Agreed. The products I have used above, DrivePool, SnapRaid and UnRaid are all software solutions. This was important to me because I was reusing hardware and had a real eclectic mix of drives from 14TB NAS drives to 256GB laptop drives that I wanted to get more life out of.

The only hardware limitation is the parity based apps SnapRaid and UnRaid need your largest drive to be the parity one. Makes sense but in a situation like mine where I had a 14TB drive and the next closes was 8TB, that parity drive wasn’t well utilised. Not a big issue but.

As others have said, you certainly can.

If your current system is a Windows PC then a super easy way to go about it is to purchase a product called Stablebit DrivePool which will allow you to combine multiple hard disks into one drive, and then do duplication of data you find important. Share that virtual drive as a Share that your other systems can see. DriePool is a super reliable product. Only downside other than the one time cost is that its redundancy is based on file duplication, which has the benefit that you can pull your drives out and use them elsewhere as any one file is always contained on a single drive, but unlike parity based solutions it’s super space inefficient to retain duplicate copies. It’s a tradeoff between simplicity and time to recover in a failure versus maximising disk use and reducing costs. Depending what your NAS is for, maybe you don’t need that redundancy but. You can also team it up with another product called SnapRaid (which is free) which can make your redundancy parity based.

I ran DrivePool for years on Windows and it’s a great product. Windows itself isn’t overly optimised for this use case, but as a predominately Mac household having access to Windows on a headless system was handy if I had to run the odd Windows only apps, so using Windows had its perks.

While Windows and a PC will cost more to operate, you’ll potentially be out well ahead if you don’t have to buy additional hardware. It’s likely worth running what you have into the ground rather than buying new hardware. There’s guides on some things you can do to optimise Windows too.

I’ve since moved to using UnRaid which is a paid product (one time purchase) designed specifically for NAS on your own PC. Great solution but I’d say that the barrier of entry is much higher than a Windows box. Still very versatile product. Moved to that as over time I’ve used a bit more Linux in my life, and I also had reduced need for Windows as the NAS OS.

Haven’t tried TrueNas but that’d be an alternative to UnRaid.

Personally, tap to scroll to top is a must have feature for me in an iOS (or Android) client. Don’t see an issue with it being an option to disable, but wouldn’t want to see the feature go entirely and I think it should be on by default for consistency with the OS.

I usually disable the quick jump buttons as I don’t really like the ever presence overlay, and it’s not something that really feels like iOS to me. I actually find those buttons more jntrusive. Given that the jump to tops what I use.

With the size of phones I don’t find myself ever accidentally clicking the region and don’t recall ever accidentally triggering a scroll when I intended to bring up notification or control center.

So yeah, I think having an option isn’t a bad idea, but would want the feature to stay.

I’ve moved to Avalon from Memmy, which itself is a great app and the one that spoke to me most when I made the mid year decision to largely cut my Reddit usage. It’s a great app particularly for free.

That said, we probably can’t talk about Memmy in this context without noting the almost two month absence of any updates for the app, which is only early in its life, due to the developers citing burnout. There’s certainly got to be some questions about sustainability for those guys when they have to also carry jobs etc and Memmy for all intents is a hobby for them.

Now maybe the apps in a place where you feel going a few months without updates doesn’t matter, that’s fine. At the same time it’s possible that a revenue stream of some sort would allow the devs to prioritise work on the app over other things. I don’t imagine Lemmy yet has the user base to sustain a developer full time on the single app alone, but having some income from the app may none the less assist greatly. People have even asked the Memmy team to consider adding paid tiers in recognition of some of the issues.

None of that is to say that I didn’t do a double take when I saw the price of Avalon, and did give it a second thought. It’s a decent price commitment, I agree. Apps that are paid for could also be abandoned too which is a risk. At the same time I have noticed a number of the Lemmy apps have had growing pains, burnout issues for devs etc, so while there are good free options out there in the longer term in many cases that may not be sustainable, and there is a place for paid apps particularly where that can contribute to the apps ongoing development.

Monthly $2.99, Annual $22.99 and Lifetime 49.99. This is in $AUD.

Unsure what that comes to exactly in USD but I assume it’s around $1.99 and $14.99 or there abouts. Other posts note lifetime is $30USD.

Prices are there in the TestFlight version. Assume the same error preventing purchases is preventing those being displayed as they probably pull the price dynamically from the App Store.

It’s definitely worth thinking about your use case and whether a second hand mini-pc of some sort is a better option. Along with the Pi itself many people are probably going to need a new case and quite possibly a power adapter too given the new power profile. An older PC where that’s taken care off, and where you probably have a 120GB SSD included, could be the better option for some people.

Yeah, removing EE encryption by providers won’t be effective at all. Back in uni throwing together a bit of code to encrypt files and corresponding code to decrypt it was one of the very first lessons that gets taught. It’s trivially done if not by an existing product, then doing it yourself. Anyone wanting to circumvent this will just encrypt data before they send it over these channels and in the end no one is particularly safer for the laws.

I’m all for laws that help protect children, but I don’t see preventing EE encryption as an effective solution at all to the issue being addressed.

Seems reasonable enough to me as an option staff can take up, but don’t need to if they have other accomodation or would rather live somewhere not operated by their employer.

Based on the article it seems the cost is reasonable for the area. Having a cost on the accomodation rather than it being free probably helps stop an influx of people with suitable accommodation already cancelling lease or subletting, to come stay at that building and limiting access to those that need it more. That and no doubt people who couldn’t take it up may feel shafted that their colleagues are getting a $700 a week perk if Google made it free.

No doubt one can argue the often polarising merits of office work versus remote, but if they’re going to have people come to the office having accomodation available, paid or not, no doubt would be helpful and something many other employers going through a similar transition may not be able to offer.

I’m struggling to find where I heard about this, but if you post to Twitter (or I guess it’s X now) and tag @Sync, they should get back in touch with you and offer you a bonus 10GB for the positive outreach.

Since I don’t know about where I heard about the offer originally, the next best thing might be my post which Sync responded to as evidence of the bonus. Along with one or two other bonuses which one may have been a referral, I’m at 17GB on the free account which is pretty decent, and certainly not as burdensome as the referral process one has to go through with Dropbox to grow the free tier there.

They’re a great service from the time I’ve spent with it and worth a go.

Primarily Memmy for iOS.

Voyager is nice too though on iOS. Connect on Android is nice also.