tal

Magewell Pro Capture card

I’ve been kind of shifting towards use of USB devices over internal cards.

All of the USB devices that I have still can be connected to computers. Ditto for DE-9 serial ports, though I might need a USB adapter.

But I’ve seen ISA->PCI/AGP->PCIe, obsolete a lot of old hardware that I’ve had sitting around, and that’s just on the PC. That includes my video capture hardware.

the whole thing fell over…Do I need to make the model smaller, or is there something wrong with the print settings?

I haven’t done 3D printing for some time, despite following the community, but can you add a base, perhaps, that would make it more stable and is only attached at a few points and can be snipped off? There’s probably terminology for such a thing, but I’m afraid if there is, I don’t know it.

If you don’t want to retain it at all — like, you just want the catharsis of typing it, and definitely want it to go into the void — then I suppose you could use a laptop with no writeable storage and a live-boot Linux distro that boots off a USB key. That never gets retained. Don’t put it on a network.

He could probably run an NFS server that isn’t a closed box, and have that just use the Synology box as storage for that server. That’d give whatever options Linux and/or the NFS server you want to run have for giving fair prioritization to writes, or increasing cache size (like, say he has bursty load and blows through the cache on the Synology NAS, but a Linux NFS server with more write cache available could potentially just slurp up writes quickly and then more-slowly hand them off to the NAS).

Honestly, though, I think that a preferable option, if one doesn’t want to mess with client global VM options (which wouldn’t be my first choice, but it sounds like OP is okay with it) is just to crank up the timeout options on the NFS clients, as I mention in my other comment, if he just doesn’t want timeout errors to percolate up and doesn’t mind the NAS taking a while to finish whatever it’s doing in some situations. It’s possible that he tried that, but I didn’t see it in his post.

NFSv4 has leases, and — I haven’t tested it, but it’s plausible to me from a protocol standpoint — it might be possible that it can be set up such that as long as a lease can be re-acquired, it doesn’t time out outstanding file operations, even if they’re taking a long time. The Synology NAS might be able to avoid timing out on that as long as it’s reachable, even if it’s doing a lot of writing. That’d still let you know if you had your NFS server wedge or lost connectivity to it, because your leases would go away within a bounded amount of time, but might not time out on time to complete other operations. No guarantee, just it’s something that I might go look into if I were hitting this myself.

That’s a global VM setting, which is also going to affect your other filesystems, which may or may not be a concern.

You might also consider — I’m not testing these, but would expect that it should work:

• Passing the sync mount option. That will use no write caching for that filesystem, which may impact performance more than you want.

• Increasing the NFS mount options timeo= or retrans=. These will avoid having the client time out and decide that the NFS server is taking excessively long (though an operation may still take longer to complete if the NFS server is taking a while to respond).

If you have Magic Sysrq enabled, you can do Magic Sysrq-t, which may give you some idea of what the system is doing, since you’ll get stack traces. As long as the kernel can talk to the keyboard, it should be able to get that.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_sysrq

You maybe can’t see anything on your monitor, but if the system is working enough to generate the stack traces and log them to the syslog on disk (like, your kernel filesystem and disk systems are still functional), you’ll be able to view them on reboot.

If it can’t even do that, you might be able to set up a serial console and then, using another system running screen or minicom or something like that linked up to the serial port, issue Magic Sysrq to that and view it on that machine.

Some systems have hardware watchdogs, where if a process can’t constantly ping the thing, the system will reboot. That doesn’t solve your problem, but it may mitigate it if you just want it to reboot if things wedge up. The watchdog package in Debian has some software to make use of this.

DDG mostly. I’m not unhappy with Kagi on any particular technical aspect, but I’m not happy about the fact that I learned that it was operating out of Serbia (it was often listed as being based in the San Francisco Bay Area; this appears to actually be a residence of the founder). I’d be much more comfortable about them getting in practical legal trouble if they wound up retaining data if they were operating in a US or EU or something legal jurisdiction. I posted about it to !kagi@programming.dev a while back.

If they moved operations to the US or somewhere like that, I’d have no problem using them.

The publishers can do it via uploading beta branches, but there’s also a way to tell the Steam client to fetch old versions independently of that. I remember it coming up specifically with Skyrim, because updates broke a lot of mods environments, and it takes a long time for a lot of mods to be updated (during which time people couldn’t play their modded installs).

searches

steamcommunity.com/app/…/4032473829603430509/

The download_depot Steam console command.

The linked (non-Skyrim-specific) guide talks about how to obtain manifest IDs for versions of other games.

But, yeah. It’s really not how Steam’s intended to be used, and I imagine that hypothetically, one day, it could stop working.

There are also IIRC some ways to block Steam from updating individual games, but again, not intended functionality.

searches

steamcommunity.com/…/3205995441631274440/

If you specifically want control over game updates for some game, then GOG can be a major benefit for that.

I would guess that he’s looking for a response to someone pointing out that Steam has a larger game library than GOG.

Like, he’s gonna say “yes, but a higher proportion of the excluded games aren’t good”.

I mean, it’s true that there are lots of games sold on Steam that aren’t great games, but that doesn’t hurt me much.

There are lots of products on Amazon that aren’t that great.

There are lots of websites on the Internet that aren’t that great.

As long as I can get to the stuff I want, all good.

Took down Framework’s website, which I was using.

Just keep in mind that the long run trend is pretty strongly downwards; that’s a log-scale graph.

Org-mode in emacs.

There are various mobile clients.

If you have something to synch files, it’s just syncing org files. Probably mostly interesting to people who use a lot of emacs on a PC, though.