much better, very rarely fails. Especially for non-white faces. But even for white faces PhotoPrisim regularly needed me reviewing the unmatched faces. I also needed to really turn up the “what is a face” threshold because otherwise it would miss a ton of clear faces. (Then it only missed some, but also has tons of false positives). On the other hand Immich just works.
2. Immich’s UI is much nicer overall. Lots of small affordances. For example the menu item to “view in timeline” is worth switching alone. Also good riddance to PhotoPrism’s persistent and buggy selection. Someone must have worked really hard on implementing this but it was really just a bad idea.
3. Immich has an app with uploading, and it allows you to view local and uploaded photos in one interface which is a huge UX win. I couldn’t find a good Android app for uploading to photoprism. You could set up import delays and stuff but you would still regularly get partially uploaded files imported and have to clean it up manually.
4. Immich’s search by content is much better. For example searching for “cat with red and yellow ball” was useless on PhotoPrism, but I found tons of the results I was looking for on Immich.

The bad:

1. There is currently a terrible jank in the Immich app which makes videos unusable and everything painful. Apparently this is due to some Album sync process running in the main thread. They are working on it. I can’t fathom how a few hundred albums causes this much lag but 🤷 There is also even worse lag on the location view page, but at least that is just one page.
2. The Immich app has a lot less features than the website. But the website works very well on mobile so even just using the website (and the app for uploading) is better than PhotoPrism here. The fundamentals are good but it just needs more work.
3. I liked PhotoPrism’s advanced filters. They were very limited but at least they were there.
4. Not being able to sort search results by date is a huge usability issue. I often know roughly when the photo I want to find was taken and being able to order by date would be hugely helpful.
5. You have to eagerly transcode all videos. There is no way to clean up old transcodes and re-transcode on the fly. To be fair the PhotoPrism story also wasn’t great because you had to wait for the full video to be transcoded before starting, leading to a huge delay for videos more than a few seconds, but at least I could save a few hundred gigs of disk space.

Honestly a lot of stuff in PhotoPrism feels like one developer has a weird workflow and they optimized it for that. Most of them are counter to what I actually want to do (like automatic title and description generation, or the review stuff, or auto quality rating). Immich is very clearly inspired by Google Photos and takes a lot of things directly from it, but that matches my use case way better. (I was pretty happy with Google Photos until they started refusing to give access to the originals.)