Number?

Doesn’t sound that impressive when Wendelstein 7-X achieved 17 minutes of plasma in 2021.

Not all letters are voiced. All c in sch are silent. Seemingly half of all h are silent. One s in dass is silent and therefore incorrectly sound the same as das (which is a different word). Sometimes an s is sharp sometimes it’s soft.

Gender of nouns are mostly arbitrary. Yeah there are some rules for some of them depending on the ending syllables but that only increases confusion. But then there’s stuff like der/die/das Joghurt (the yogurt) where all(!) genders are allowed. And then there’s stuff like der Modul and das Modul which are completely different things and only distinguishable by gender.

Also gender is a pretty stupid word for word classes. Because it’s just that: A group of words that behave grammatically the same. They have nothing to do with genders derived from biology. The third case isn’t even neutral, a common error that most people (even Germans) aren’t aware of. It’s ne-utrum which means neighter. In the past there was a forth case utrum which means both. And if we got further into the past there were much more word classes. There are languages out there that have 16+ word classes. Nobody even thinks about genders there.

German learners should always learn the article together with its noun (das Auto) to know the gender or get burned forever by the gender mess.

for me it’s the loss of joy.

Same for me. I just don’t feel entertained anymore.
Current video games are all stupid. Current tv series and movies are stupid too. What do I do? What can I do?

Currently I can only relax and have some fun by reading fantasy stories. Everything else is literally not bearable anymore.

I hope to go on my first week long bike packing tour in early summer when it’ll be warm enough for camping. It’s going to be my first long camping tour. Just to do something completely different I never did before. I fear I’ll go crazy if I don’t do something like that.

I saw a small report about a retired woman walking (!) with a donkey (!) through the country. She did 650 km last year which is impressive for a 70 year old. Currently she’s staying at a camping site where they keep donkeys because it’s too cold and her donkey needs contact to other donkeys from time to time. Incredible stuff!

These aren’t insurmountable problems, but yeah.

They way you are describing it points to you having depression. You should visit a doctor and talk about it. Depression is actually an illness that could cost you your life (by lowering your instinct of self preservation and sometimes outright ignoring it).

Or you just switch to LibreWolf where all these settings are already set. It even comes with uBlock preinstalled.

Those apps are like Google search. They are designed to keep you occupied, to make you pay for subscriptions and click on ads.

They are not designed to find you a good partner.

100 days for that?

8-10 years is a fully fledged pv system. The small balcony panels pay themselves after about 5 years, longer if you add a battery.

In Germany those panels usually pay themselves after about 5 years depending on the price of the necessary electronics (don’t forget the electricity meter!) and if there’s also a battery.

IMO it depends on how much action is displayed in the movie. If there are a lot of dynamic scenes like car chases you’ll need a high rate while ‘simple’ dialog scenes can get away with way less.

That also means it depends on what movies you like to watch.

I have a really hard time distinguishing between a good 4K webrip (15-20 Mbps) and remux (40-80 Mbps), so I have no issue keeping the majority of my library encoded at ~18Mbps

That’s because Netflix and the other common services usually only stream at 6-15 Mbps. You’ll have to resort to Bravia Core or blu-ray discs to get anything in the 80 Mbps range.

Or Unexpected Keyboard. I like that one.

Is SSD really necessary? Everything I search up says SSDs have worse retention than HDD in cold storage. A couple TB of HDD is pretty cheap these days, and seems like a better cold storage option.

SSDs are by design less susceptible and more robust. No moving parts and able to work in much harsher conditions than hdds will ever be able to. The standard set by JEDEC requires every consumer ssd to have a 1 year data retention while powered off at 30 °C (I think). That’s the minimum it has to archieve but usually they are better than that. Do not buy the cheapest thumb drives because they contain the all the crap that wasn’t good enough to make ssds from it.
Btw you need to fire hdds up regularly too or the motor gets stuck. I think every 3-6 months was the recommendation.

Yes, so now I’m thinking a rotation cycle. About every 5 years replace the drives with new ones, copy over all data.

Don’t make it flat every 5 years. Let a software monitor the SMART values of the drives and send notifications if the values indicate an increased change of a dying disc/ssd.

Does this matter if I have a SATA->USB cable stored with it?

Those are the first that fail, followed by the usb controller chip in the tray. Keep it as simple as possible. Removable trays are probably the best way but I’m not sure how much wear they can take.

Do not buy 2.5" drives. This class will die out soon™. There were no new hdds introduced in years and ssds are often replaced by M.2 ones because of the faster connection.

Printing the photos won’t help much. After 20 or so years they are all discolored. You can’t prevent that.

I think SSDs might be the best storage medium for you. Consumer-grade ssds have a 1 year data retention when powered off. That means at least once per year you have to turn it on and copy the data around one time to refresh the cells. This way it’ll probably last several 100 years.

You can’t exactly make it fool-proof. Outside people will never know what you did to create your backup and what to do to access it. Who knows if the drives file system or file types are still readable after 20 years? Who knows if SATA and USB connectors are still around after that time?
For example it is very likely that SATA will disappear within the next 10-15 years as hdds are becoming more and more an enterprise thing and consumers are switching to M.2 ssds.

Btrfs and zfs are self-healing.

You can make a script to check for errors and autocorrection yourself but that needs at least a second hdd. On both drives are the same data and a file or database with the checksums of the data. The script then compares the actual checksums of the two copies and the db checksum. If they match -> perfect. If they don’t match the file where there are two matching checksum is the good one and replaces the faulty one or corrects the db entry, whichever is defect. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be more complicated.

Any file systems Windows can read out-of-the-box are no good file systems. What Windows read? FAT and NTFS. Former is so basic it has no mechanisms to detect errors and bitrot and the later one is a mess.
You should stick to ext4, btrfs and zfs.

If you want to make if fool-proof then add a sticker with ‘bring me to a computer shop to access my content’.

This will do nothing at all. Drives don’t die by rust. They usually die because the motor somehow can’t get the discs to spin. Very often dry lube is the reason. That can occur if you leave the drive off too long.

For local backups it depends on what you want to have:

• The cheapest option is a usb or thumb drive. But you have to regularly plug it in and copy your backup on it.
• The lazy option is to buy a NAS and configure a backup job that regularly creates a backup. Versioned, incremental, differentials and full backups are possible as is WORM to add a bit of extra security. You can configure a NAS to only turn on specified times, do a backup and then turn off again. This will increase protection against encrypting malware. WORM also helps in this case.
  Or just let it run 24/7, create backups every hour and install extra services on it like AI powered image analysis to identify people and objects and let it automatically tag your photos. Cool stuff! Check out QNAP and Synology or build a NAS yourself.
  A NAS can also be configured to present its content in a LAN by itself. Any computer will automatically connect to it if the access isn’t secured by user/password or certificate.

I recommend buying a NAS.

What about OpenMediaVault?
Yes it focuses to be more of a NAS ‘operating system’ but the file sharing stuff is easy to set up. Any client can connect via nfs, smb or web to access any files.

Arrrr! Welcome aboard, ye scallywags!