blackstrat

I currently shoot my kids U9s rugby with a Nikon Z6 and 70-200 2.8 with an FTZ adapter. But as the pitches are bigger now than when they played tag only I'm finding the 200mm reach limiting and I end up doing a lot of cropping. I'm not printing these or publishing them anywhere, but it does consume a lot of time in post processing.

So I'm considering some long lenses, almost certainly second hand.

I obviously rely on decent autofocus speed as the kids are pretty quick. I'm less worried about edge sharpness as it's centre sharpness that matters most and vignetting I consider a solved problem using PhotoLab.

I've had my eye on either:

• Sigma 150-600 DG OS HSM SPORT
• Nikon 200-500

The Sigma is more expensive, but i don't mind if its woth the extra. I don't know much about Tamron or others.

What would you recommend or have experience with shooting outdoor field sports?

As per title really. I'm looking for a new small music player that will play MP3 and FLAC files. Preferably that takes a large SD card, otherwise has at least 128gb of storage. I want to be copying files directly on to it in a file browser and for them to play in the right order (I have a player that plays in the order the files were copied on to it, which is full on madness). I have no interest in iTunes and I run Linux as my computer OS.

Also needs to be less than £100.

And I really mean no wireless functionally at all, I don't mean "includes Bluetooth but it can be turned off".

I currently have a dual monitor setup of a Dell 24" and 27", neither are variable refresh rate. I think the 24" monitor is getting on for 17 years old and has had issues with lines on it when cold for the past 13 years. But it's my second monitor and once it's warmed up it's not too bad. Well I think the time has come to retire it and for my main 27" to become my secondary monitor and buy a new primary. I am interested in photography so accurate colours are important to me, which is why I bought these monitors in the first place. But I also play games, so something with some gaming features like Freesync and >60Hz refresh rates I also want. I've got my eye on a ASUS ROG Strix XG27ACS, fwiw.

I am running Endeavour OS (kernel 6.13.1) with KDE Plasma (6.2.5) on Wayland with a Radeon RX 5700 XT. My question is: Will my setup allow me to run one non-freesync monitor @60Hz and one Freesync monitor using the VRR at up to 180Hz. So I can get all the benefits of the new monitor when gaming, without having to turn the second monitor off?

I believe that if I just had the one monitor I'd have no issues and my setup would be plug and play. But as this has been a long time coming with many issues along the way to get VRR on linux working, I'm concerned that it's a "everything must support it or it won't work" scenario.

Grateful for your insights and advise.

As per the title really. The whole AI revolution has largely passed me by, but the idea of self hosting something on a small box like this appeals. I don't have an nvidia GPU in my PC and never will, so far as I can tell that pretty much rules out doing anything AI there.

I guess I can run it as a headless machine and connect over SSH or whatever web interface the AI models provide? I'm assuming running Proxmox on it will not work that well.

My main idea for AI is identifying photos with certain properties to aid in tagging over 20 years and 10s of thousands of photos.

I haven't tagged my photos in 22 years, relying solely on folders with a brief description and the date. But now I realise tagging might actually be a good idea going forward (and back). As it's definitely getting unrulely.

I'm using PhotoLab and have started going back through and tagging people and places mostly, plus things like "landscape", "flower" etc. Fairly high level. I have a "home" and "garden" tag which covers a lot of photos as well as a " day out" when we visited some place.

I'm sure some people add way more tags- do you and is it useful to you?

I have a ZFS RAIDZ2 array made of 6x 2TB disks with power on hours between 40,000 and 70,000. This is used just for data storage of photos and videos, not OS drives. Part of me is a bit concerned at those hours considering they're a right old mix of desktop drives and old WD reds. I keep them on 24/7 so they're not too stressed in terms of power cycles bit they have in the past been through a few RAID5 rebuilds.

Considering swapping to 2x 'refurbed' 12TB enterprise drives and running ZFS RAIDZ1. So even though they'd have a decent amount of hours on them, they'd be better quality drives and fewer disks means less change of any one failing (I have good backups).

The next time I have one of my current drives die I'm not feeling like staying with my current setup is worth it, so may as well change over now before it happens?

Also the 6x disks I have at the moment are really crammed in to my case in a hideous way, so from an aesthetic POV (not that I can actually seeing the solid case in a rack in the garage),it'll be nicer.

As per the title really. I'd be looking to pick one up second hand and use it on EndeavourOS.

Is there a really worthwhile boost in performance moving to the 6700XT, or should I wait a bit longer to get something else higher end? I will not consider Nvidia as a Linux user.

What are you.planning on DIYing this year? Large or small I'd love to hear about it. Is it something you've done before or something out of your comfort zone?

I'm planning on building some wheelie bin storagefor the from of the house that's on a bit of a slope. Never done anything like that before. I'm going to get a wood blade for my angle grinder as I cannot cut straight with a saw to save my life.

I'm sure it'll end up looking like Homer's handywork.

Before or after that I'd like to build a small work bench for the garage. But the possibilities are so much to decide on.

I've never had a proper tool bag before. As a home DIYer I've just had loose tools on shelves in the garage. I finally got fed up of running up and down stairs to get the next tool I needed on a job. This thing is great. I can fit most things in and I have a few other tools to add - like some scissors to stop borrowing the kitchen ones. I may even get a shorter, wider one for longer tools that are less frequently used.

Let's see your tool bags and setup.

I previously asked here about moving to ZFS. So a week on I'm here with an update. TL;DR: Surprisingly simple upgrade.

I decided to buy another HBA that came pre-flashed in IT mode and without an onboard BIOS (so that server bootups would be quicker - I'm not using the HBA attached disks as boot disks). For £30 it seems worth the cost to avoid the hassle of flashing it, plus if it all goes wrong I can revert back.

I read a whole load about Proxmox PCIE passthrough, most of it out of date it would seem. I am running an AMD system and there are many sugestions online to set grub parameters to amd_iommu=on, which when you read in to the kernel parameters for the 6.x version proxmox uses, isn't a valid value. I think I also read that there's no need to set iommu=pt on AMD systems. But it's all very confusing as most wikis that should know better are very Intel specific.

I eventually saw a youtube video of someone running proxmox 8 on AMD wanting to do the same as I was and they showed that if IOMMU isn't setup, then you get a warning in the web GUI when adding a device. Well that's interesting - I don't get that warning. I am also lucky that the old HBA is in its own IOMMU group, so it should pass through easy without breaking anything. I hope the new one will be the same.

Worth noting that there are a lot of bad Youtube videos with people giving bad advise on how to configure a VM for ZFS/TrueNAS use - you need them passed through properly so the VM's OS has full control of them. Which is why an IT HBA is required over an IR one, but just that alone doesn't mean you can't set the config up wrong.

I also discovered along the way that my existing file server VM was not setup to be able to handle PCIe passthrough. The default Machine Type that Proxmox suggests - i440fx - doesn't support it. So that needs changing to q35, also it has to be setup with UEFI. Well that's more of a problem as my VM is using BIOS. A this point it became easier to spin up a new VM with the correct setting and re-do the configuration of it. Other options to be aware of: Memory ballooning needs to be off and the CPU set to host.

At this point I haven't installed the new HBA yet.

Install a fresh version of Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS and it all feels very snappy. Makes me wonder about my old VM, I think it might be an original install of 16.04 that I have upgraded every 2 years and was migrated over from my old ESXi R710 server a few years ago. Fair play to it, I have had zero issues with it in all that time. Ubuntu server is just absolutely rock solid.

Not too much to configure on this VM - SSH, NFS exports, etckeeper, a couple of users and groups. I use etckeeper, so I have a record of the /etc of all my VMs that I can look back to, which has come in handy on several occasions.

Now almost ready to swap the HBA after I run the final restic backup, which only takes 5 mins (I bloody love restic!). Also update the fstabs of VMS so they don't try mount the file server and stop a few from auto starting on boot, just temporarily.

Turn the server off and get inside to swap the cards over. Quite straightforward other than the SAS ports being in a worse place for ease of access. Power back on. Amazingly it all came up - last time I tried to add an NVME on a PCIe card it killed the system.

Set the PICe passthrough for the HBA on the new VM. Luckily the new HBA is on it's own IOMMU group (maybe that's somehow tied to the PCIE slot?) Make sure to tick the PCIE flag so it's not treated as PCI - remember PCI cards?!

Now the real deal. Boot the VM, SSH in. fdisk -l lists all the disks attached. Well this is good news! Try create the zpool zpool create storage raidz2 /dev/disk/by-id/XXXXXXX ...... Hmmm, can't do that as it knows it's a raid disk and mdadm has tried to mount it so they're in use. Quite a bit of investigation later with a combination of wipefs -af /dev/sdX, umount /dev/md126, mdadm --stop /dev/sd126 and shutdown -r now and the RAIDynes of the disks is gone and I can re-run the zpool command. It that worked! Note: I forgot to add in ashift=12 to my zpool creation command, I have only just noticed this as I write, but thankfully it was clever enough to pick the correct one.

$ zpool get all | grep ashift
storage  ashift                         0                              default

Hmmm, what's 0?

$ sudo zdb -l /dev/sdb1 | grep ashift
ashift: 12

Phew!!!

I also have passed through the USB backup disks I have, mounted them and started the restic backup restore. So far it's 1.503TB in after precisely 5 hours, which seems OK.

I'll setup monthly scrub cron jobs tomorrow.

P.S. I tried TrueNAS out in a VM with no disks to see what it's all about. It looks very nice, but I don't need any of that fancyness. I've always managed my VM's over SSH which I've felt is lighter weight and less open to attack.

Thanks for stopping by my Ted Talk.

At the moment I have my NAS setup as a Proxmox VM with a hardware RAID card handling 6 2TB disks. My VMs are running on NVMEs with the NAS VM handling the data storage with the RAIDed volume passed through to the VM direct in Proxmox. I am running it as a large ext4 partition. Mostly photos, personal docs and a few films. Only I really use it. My desktop and laptop mount it over NFS. I have restic backups running weekly to two external HDDs. It all works pretty well and has for years.

I am now getting ZFS curious. I know I'll need to IT flash the HBA, or get another. I'm guessing it's best to create the zpool in Proxmox and pass that through to the NAS VM? Or would it be better to pass the individual disks through to the VM and manage the zpool from there?

CDs are in every way better than vinyl records. They are smaller, much higher quality audio, lower noise floor and don't wear out by being played. The fact that CD sales are behind vinyl is a sign that the world has gone mad. The fact you can rip and stream your own CD media is fantastic because generally remasters are not good and streaming services typically only have remastered versions, not originals. You have no control on streaming services about what version of an album you're served or whether it'll still be there tomorrow. Not an issue with physical media.

The vast majority of people listen to music using equipment that produces audio of poor quality, especially those that stream using ear buds. It makes me very sad when people don't care that what they're listening to could sound so much better, especially if played through a hifi from a CD player, or using half decent (not beats) headphones.

There's plenty of good sounding and well produced music out there, but it's typically played back through the equivalent of two cans and some string. I'm not sure people remember how good good music can sound when played back through good kit.