CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@jalefkowit check your notes carefully. When I needed a specific component to repair our furnace a few years ago, I ordered the right part and the parts place sent a similar, but wrong one. The error was actually theirs and not mine.

@JessTheUnstill Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go, I bought my sheets from https://www.thecompanystore.com/

Before it locked up I was forming a theory that since most/all of the crashes have been happening when the box is more or less idle, it might be related to low power CPU states and something going wrong either entering or exiting that. But freezing up while doing a drive operation makes me suspect the drive.

Anyway, computers remain, as ever, a mistake.

Installed the UGREEN OS on my NAS and ran an overnight stress test without errors. The installer is keyed to the serial number of the box and can only be activated once, so I thought I’d make an image of the boot drive with it installed. That way if I do any more testing with TrueNAS I could just restore the image instead of having to get another keyed ISO sent to me.

It locked up during the imaging. Before it locked up it kept randomly slowing down and speeding up again, then it slowed down one last time and froze.

So I asked if they could just replace the SSD without replacing the whole box, and I bought a new SSD that I’m planning to use for any non-UGREEN OS installations. I would have preferred not to have that expense, but it’s going to make admin of the box much easier.

Sigh. UGREEN wants me to install their OS on my NAS as a troubleshooting step, which is a pain since it will mean wiping my boot drive and possibly the storage volumes as well. I realized since I had all my storage volumes mirrored I could just pull half the drives (two spinning rust, one SSD) and let the system limp along in an unhealthy state while testing it. Then when I'm done testing I can put the pulled devices back in and restore my ZFS volumes from them as if nothing had ever happened. I hope.

@gregatron5 my Mac fallback has just been regular Firefox for a while now. I haven’t used Chrome in years and don’t even have a Chromium browser installed. I ran into a weird problem where the Chrome Updater process was always consuming a bunch of CPU even after a fresh reboot, and the problem persisted across a few uninstall/reinstall cycles. I tried Chrome Canary at the time and still had the same problem, so I just deleted it and never looked back. Safari was so much better at memory management by then anyway, so I didn’t miss it.

@gregatron5 not yet! I like Safari as a daily driver on all my Apple devices, but since I’m trying Linux on some old hardware, I’m on the hunt for a daily driver there.

The ElementaryOS browser "Web" (which is Gnome Web, FKA Epiphany), is janky when scrolling in Phanpy (it jumps around and sometimes flips rapidly between the before and after states) so I thought I'd try some other browsers. Firefox doesn't let you install PWAs as apps without installing a third party extension (which has many negative reviews). Vivaldi does PWAs, but its scrolling speed is different than the system scrolling speed, and it doesn't respect two finger swipes for forward and back. Floorp is a Firefox fork that DOES have PWAs, so Floorp it is! (At least for now).

@mcc the user avatar saying ALL WE HAVE IS NOW doesn't help with the temporal confusion there.