25kV railway electrification is normally very separate from local electric grids.

Grid ‘reliability’ issues are normally load shedding or damage at the distribution level; the 10-22kV local networks. DC networks like third rail and 1500V are often supplied from local substations.

Long distance 25kV lines are almost always fed directly from big substations on the grid backbone - here in NZ, they’re all from the 220kV substations at roughly 140km spacing; I believe in the UK it’s almost all from 400kV subs. Those are extremely reliable and well monitored because no-one wants to be doing a grid black start, and loss of a grid backbone substation gives you a pretty good chance of the whole grid falling over. 25kV railway electrification is rock solid.

NZ’s grid is roughly 93% efficient; half of that is in the transmission (long-distance) and the other half in distribution. We have one of the worst grid layouts for transmission efficiency because most of the generation is in the deep south while the load is in the north, with an underwater section in between.

Batteries and charging is IIRC around 90% efficient, round trip. Call it 75% from generator terminals to motor terminals.

If you’re not generating the hydrogen right at the generator, you’ll also be incurring grid losses to get the power to the hydrogen plant.

If you are generating hydrogen at the generators, you’ll then need to transport the hydrogen even further. I’m struggling to find exact figures for losses in natural gas networks, but my understanding is that leakage is several percent. Any large-scale hydrogen system could end up being similar, plus you now need a shipping industry to move the hydrogen to the point of consumption.

New Zealand is famously a very old country.

Hydrogen has a major efficiency problem. Unless the electricity to create the hydrogen is practically free (i.e. grid price is zero, you’re turning off generators) it’s not worth it. You’re at like 30% round trip efficiency whereas batteries and overhead lines are well above 90%.

Using hydrogen also prevents regenerative braking, which is one of the big advantages of battery or overhead electric.

Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

Waze is of course owned by Google…

I’ve certainly never heard of a chicken ranch, but plenty of chicken farms.

With software that misuses /tmp, I’m more worried about burning out my SSD endurance than running out of RAM.

The screen turning off when it automatically locks is an added bonus; the priority is to be able to command the system to simultaneously lock and turn off the screen. You’re correct that the setting at zero seconds safely achieves that.

I’ve had other, more stupid uses for running commands, though I don’t think any are actively in use.

Taking actions on network reconfiguration, charge completion, and SMART failure are all things that spring to mind. It’s nice to be able to set those kinds of things in a GUI rather than putting them in /etc/something.d

What I want is not (just) that the screen turns off when the lock timer times out, but that I can push ‘lock’ or a key combination and have the system lock and the screen turn off immediately.

The new ‘when locked, turn off screen’ setting should help with this, but setting it too low will presumably make it hard to unlock.

For running backups, ‘after a period of inactivity’ could help.

It still seems like the removal of a useful feature.

I use it for turning off the screen when the screen is locked, allowing background tasks to continue.

It’s also useful to run things like backups when the system is more likely to be idle.

HDDs can fail at any time, with or without warning.

It’s not the bridge rectifier, but it’s an artifact of the operation of the switchmode power supply. Similar effects are often described as 'coil whine '.

The switching operation varies in duty cycle and frequency depending on load, and isn’t absolutely stable so oscillates a little bit. This switching supply is often in the audio range; typically between about 5kHz and 200kHz depending on design and load.

Changing current and magnetic field causes the physical components (particularly transformers/inductors) to change size and shape, and this vibration causes audible noise. At some conditions, it will resonate at an audible frequency and be loud. At other conditions, it might not resonate and/or the frequency is outside the audible range, so it’s silent.

Mains transformers do the same, causing the characteristic 50/60Hz hum. You’ll also hear the same out of cellphone chargers.

Nothing to worry about.

Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

Biggest question to me is why you need an IP in the first place?

You rapidly end up with a freeloader issue.

Does the exterior of the case get physically very hot? If it does, then your problem is that the case can’t shed enough heat. If the case is mostly cooler, or only has a hot spot in the middle, then it’s an issue with getting heat from the die to the case.

I would be looking at something like a 100x100x3 copper shim, to help with not just moving heat straight from the die to the adjacent section of case, but also spreading the heat sideways. Heat pipes would be nice but 3mm is too thin for a DIY solution.

Incidentally, there’s a reasonably wide range of connectors that don’t fit traditional identities. Some, like most USB connectors, have a situation where there’s a male prong in the middle of a ‘female’ connector.

Others, like Anderson Powerpole, are fully self-mating.

I think you may just be able to run mdadm --discover and follow your nose. I haven’t gone digging enough to find good documentation.

Many of these are defaults dating back to the Unix days, particularly tar (tape archive) and gzip.

Krita (KRA), GIMP (XCF), and Photoshop (PSD) save files in a lossless internal format that preserves layers etc. Every time you open and save a jpg, it gets worse, and that’s not acceptable for professional use. If all you want is to crop/draw on images, something like KolourPaint is probably a better choice.

MP4 is/was patent encumbered depending on jurisdiction.

The point being made is that that means you must trust them with your private key, and you can’t have say two private keys - one for low security content they store, and one for more sensitive stuff where the key stays on hardware under your control.