bluGill

One of each. There is a small chance that drives made in the same factory will fail at exactly the same time for the same reason when used in RAID 1. While this probably won’t happen (if it does it would be in the first month and you will hear about others with the same failures), why risk it. Besides you want hard drive makers to stay in business - all hard drives will crash in the future, the only question is when.

I didn’t take my advice for a RAID I built years ago. I just placed the order (one hour ago) to replace a WD red with a Seagate. God only knows when the next drive will fail. I’ve overall been fine, but I only have one disk redundancy in my zfs system until Thursday.

Unfortunately janky media files seem to be the rule.

You can maybe stretch that 4 hours to several days. However you must get enough solar in 4 hours to provide more than 1 day of use. You will probably get to 6-8 hours of production from your panels, but the production is reduced in the off hours and there are almost always a few clouds reducing your output even at peak times so until proved otherwise just count on 4 hours. (prove can be several years worth of data, or careful local climate calculation possibly with various devices to handle the sun moving)

How reliable do you need to be - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ often goes offline because there wasn’t enough sun to keep their servers up - would this be acceptable for your servers? (you should spend a lot of time on that website when it is up - it will teach you more than anyone else here)

Will you allow yourself to plug in the backup if there isn’t much sun for a few days (either yourself or some automatic system) - just the ability to go 20 hours on battery and enough solar to recharge the battery in 4 hours on a sunny day would get most people to 90% solar and will be a lot cheaper than chasing to 100% solar all the time - but that might not be good enough for you.

The general rule of thumb if you never can go down is you need to be able to run for 2 weeks without any sun, and enough solar to then recharge those batteries when there is 4 hours of full sun. Of course the weather where you live makes a difference. If you live in the desert your worst possible day will always be followed by a day where you can completely recharge the battery so you need much less batteries; while those who live in arctic locations will not get any sun for a couple months and so need a lot more storage.

There are a number of jobs that count various community contributions in your review. This is a very large topic - write a paper in a major journal, give a speech at a conference, submit high profile bug reports - you can get a large raise for it. (the worry of course is that you get a reputation and thus someone gives you a great offer so if they want to keep you they better pay enough that you won’t leave). Exactly what gets you those promotions/raises isn’t clear in part because they need flexibility for someone who honestly discovers a new way to get that reputation and thus they have to give them a promotion. People who don’t deserve the promotion see the policy in place and look for ways to cheat themselves to a promotion they don’t deserve.

Do you really need all that? Is there a local copy shop (often public libraries, drug stores…) that have some of those services? Sometimes they have better quality printers (photo printers for example). While you pay more per page, do you really do whatever it is enough to make it worth the cost of the printer vs just going elsewhere? There are many middle grounds (black and white printer. Use your phone camera as a scanner) that are clearly worse than what you want, but still good enough for most purposes and you can use the better option when you need it.

The answer to the above of course depends on your specific situation so there isn’t one right answer. It is always work thinking about though.

It wasn’t clear that windows 95 would beat OS/2, and OS/2 was clearly the better so I installed that over windows 3.1. Then in college I got introduced to BSD. I still prefer BSD, but sometimes linux has things that BSD doesn’t so I use linux in places.