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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2024

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  • I have a long list of really bad hotels,but some weren’t responsible for their own badness (if you are in an “almost warzone” area priorities shift), some were known to be bad (and didn’t try to look like they weren’t - and were at least priced like that…so I am okay with that).

    The worst one therefore would be one with a formerly fairly posh German chain that is now mostly run down. First they didn’t have my room ready. Then when it was ready, the carpet (ugh,I hate old 80ies carpet) felt squishy…and smelled…turns out the toilet leaked into the carpet. Which housekeeping surely would have noticed if they had cleaned the toilet…which still had the shit stains of whoever was in it before me. So I’ve got another room. It wasn’t much cleaner and had twin beds. Not what I ordered but I didn’t care at this point… extra points: There was a hole in the wall behind the closet which woul allow someone to look into the bathroom of another room. Again I didn’t care,especially as the other room seemed not to be occupied. And I was dead tired. (And yes,i always look behind closets, not for holes, but for bugs and cameras…had encounters with both)

    Later the same night a hooker knocked on the door. Which is kind of strange as the elevators required key cards and the stairs were “alarm locked”. So she likely worked with someone on the inside. Which is kind of a security problem.

    Now, at around 3 o’clock in the morning the door swings open and a very drunk lady walks in with her baggage. She screams I scream, she needs to puke before I can explain. At least she makes it to the toilet. So here I am, holding the hair of a total stranger puking her soul out. (Hey, as an original Oktoberfest trainer paramedic I am a professional at that!) It later turns out they simply gave her the shit stained room an hour after me, when she complained they promised to give her another room by the time she would come back from her stag night. I really would like to tell you know how this was a big love story, but it’s not. After she had a few more bodily functions and I was sure she would be okay I packed my stuff, screamed at the night desk staff a bit after they accused me of bilking the bill and went to the other side of the street into another (big EU chain) hotel. … whose night staffmember looked at me, asked me if I was also a “refugee from that other hotel” and laughed. Told me I was already the fourth one the same night.

    Funny enough they really had the audacity to charge my company for the whole stay, even for things they wouldn’t be able to charge if I left after a full day. (Taxes, breakfast,etc., parking) The company lawyer had their fun with them.

    I just looked them up and while the chain still operates the hotel has been closed long ago. And funny enough I even found a newspaper article of the staff complaining that “no other hotel would employ them because they knew we were above their level”. Yeah,no.


  • For me? Panasonic Thoughbook CF30. I had one. Quite an impressive thing at the time. And sturdy as fuck - I carried mine through the jungle, for more than 100.000km around the world. It had a fucking hard drive and lcd heater for colder environments and mobile broadband.

    And you literally couldn’t destroy it. Mine wasn’t outpaced or destroyed, it took Air France and Paris CDG to kill it -they stole it.





  • Easiest way is to use a tasmota based power plug. They need to calibrated once,but then are pretty reliable and can be found for 15 bucks.

    Nous A1T (or similar nous,but watch out for the T at the end, Z is zigbee) is popular in central europe. They are well built and cheap as fuck. But again,they need to be calibrated once which you need a steady user (e.g an old incandescent light bulb ) and a multimeter for… It’s easy and only needs to be done once.

    Another option are the Inter-Tech PDUs, they costs around a 100 Bucks, are fully IP, can switch channels but only measure the consumption of the whole strip. If you have a more advanced USV they often have a total power consumption measurement.

    If you want to go all in you need to look for “switched and metered” PDUs, but they are fucking expensive. The Cyberpower PDU81005 is the cheapest “good” one and is over 400 bucks here . So… Most people won’t do that,even in a professional setting.


  • I “broke into” a room I officially had been given a key to by the headmaster.

    I was the new head of our student newspaper at the time and as such had been given a key to the room. The former head didn’t go out in good graces and hated my guts. And claimed I came in before I officially was the head and stole something from him. In reality I had cleaned up the crazy mess he left -partially with the help of a teacher.

    …well, the former head was well connected, I wasn’t as I was a troublemaker and the administration loved to have a cause to kick me out.

    Funnily enough I did enough other shit to warrant that…but they didn’t catch me with that…







  • Yeah. While I rarely work on the road these days I am a critical care paramedic by trade.

    …and tbh, I did cry about some patients. …the old nana who accidentally set herself ablaze a day before Christmas. … The young lad who died a very gruesome death despite the efforts of over 50 rescuers. … The 1 year old who died because the psychotic dad had stuffed his crib with blankets. (And dad was “clear” in the head when we arrived…imagine the pain he felt) … And over the same dad when he hanged himself 6 months later.

    There are a few more,worse ones, that I don’t want to think back to








  • Just a few considerations:

    • For a 12 bay NAS I would strongly consider ZFS - which makes ECC more or less a must.

    • Mainboard wise the CWK AMD Board is worth a consideration, and so is the Asrock Live Mixer B850 if you want ECC on AMD5

    • A popular build option is using a cheap used or “Chinese” host-build controller as SATA ports are hard to get these days.

    • I would personally look at using Proxmox and then TrueNAS as an NAS OS and simply passthrough the HBA.

    • Another alternative would be using a Zimbra Board and use their expansion options - but that comes with downsides in terms of CPU power and no ECC.

    • For Plex it might be favourable to use a CPU with a built-in GPU for transcoding. Intel is slightly better here, but has other downsides, especially if you want ECC

    • Get a Geekworm PiKvm, a original PiKVM, a NanoPi oder JetKVM…or something like that. it’s worth it.

    • If you don’t feel like self-building anymore have a look at the Ugreen. They come without the “only approved HDDs” Synology bullshit, allow you to install your own OS and are fairly capable. But sadly they do not support ECC. (And they aren’t really cheaper than self building at least not in central Europe.)

    • Self building is absolutely possible and we are here to help you.