Project: NAS backups share using Windows/Backblaze personal

There’s two types of people: Those who have backups, and those who will lose data. Several years ago I had a raid card failure on a RAID 5 array (three disks) that lost about 5~ TB of data. Of this, about 1.5 was completely irreplaceable data, things as far back as high school projects. After this, I went into backup mode and always had redundant copies both locally and online (cloud based). At this point I’ve made a pretty solid system for handling this across multiple systems. Lemme walk you through it.

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RG350P Handheld First Impressions

After saving up for this handheld, I pulled the trigger on this recently and have been pretty impressed overall. The system runs buttery smooth, comes preconfigured with a large number of emulators and ROMs and just generally feels like a solid little handheld from the hay-day of Gameboy goodness.

Running at 100 bucks with a micro-SD card, the system isn’t super expensive when compared to my Nintendo DS with a custom Kart to run roms (about 90 bucks total and much more limited in what it can do in comparison). This handheld even plays PSX roms without issue and has excellent loading times when compared to my playing times as a child.

Things of note:

  • Quick to boot. Plays games very well once you find the right roms. Surprised it plays PSX roms as well as it does (Vigilante 8, Driver, Crash Team Racing each for 30 mins or more without issue).
  • The system will randomly not boot (stuck on black screen) but hitting the reset button immediately resets and fixes it.
  • Came with 32GB MicroSD card loaded with ROMS which makes managing them much easier. Comes with a bunch of emulators (including DOSBOX which is neat) and all are preconfigured and just work which is excellent.
  • Lots of menu options that make it pretty solid to use. Can also save game states to come back to them if the games don’t support saving (very neat feature).
  • Worth 100 bucks? I’d say so for sure, especially with the loaded SD card.

I’m going to be spending a lot of time tinkering with this. It appears it supports networking (guessing via one of the two USB-C ports) so will need to check that out for easier ROM management off my internal SFTP server. In the meantime, I’ll be reliving my childhood on a 4 inch screen.

unRAID: capacity and ease of use over performance

I’ve been looking over various NAS (Network-Attached-Storage) operating systems for some time now. Naturally, there’s two big players in the game that everyone seems to go to: FreeNAS and unRAID. Both boast a considerable user base, community add on support and a ton of customization but one big difference at a quick glance: FreeNAS, as the name implies, is free while unRAID is a pay for licensed OS. But a quick glance only shows so much.

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Automated Youtube Downloads Into Plex (Windows)

Welcome to another Overly Complicate Project! This time, it started with some advice from our friends at r/DataHoarder and a fun tool called “youtube-dl”. This has taken a bit of tinkering and some custom code, but I now have an all-in-one solution that downloads Youtube videos from a playlist/channel, confirms progress to save bandwidth on future downloads, and stores them into a Plex library for local viewing. Let’s begin.

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WordPress permalinks issues

After running into this issue once more with a fresh WordPress install, I’ve found the only way to use custom permalinks is to have them custom set up like this:

Go under Settings > Permalinks

Click on “Custom Structure” and insert like this:

/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

After hours of google searching with people saying anything from disabling plugins (there were none) to reverting settings (it was a NEW site with no posts prior to changes), this is the ONLY way I’ve gotten the custom WordPress Permalinks to work in the manner I wanted. Hopefully this saves others time/frustration.

Archiving youtube and website data

YouTube has become a bit of a dilemma for many people like myself who enjoy music and video edits with said music; We love supporting artists we enjoy along with the video edits. But, with companies locking down on content, these videos and channels are going offline suddenly and often without warning. I’ve taken to downloading backups of these as often as possible. With a little help from r/datahoarding, I now have a great set up that does this with minimal user intervention.

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My choices for browser addons

A web browser is something everyone uses but no one really thinks about. Sure, some people prefer Chrome or FireFox (myself being in the latter), or some even stick with the MS choice of Edge or IE. But what a lot of people don’t know, is there is a myriad of add ons, themes and plugins that make them so much more than just a browser. Some of these addons also provide extra layers of security. That’s where today’s discussion will be: The addons I run for security and privacy and what they do.

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Glasswire: First impressions and review

In the wide world of interwebs, there’s a lot of dangerous exploits, vulnerabilities and attacks that can happen regularly. With this also comes a vast number of trackers both online and built into Windows 10 itself. I’ve been looking for a new firewall program for sometime and did a free trial of Glasswire for 14 days a couple months ago. I enjoyed the application but couldn’t justify the cost (30/year at the time) for this app and decided to shop around for something potentially cheaper/better.

I ran into an application called NetLimiter. It was hailed as a cheaper replacement to Glasswire (specifically: a one time charge for the lifetime of the product with free updates for the current release). I tested this and was a bit disappointed with the interface and options. It’s a gorgeous GUI and tool, but didn’t quite have what I wanted. Back to Glasswire I went!

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