Neat! Someone wrote a python tool to turn MacOS’s native powermetrics into a top-like monitoring tool.
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As it turns out, this is a long standing bug they can’t seem to squash. Not sure why it didn’t affect me until I switched distros though.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=353975
They do think they’re onto something though. So that’s good!
Just an update for everyone: we think there is a decent chance this is fixed in Plasma 5.25 and are working on backporting a major multimonitor refactor to 5.24. In the meantime, if anyone affected would test with Plasma 5.25 (AKA current git master) that would be lovely.
A few weeks ago I have learned about btop++ and it has been nothing short of amazing. Usage of braille fonts means you get a lot of resolution out of your terminal, and the author is nice and very responsive. It supports Linux, FreeBSD and macOS, with Windows support being WIP. I have personally compiled it for and tested it on an embedded ARM computer running Linux.
Yeah, btop is one of my favorite tools already. You’ll find it in many of my screenshots in this thread (among its many variations). It’s just not as specific as asitop for the Apple Silicon. Namely the power metrics and E vs P core breakdown.
Fair enough. If there isn’t one, open an issue - like I said, the author is quite responsive.
Thats a lot of cooling for a tablet 
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I knew I remembered seeing a blog post you made!
I just came here to ask this: I’m really undecided between the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro and the Sony WF-1000XM4. I don’t have a Samsung phone so I’ll lose the higher quality codec. While with the Sony I can use the bluetooth 5.2 and LDAC codecs.
I’m seeing all kind of shit things said about both pairs but can’t find a definitive answer about it.
I guess it’s more like better tuning with lower tech at a lower price or inferior tuning with way better tech at an higher price?
Thanks!
I greatly preferred Samsung/AKG’s tuning to Sony’s. The XM4s were very dark and took a lot of EQing to get to my liking. The codec really isn’t going to make a ton of difference with typical streaming services. I used them with my iPhone and not a lot sticks out to me.
Sony takes a huge W in the ANC dept, but I don’t use ANC outdoors, which is the largest setting I use them in. Reviews aren’t going to cut it with this though. I didn’t find the XM4s comfortable no matter the sound, so it was not a compromise I was willing to make to keep them. If you’re looking at both new, I would just get both. See which ones match your lifestyle, then return the ones that don’t work out.
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So it’s just marketing, at least for now. I got 40GB of mostly high quality music on my phone, but I guess it’s stupid to expect the same quality I get with my wired setup at home when I’m out.
I guess that’s the best course of action. Thanks!
Went for the Buds 2 since they boast better fit, better NC, slightly better tonal response and are quipped with bluetooth 5.2 so the LE protocol makes them last slightly longer. They’re also cheaper so it’s a win - win situation I hope.
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Tried out Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Network Access this weekend.
They have a largely cross-platform cloudflared service that can tunnel traffic directly through to CF. So whatever service you tunnel can be pointed a domain in Cloudflare and automatically has a certificate and runs over https. And that’s it. It takes care of reverse proxy with no port forwarding.
It was a bit slow for me, but I may have set something up incorrectly. I’ll spend a bit more time with it before putting anything production-class behind it.
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Revamping my QNAP TVS-873 today w/ TrueNAS Scale.
It’s still great from a hardware standpoint, but I’ve grown used to the joys of ZFS. Initially QNAP was going to make QuTS Hero available to older NASes, but they walked that back. It’s a shame.
Let’s see how this goes.
Update: Success!
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I absolutely love that PCIe to M.2 adapter, the look of the cooler, like a mouse trap or an egg slicer. Got this old-schoolish mechanical device vibe.
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The funny part is that cooler came from a $350 Lenovo. It was on a single sided, DRAMless 256GB Gen 3 drive. It was so pointless lol. Now it’s happily repurposed.
Annnnnnnnd finished the QNAP conversion.
Incoming rambling warning…
I tried following a few guides at first, but things weren’t in the same spots due to using Scale vs Core, so I abandoned all that and went about it how I usually do. Just playing around wit the interfaces.
QNAPs are very hand-holdy, so having to explicitly define everything was a departure from pre-built land. Pre-built NASes feel more like an appliance and I absolutely see why people use them. TrueNAS does a good job of organizing everything, so it’s a lot friendlier than completely scratch built storage solutions I’ve worked with in the past. It’s a great blend of ease of use and control. Some wizards for setting up common configs would be nice to see, but if you’ve come this far, it’s likely you don’t need them. Having a checklist so you setup permissions correctly and remember to configure snapshots is just as effective. If I were doing this more regularly, I would just document it in my personal knowledge base container.
My QNAP TVS-873 is a equipped with an AMD Embedded R-Series RX-421BD Radeon R7. It’s billed as quad core, but TrueNAS sees it as 2 core, 4 thread. Not too sure what that’s all about unless it’s the same deal as Bulldozer. The SoC doesn’t support ECC, so I’m just using 4x 16GB SODIMM DDR4 2666. For the network card I’m using an “Intel X540-T2” from 10Gtek. For storage I have 8x Seagate Iron Wolf drives and 2x 1TB Samsung 860 EVOs (SATA). I was using the EVOs for tiered storage under QNAP QTS, but TrueNAS/ZFS doesn’t offer that kind of caching, so I don’t know what I’ll do with them yet. I already have a “fast” NAS, so I don’t need an SSD pool.
I removed the 512MB Apacer DOM that was hot glued to the board so that I could safely reverse this operation if needed. In its place, I’m using a 512GB Intel NVMe I pulled from something at some point. It’s overkill, but I have a few of those drives lying around.
Overall, I made this move out of curiosity. I could have lived with QTS and been happy, but taking this and converting it to TrueNAS saved me the expense of building another NAS to scratch the itch. QTS did offer snapshots, but I never fully trusted them. Scrubbing took around 26 hours under QTS via ETX4, as did the RAID initialization. Provisioning pools and different levels of storage was also messy. The annoyingly broken notifications, warnings, and constant installations of apps I’ll never use will not be missed lol.
My other 4 NASes use QuTS Hero (the ZFS fueled version), so I won’t be touching those, but I feel better about this particular NAS now knowing that it’s got a filesystem I have faith in. This NAS handles Veeam storage and non-essential multimedia, so I’ve kept it simple. I may run some non-essential VMs and containers (installing iperf3 now), but it will never be much more than storage and learning.
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Was curious, did a quick check - seems like this CPU actually is the fourth (and last) iteration of Bulldozer. That said, PassMark lists it as having four cores in four modules, so that 2c4t designation is still in question.
For the SSDs I was going to suggest L2ARC, but with 64 GB of RAM this is likely unnecessary. Probably not many writes, so SLOG (write cache) is meaningless as well.
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Windows shows Bulldozer CPUs as hyperthreaded cores, with a 6 core FX 6300 showing up as 3 core 6 threads, although the Bulldozer cores were named “modules” (because of their shared resources). I thought Linux shows the cores alright. Not sure if the truenas used is core or scale. But it is not uncommon for Bulldozer through Excavator CPUs to show up as half the number of cores and SMT to many OS.
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I went with Scale since I’m already knee deep in Docker and may use it here for things I just want to test and don’t care about.