I initially found his channel when he build a working calculator from roller coasters in RCT2.[1] It's been fun since then learning about how guests decide to enter a toilet or why guests will always get stuck in certain maze designs etc.
For reference: A RAM 1500 would pay 383 Euro in Utrecht as a person and 183 as a business (quarterly). And as a bonus you pay no BPM (aquisition tax) as a business, which is in the 12000-15000 (15k) range. The BPM hole has been fixed as of 2025 but there are enough already on the road.
I personally like the wanktank since it's more internationial.
You cannot use a "grijs" plate as a personal vehicle unless you pay "bijtelling" which starts at 500km yearly for private usage, but I guess the milage administration will be on the same order as the driving style.
I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too simple for anything except accessing some files remotely via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech babysitting project".
DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.
Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on rails.
Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time.
Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.
All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.
> Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue
You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!
Agreed. it was a pretty freak issue, albeit one that had a well known fix. I stated it here in full disclosure and did state that this was beyond what most people would consider tolerable. And I'll admit that I came very close to throwing it in the garbage and buying a new one.
Still, other than replacing old drives, something that'd happen regardless of solution, that's the only fiddling I ever had to do.
That was almost certainly the Intel Avoton clock degradation issue. It hit Cisco and lots of other networking vendors too. I lost Supermicro and ASRock boards to the same thing. Soldering on the resistor gets the CLK circuit back into spec for a while, but I had an officially-repaired board eventually fail again in the same way after a few more years since it keeps degrading.
That's a good reminder, I forgot about it being temporary. Looks like it was ~6 years before the initial failure, and it's been ~4 years since.
I should start investigating potential migration paths that would allow me to do a HDD migration as that would be ideal. Although it looks like that might be a pain due to some of their OS-level limitations.
I swapped my dead C2750 (Supermicro A1SAi-2750F) board for my cold-spare C3558 (A2SDi-4C-HLN4F) and was right back running again. I guess if you're talking about an appliance it's a little different, but this was just my home firewall/router FreeBSD+PF+Jails machine.
And actually a good reminder for me to eBay up another cold spare, because I totally forgot to.
Same here. Still rocking a DS415+ from 2015. Had to solder a 100ohm resistor to work around the Intel Atom C2000 flaw. Has had a new set of spinning rust in that time too. It's also connected to UPS so will power down if there's an extended outage. Stuck on DSM 7.1 but it does the job.
As for the ancient Linux kernel, I want the device I’m using for backups to be secure. I’m not saying I need to be using the kernel on ~main, but there are important security fixes merged in the last 5 years.
I'd be far more weary of the application level services provided by Synology than of the kernel in this context, as long as the vendor backports the various fixes and you update the kernel you should in theory be fine. But the applications get far less scrutiny.
What you really never ever should do is expose your NAS to the internet, even if vendors seem to push for this. Of course you'd still be vulnerable to a local compromised application on another machine that is on the same network as the NAS. It's all trade-offs. My own solution to all this was quite simple but highly dependent on how I use the NAS: when not in use it is off and it is only connected to my own machine running linux, not to the wifi or the house network.
It's hard to find any other products that compare to DSM. It really is something special. It's worth a small premium in hardware costs. But I share a lot of the concerns as everyone else here and will be considering other options.
I find that Linux NAS and router project require essentially no babysitting. You do have to do some initial setup work, but once it's done, there's no maintenance (other than replacing failed hardware) for years and years.
I just lost a bunch of files on mine due to their Drive software. I was setting up a folder to sync and just clicking the folder in their file explorer when setting it up isn’t enough to actually select it, so the sync went one level higher than it should have. That decided to wipe out the folders on that level instead of trying to sync them back to my computer, for whatever reason.
Also for whatever reason when you use Drive files don’t go into the regular recycle bin. They go into the Drive recycle bin…but only if you have file backups (whatever they call them, where it saves copies of files if they’re changed) enabled. I didn’t, for that folder.
And when will be the last... Recently a webshop accidentally sent me my order of two fantastic jazz CD's twice and they did not want me to return them. I tried to offload them for free on anyone I know who vaguely likes jazz. None of them had a CD player, none of them wanted two CD's for free...
One of the things I like best when visiting friends, is to have a look at their bookcases and CD racks. But I think I won't be able to much longer.
First off, stealing is not allowed. I don't know the finer details of intellectual property law, but if IKEA according to that would be stealing designs than that is not OK.
Second however, engineering products in such a way that you can bring down the price by 95% while quality/niceness/longevity only suffers (let's say) 25% is a thing to marvel at. Having 75% of a €265 design stool in your house for €25 is fantastic.
I think 99% of WhatsApp users would gladly stop using WhatsApp and switch to something like Signal, if they had verbal agreements of "everyone else" that they would also switch.
Everyone is only on WhatsApp because everyone is on WhatsApp. That is why they tolerate the Meta ickiness of it.
I bet more than 1% of Whatsapp users make use of their web interface and/or live location. Signal doesn't have either of these. Yes, you can install a Signal app on your computer, but not everyone wants to do this.
Also, that "everyone else" would have to include all business accounts, which I think would require Signal to build out an API
This sounds like a product idea to me. Make a website that shows the status of your friends that are willing to switch to signal. You send an invite to all your friends first so the list keeps up to date as soon as one of your friend made a decision. If everybody agreed you can switch as a whole. Even better if signal would implement it themself!
As far as I can tell, Signal automatically tells me which of my contacts are already on the app. If someone is willing to switch, the obvious thing to do is install it.
> I think 99% of WhatsApp users would gladly stop using WhatsApp and switch to something like Signal, if they had verbal agreements of "everyone else" that they would also switch.
Most users do not care. If you told them other users agreed to switch platforms, they’d be annoyed about having to learn a new app when they already had one that was set up and they knew how to use.
HN is part of a small bubble that doesn’t understand product management for common people. Average users do not care. They just want a product that works.
Actually Facebook and WhatsApp are the only products I know of where even completely non-tech people like my mom or the other parents at my soccer game have ever mentioned something along the lines of "yeah I did X on Facebook so now whatshisname Zekkerburg knows about it too..."
These people probably have zero awareness about cookies, tracking, online disinformation campaigns and online security in general...yet the one "tech" thing they know is that Facebook spies on you.
Everyone is aware of how Meta kills privacy in their products. The products are still useful, especially at price point "free". And they are still riding on an installed base and network effect from a time before we cared that much about the privacy infringement.
But, actually paying for the privilege of being the product...that seems like an extremely hard sell from Facebook for me.
I'm with you. My phone is my primary computer. I want it to have the most computing power, battery life, storage, and camera performance possible. I don't really care for its looks as long as it meets a certain baseline.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBlXovStrlQkVA2xJEROUNg
He is basically reverse engineering and explaining RCT's logic and design, but does it via entertaining videos.