I’m surprised they had to outsource that as they have been producing so much shit for decades.

At this point I have a difficult time trusting any tomatoes I don’t grow myself.

At least they are consistent I guess.

I’ve had great luck using Intel NUCs as home servers and HTPC boxes. Since those are now gone, I have found that Beelink is the most cost effective replacement when I needed to revamp the setup. My biggest complaint on them is that the cooling fans on them are not super reliable and it is not easy to find compatible replacements. I had to order them direct from China and there are a few wiring incompatible variants. I ended up with one of them being the wrong type and I had to resolder the leads to match the existing broken fan.

From what I understand there are better dongles now than that they can perform better than the Apple dongle, but the one everyone raves about that was $20 - $30 or so is now hard to come brand is going for closer to $80 (I think it is the Jcally JM20 Max). I don’t see a reason to bother spending more money chasing this crap now that I’ve had to buy both my wife and I standalone music players. What I do know is that the first company that releases a decent phone that has a headphone jack that fits my other needs is getting my Money. If Fairphone has brought it back, it would have been them since they have decent ROM alternatives (though not GrapheneOS).

I’ve used three: one was generic (it was at the time the only way to get one that could charge and have a headphone out in the same dongle), one was from Fiio (surprisingly bad sounding, maybe worse than the generic in some ways, but better build), and one was the official Google dongle (sounded clean, but was super weak. Couldn’t power even my lightest headphones that weren’t IEMs). The only one I still have is the Google dongle because the others broke, but I don’t use it because it still kinda sucks. I ended up being forced to buy a phone without a headphone jack fairly recently because Google more or less killed my Pixel 4a and there were no replacement phones with headphones jacks that I could put GrapheneOS on. I ended up buying myself a portable music player to list to music on. My phone is now only for listening to music in the car and it sucks :(

My wired earbuds cost more than ten times that and will probably last me until I retire. The vast majority of those USB-c to 3.5mm adapters are cheap crap that have a worthless DAC and/or fall apart after a short time. I have purchased my wife three such adapters since she decided it was worth it to get a phone without a headphone jack and none of them have been good.

I ended up having to buy her a separate portable music player to use. So thanks for that Google, Apple, and the rest of the greedy shithead OEMs.

It absolutely does not require too much space. And you can still buy phones with headphone jacks, just not any of the (ironically) higher end models because OEMs know they can push their first party bluetooth headphones to these customers.

I’m so sorry to hear that somewhere in between Clarence Boddicker eviscerated the admins. I hope they can regain their humanity.

That is an absolutely wild fail rate.

I just recently replaced a bunch of 1TB and 2TB drives with an 4TB SSD and 8TB HDD pretty cheaply back in December. I was trying to get those in before tariff shenanigans. Technically, those old drives are still in use, just for redundancy now. Even the scary old Seagate drives!

To be fair, I believe the increased pricing then was mostly due to sales, and thus production, tanking post COVID along with the big inflation for a couple of years. There was almost certainly greed from the most prominent memory makers tackedo n though.

I would love to see your data on this if you have it available.

The only drives I have ever had die on me were actually both WD, but it’s all anecdotal, and I’ve had tons of WD drives that were great (my favorites were the raptors and velociratpers). I’ve owned way too many HDDs over the many years, and I can say that I haven’t had issues with any, but again I do my research and only order from what I believe to be good runs of drives. In case you have never done so, take a look at the reports that Backblaze puts out on their drive reliability. I found it pretty eye opening. Before Backblaze start sharing their data, there used to be a site that crowd sourced HDD lifetimes and failure causes that I used to use when buying drives and I always entered my drive data there. I can’t recall the name of it now nor do I know if it still exists, but you could definitely spot the “bad” gens on there and WD and Seagate were both pretty even as far as I recall. I remember Hitachi being statistically worse, but it made sense as they bought IBM’s derided Deskstar business from them. Ironically, WD ended up buying Hitachi’s HDD business years later, but I think it was considered OK by then.

I know people love to dunk on Seagate drives, but it was really just the one gen that was the cause of that bad rep. Before that the most hated drives were the “deathstars” (Deskstars). I have a 1TB Seagate drive that is 10 years old and still in use daily. Just do some research on which drive to buy, no OEM is sacrosanct. I’d personally wait 6 months to a year before buying one of these drives though, so enough people have time to find out if this generation is trouble or not.

That’s not true, that’s impossible!

I am all of the sudden Luke Skywalker, a character from that old classic film.

Yeah, DBeaver used to be unusable, but it is quite decent these days. I was really unhappy with Datagrip, so I decided to give it another try and I am glad I did.

As far as this tool goes, I don’t love the idea of having my tools in the browser, so this won’t work for me, but it is a cool project nonetheless.