Yeah, the tinkering is part of the fun. Right now I'm still perfecting my OMV NAS/Homelab but after that I might look into custom routers. I'm still hoping to get fibre in the foreseeable future, but right now it's not looking too good in my area...

That's the problem with my router... I can't. I've seen it done with OpenWRT but I chose the wrong model for that...

I wanted to do that as well, but I can't redirect outgoing traffic on my router, just block it entirely. Sadly it was the only device of that series not supporting OpenWRT (sigh)... Next one will either have to support that or be a DIY project... Have been starting to self host my stuff already and I'm not planning to stop there!

Doesn't help if the device has a baked in DNS address and just ignores your settings tho. Amazon and Google devices seem prone to that. After blocking everything on the common DNS ports except the PiHole, some of my devices have been acting kinda sluggish.

I don't think it goes that deep, but in the iron druid series if enough people believe in it, it exists (yes even a marvel version of thor). Quite entertaining read, but I might be biased by the telepathically talking irish wolfhound (which loves to throw in movie references).

Mine was a first generation one and as it was dying the first articles popped up about how bad they and the following generation were failing. Didn't bother with warranty... wasn't fond of gambling with the failure rates. Irony was that I named the drive Deathstar when I got it (I have the long standing tradition naming my drives after space ships).

Gonna remember that for the next drive failure. Isn't condensation a problem with that trick?

You might want to look at snapraid. I've recently overhauled my own NAS and love it. It is snapshot based (so not perfect safety) but it is highly configurable and provides parity and scrubbing for corruption even with a JBOD array.

The only one that didn't die because of my own fault (two externals and a laptop one sigh), was one of the infamous IBM/Hitachi Deathstars.

That's not on Nvidia but the fault of Google tho (they use stock Android TV) you can just use another launcher and set it to auto start ( not like the Fire Stick where they barred that option with updates sigh).

I use Syncthing to automatically keep the database up to date and usable on all of my devices. Autotype on PC is such a nice feature I wouldn't want to miss (and it increases security on top of that).

Yeah, I got a racing bike from a local brand that was mainly known for cheap supermarket bikes. However, they did sell small series of high quality bikes directly out of the factory as well. My racing bike is one of those. It was a lucky, heavily discounted grab at their outlet shop sitting there for ages due to the horrendous colour combination of Telekom magenta and sperm white (great theft deterrent 😋).

In the almost 30 years I own this bike now, every bike shop I went to scoffed at the brand and refused to work on it. The only exception was a bike shop at my university town specialising in buying scrap bikes and building new Frankenbikes out of them for the students.

He took one look at my bike when I brought it in, smiled, immediately identified it as a factory bike. He complimented the quality and ease of maintenance, congratulated my purchase (on a 15 year old bike lol) and said he's looking forward to working on it. Save to say he had a loyal customer for the whole time I was living there.

That might be a hot take.

You can still get them but prices are pretty outrageous compared to before. As a result of that a lot of the smaller companies have died and a lot of the small independent neighbourhood vaping shops have closed.

I have just checked my bulk order from before the tax... I paid 30€ for 1l 50:50 base. Today you pay 35€ for 100ml of the same (same shop of course).

Edit: the irony of the whole thing is that it's now more economic to use high nicotine ready made liquids and to not use sub ohm coils to reduce liquid throughput... Great work lawmakers!

Yeah, sadly those have become the norm since they started the ridiculous vaping tax here in Germany. It started at 16ct/ml for everything that goes into a liquid independent of nicotine content (base, flavour concentrate, everything...) and its supposed to go up to 32ct/ml in 2026. This has greatly harmed the mod scene while strengthening the pod market. This was done for 'health reasons' making vaping less appealing for the youth, but everyone suspects the tobacco lobby influenced how the tax was set up, to profit their disposable businesses...

Probably a European pod they're often around 2ml. Maximum nicotine concentration here is 20mg/ml independent of buying a nicotine shot for mixing liquid yourself, or buying a ready to use flavoured one. Yuul responded to this limit by increasing it's wick size and effectively increasing nicotine levels per hit above the American levels (of course using up pods much faster is a welcome side effect).

Edit: just look at the top sellers here for example https://www.dampfalarm.de/E-Zigaretten/Pod-Systeme/?p=1

That's the same company that has this on their 'about us' page:

"Haier company history: since its creation in 1984, the company has been run by the same CEO, Zhang Ruimin, who has always had a clear objective: to build high-quality, reliable products. Within the first year of his appointment, in response to complaints about faulty fridges, his radical action of smashing the fridges with a hammer in front of employees has been recognised as an important cornerstone of the brand."

I call hypocrisy!

And of course they won't compete over which service provides the better app\features\catalogue but will try the same exclusivity game the video streaming platforms started... No thanks!

I couldn't find it again, sorry. But it wasn't any real brand that did this (yet), but cheap noname TV clones (similar to those Trojan horse android boxes). Not something you'd trust anyway, but didn't expect them trying to bridge the gap to get telemetry.

I have been searching for the source, but can't find it anymore between all the WiFi troubleshooting sites. It wasn't really brand stuff they mentioned but cheapo TV clones they checked for security risks, similar to those Trojan horse Android TV boxes.

But wouldn't be the first time that the industry takes inspiration from something like that and either implements it silently to get the juicy telemetry (yes, using that to enable smart features would be dumb) or sells it as a 'feature'.

The question is how long that will help. Just recently read about the first TVs popping up that try to connect to any available open WiFi to phone home, regardless of your settings. Soon our TVs will need tinfoil hats 😱