I am referring to voltage drop consistency over distance.

Say you are running two 15m cable runs for rear surround speakers. If you run very cheap cable, the amount of voltage, and thus volume, will not be the same across the two channels. In short runs, not enough to notice, but on longer runs you can.

But there is no need for super expensive cable. You just need something durable and consistent enough.

Spite is the only reason I would.

Or grind a slot in the screw and you can use a flat head screwdriver.

Be sure to upload the process and tag BMW with a FU.

The only reason for reasonable quality speaker cables, is so that you get consistant volume between left and right channels if the volume is the same. That and so they don’t break when you pull on them.

In my case, I setup a ZFS pool of my disks in my old desktop PC running Proxmox. Then I allocated some storage to an LXC container running Debian and Samba for file sharing.

In your case, since the QNAP already runs Samba, it would be best to run it directly on the NAS.

But if you want to do it for the learning experience, you can setup an NFS share on the QNAP and link it to the Proxmox. The Proxmox can then use the NAS for storage and you can have VMs or LXC contsiners use for virtual disks.

I am quite satisfied with the unifi ecosystem so far as networking and CCTV systems go. They are cloud enabled without being cloud dependent. Since the early 2025 networking update, their routers are pretty good now. The UDM SE is a pretty compelling router/POEswitch/NVR in the home context.

Their NAS ecosystem is still very new and I would not it a viable option yet. They are also leaning towards the vendor lock-in direction with drives. Its the same reason I would stay away from Synology and QNAP.

Personally, I run a old desktop as a NAS/homelab running Proxmox(FOSS based hypervisor). I run ZFS on it and its “fine”. It performs fine even with a mixed bunch of disks, provided you have them in pairs or groups of 3 that perform close to identically. I just run a Debian container on the Proxmox as my fileserver and a few VMs for homelabbing.

One player that works well in a home environment is UnRAID. It a Linux distor that runs on commodity hardware and handles redundancy with “just a bunch of disks” better than most. The UI is friendly to non technical users. The catch is that UI is commercial software. Many consider it a fair exchange for the convenience it brings.

Its was also Epsteins priority for his clients.

I think 50 inch is about the upper end for what can fit on a desk, but a 42 inch is the upper limit for most. I used to have a 42inch 4k monitor ($400), but it broke and got discontinued. It was basically a 42inch IPS TV display.

I still miss that display.

Gaming would be done at 4k. It’s 8k for productivity.

Its a step in the right direction.

Not quite the aspect ratio I am looking for and the price is too eye watering.

What I want is an 8k 16:9 or 16:10 display for around double the price of a 4k display at the same price as a high end 4k TV (OLED or mini led)

Not on desktop use. Which is a market segment that is under served.

Would love to replace my 4x 1440p monitor setup with a 50 inch 8k TV setup.

These people should get grant funding for reducing e-waste and Apple should pay for it.

I have had this with some laptops if the charger is faulty. The laptop goes into a limp mode, where the CPU locks to its lowest clock speed.

Since the display is using USB-C it may be triggering the slowness. Some USB-C monitors also deliver power to the connected device.

Is the laptop slow, even when running off battery, or only when running off battery?

Keeping an eye on the CPU frequency with something like Btop can maybe help troubleshoot the issue.

Would love to see work on getting broader application support like for microsoft office.

If you get stuck with Winboat, as its still a very new project, you might want to have a look at winapps, which is very similar

https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps

Basic documentation does not equal open source.

Toaster ovens from 40 years ago did better. They came with a technical diagram.

In addition to other advice, with only hardware, have 1 cold spare drive for every 2 years of remaining life of the hardware. It gets difficult to find similar spec drives the older they get. So if you want to use the drives in the NAS for another 4 years, get 2 spares. After that you start getting into the territory of replacing the drives anyway.

My rule for older hardware, before trusting the ZFS fault reporting, I would follow the following steps.

(Note these are homelabber steps and not what I would do in the enterprise, where risk and time is a lot more expensive than replacing hardware)

0. Check the Smart data of the drive. If it reports the drive as faulty, replace it.

1. Zpool clear the error and see if it comes back. Sometimes drive errors are not cause by the drive itself

2. Reseat the drive and the cables between the motherboard and the drive. Clear errors after this step. Especially with older hardware and it having travelled from its previous owner to you, something might not be seated properly.

3. Move the drive to another drive bay, or swap it with another drive. If the errors move with the drive, the drive is faulty. If the errors move to the bay, you probably have a good drive, but a faulty drive bay/cable.

Only if corporations lose all rights as individuals in Law.

This is the way.