I remember a story where people asked about blobs included in Ventoy and there were no comments from the devs, leading to suspicion.

At the time it wasn't clear to me if there was any substance to the story or if it was the usual Internet exaggeration, so I resolved to ignore it for the time being and saved a reminder to look into it after a while.

Now my reminder fired off and I looked around, but couldn't find how the story ended... do you know?

Over the years I have accumulated a sizable music library (mostly flacs, adding up to a bit less than 1TB) that I now want to reorganize (ie. gradually process with Musicbrainz Picard).

Since the music lives in my NAS, flacs are relatively big and my network speed is 1GB, I insalled on my computer a hdd I had laying around and replicated the whole library there; the idea being to work on local files and the sync them to the NAS.

I setup Syncthing for replication and... everything works, in theory.

In practice, Syncthing loves to rescan the whole library (given how long it takes, it must be reading all the data and computing checksums rather than just scanning the filesystem metadata - why on earth?) and that means my under-powered NAS (Celeron N3150) does nothing but rescanning the same files over and over.

Syncthing by default rescans directories every hour (again, why on earth?), but it still seem to rescan a whole lot even after I have set rescanIntervalS to 90 days (maybe it rescans once regardless when restarted?).

Anyway, I am looking into alternatives.
Are there any you would recommend? (FOSS please)

Notes:

• I know I could just schedule a periodic rsync from my PC to the NAS, but I would prefer a bidirectional solution if possible (rsync is gonna be the last resort)
• I read about unison, but I also read that it's not great with big jobs and that it too scans a lot
• The disks on my NAS go to sleep after 10 minutes idle time and if possible I would prefer not waking them up all the time (which would most probably happen if I scheduled a periodic rsync job - the NAS has RAM to spare, but there's no guarantee it'll keep in cache all the data rsync needs)

Lately I noticed that when I want to ssh to a server using a password I need to specify -o PubkeyAuthentication=no or I won't be asked for a password and the authentication will fail (well, for all I know, setting some other option may work too).

I use password authentication only once on freshly installed servers/vms, so it's not a huge deal, but... it still bothers me (mainly because I don't remember which option to set).

Do you guys have any idea what it may be?

Host 127.*.*.* 192.168.*.* 10.*.*.* 172.16.*.* 172.17.*.* 172.18.*.* 172.19.*.* 172.2?.*.* 172.30.*.* 172.31.*.*
  LogLevel quiet
  Stricthostkeychecking no
  Userknownhostsfile /dev/null

Host *
  ForwardAgent no
  AddKeysToAgent no
  Compression yes
  ServerAliveInterval 10
  ServerAliveCountMax 3
  HashKnownHosts no
  UserKnownHostsFile ~/.ssh/known_hosts
  ControlMaster no
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%n:%p
  ControlPersist no

AuthorizedPrincipalsFile none
Ciphers chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com,aes256-gcm@openssh.com,aes128-gcm@openssh.com,aes256-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes128-ctr
GatewayPorts no
KbdInteractiveAuthentication yes
KexAlgorithms sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com,curve25519-sha256,curve25519-sha256@libssh.org,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256
LogLevel INFO
Macs hmac-sha2-512-etm@openssh.com,hmac-sha2-256-etm@openssh.com,umac-128-etm@openssh.com
PasswordAuthentication yes
PermitRootLogin yes
PrintMotd no
StrictModes yes
UseDns no
UsePAM yes
X11Forwarding no
Banner none
AddressFamily any
Port 22
Subsystem sftp /nix/store/78mv13w9mgh0s0rd7rnr6ff4d7a39bpd-openssh-9.7p1/libexec/sftp-server 
AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys /etc/ssh/authorized_keys.d/%u
HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key

Solution:
hd-idle is the way to go (if you read their README, they explain that most drives don't support idle timers)

I've been looking into spinning down the drives of my NAS, as I use it infrequently and that brings power drain down from ~30W to ~17W.

Problem is, hdparm -S doesn't seem to do anything for these particular drives: if I set it and wait for the appropriate amount of time (eg. 5 seconds if set to 1) the drives are still reported as "active/idle" and power drain doesn't go down.

Both hdparm -y and hdparm -Y work fine, but I don't seem to be able to find settings for them in tlp (probably because they are commands rather than settings?).

Besides the caveats about disks living longer if they are kept spinning, are there reasons why I shouldn't setup a cron job (well, a systemd timer) that runs hdparm -Y every 10 minutes? (for example, could hdparm -y cause errors if run while the drive is being backed up?)

PS: According to hdparm's manpage, -y puts the drive standby mode while -Y puts it into sleep mode. Considering that in my case power drain seems the same either way, should I prefer one or the other?

I want to have my screen (the "dev" workspace) split in three "zones":

• on the left side, a tabbed group with all the text editors I start (ie. if I start a new one, it goes there in a new tab)
• on the top-right, a tabbed group of whatever many terminal I feel like launching
• on the bottom-right, my browsers (and possibly other stuff), in a group without tabs
• a key combination to cycle between: all three "zones" visible, text editors on the left - terminal on the right, text editors on the left - browser on the right, fullscreen browser

So far I've been looking at hyprland (for no particular reason except the hype) and I don't think I can do the above with it (I am by no means an expert, so... maybe it can actually be done?).

Do you know of any WM where it would be possible? (possibly, one with automatic splitting a-la bspwm, that I would use for the other workspaces)

I've been looking around for a scripting language that:

• has a cli interpreter
• is a "general purpose" language (yes, awk is touring complete but no way I'm using that except for manipulating text)
• allows to write in a functional style (ie. it has functions like map, fold, etc and allows to pass functions around as arguments)
• has a small disk footprint
• has decent documentation (doesn't need to be great: I can figure out most things, but I don't want to have to look at the interpter source code to do so)
• has a simple/straightforward setup (ideally, it should be a single executable that I can just copy to a remote system, use to run a script and then delete)

Do you know of something that would fit the bill?

Here's a use case (the one I run into today, but this is a recurring thing for me).

For my homelab I need (well, want) to generate a luhn mod n check digit (it's for my provisioning scripts to generate synchting device ids from their certificates).

I couldn't find ready-made utilities for this and I might actually need might a variation of the "official" algorithm (IIUC syncthing had a bug in their initial implementation and decided to run with it).

I don't have python (or even bash) available in all my systems, and so my goto language for script is usually sh (yes, posix sh), which in all honestly is quite frustrating for manipulating data.

After years of my desktop environment (kde) being configured the same way, I tried enabling auto-hiding in my panel and I quite like the extra screen estate.

Now, the only reasons why I have a panel in the first place are the clock and the system tray (I don't use the ~~start~~ applications menu and I don't care for the task manager) so I've started wondering if I could completely dispose of the panel.

Do you know of any launcher (I use krunner but switching to something else is fine) that satisfies (or can be configured to satisfy) the following?

1. shows the current date/time
2. integrates a system tray
3. launches applications
4. does math, unit conversion and currency conversion

I've been looking for something to replace the google chromecast that is attached to our TV.

I've tried Kodi out, but the main use case for the TV set is a 70+ yo person watching netflix and there is just no way they will be better off with Kodi than with the stock netflix app.

Besides supporting netflix, being easy to use, and providing significantly better privacy than the chromecast does, the device would ideally:

• support other mainstream streaming (amazon, disney, ...) for when my people get tired of netflix
• support a DVB-T2 usb stick (directly, or through IPTV: I can put the stick in a different machine)
• support youtube without ads (through an adblocker and possibly sponsorblock, or maybe using invidious)
• possibly, support local public TV streaming (eg. BBC)

I have a PC set aside that should be more than capable enough (intel N100), but I'm open to getting new hardware if needed. Also, it doesn't matter if the system is not very user friendly to setup (eg. if it needs to be nixos), but once it's setup it should be easy to use and relatively straightforward to update/maintain.

I guess a FOSS android TV would be ideal, but.. is there any? (I see Lineage supports the Google ADT-3, but that is basically unobtanium, at least where I live).

Is there an extension that warns you when you are wasting time reading ai-generated crap?

Case in point, I was reading an article that claimed to compare kubernetes distros and wasted some good minutes before realizing it was full of crap.

Since I need to run a few apps that won't work on LineageOS (because dumb developer security stance), I need to buy a "regular" android device that includes all the google "services".

Ideally, it should be a cheap second-hand phone that will still receive security updates for a long time.

Are there bands that are better (well, "less worse") than others from a privacy perspective?