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'm just starting off with rust, so please be patient)

Is there an idiomatic way of writing the following as a one-liner, somehow informing rustc that it should keep the PathBuf around?

// nevermind the fully-qualified names
// they are there to clarify the code
// (that's what I hope at least)

let dir: std::path::PathBuf = std::env::current_dir().unwrap();
let dir: &std::path::Path   = dir.as_path();

// this won't do:
// let dir = std::env::current_dir().unwrap().as_path();

I do understand why rust complains that "temporary value dropped while borrowed" (I mean, the message says it all), but, since I don't really need the PathBuf for anything else, I was wondering if there's an idiomatic to tell rust that it should extend its life until the end of the code block.

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

While updating home-manager I got a notice that freeimage-unstable-2021-11-01 is marked as unsafe.

Since chances are it's used by something I never use, I'd like to know what I'm using that depends on it... any idea how to do it?

Also.. any idea why I have 4 copies of the freeimage stuff in my /nix/store? (I just run nix-collect-garbage -d and the 4 seem to be actually different):

❱ md5sum /nix/store/*freeimage*/lib/libfreeimage.a
67a0ce1cb5dd562473e27d7c88e8a9bd  /nix/store/6gi6hm57zngqnxb6p5dnxhjjcbr96lrk-freeimage-unstable-2021-11-01/lib/libfreeimage.a
5995e0affbfa28b63da7e997cb4dbe63  /nix/store/09nwykzzksc0zknflsyxyah5b67c2rsn-freeimage-unstable-2021-11-01/lib/libfreeimage.a
67a0ce1cb5dd562473e27d7c88e8a9bd  /nix/store/ikfiv4gpmcpyir7lsj45by653qcnvgyx-freeimage-unstable-2021-11-01/lib/libfreeimage.a
213a408e3c1fbb5dfa4491deebe05984  /nix/store/q2sc85f2hclgwl8m3qdw8rpbs44gzmah-freeimage-unstable-2021-11-01/lib/libfreeimage.a

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).

This may be OT since strictly speaking it's about hardware... I trust it is ok to post it given the spirit of the community, but have my apologies and feel free to remove it if it's not.

I'm looking to replace my old Bose QC25, since they have recently died (after a long a fulfilling life), but it seems everything nowadays is bluetooth (which I don't mind) and require some proprietary app to turn ANC on/off (which I do mind... are physical buttons/switches become too expensive to include in your overpriced earbuds?).

Anyway... do you know of any headphones/earbuds that meet the following?

1. can be powered via wire or have batteries that last 12+hrs (long-haul flights)
2. have decent noise cancelling
3. don't require me to install a apps or can be used with some open source app (possibly with full functionality and straightforward to setup)
4. are not overly expensive (I have to buy 2 pairs and I'll only use them a few times a year when I fly)

I want to call the escapeSystemdPath (defined in nixpgs at nixos/lib/utils.nix) to derive the name of a systemd mount unit from the target path (eg. srv-my-dir.mount from /srv/my/dir), but I can't figure out how I can reference it... any ideas?

I'm playing around with nixos in a few VMs and at some point I realized I must have lost the swap configuration in one of my refactorings.

To my surprise, however, the VMs do use the swap partitions I had set up.

There is no mention on "swap" in my nix configuration (or in fstab) and no .swap units in /etc/systemd/system; I do however have a swap partition labelled "swap".

Turns out there is a systemd unit (albeit not a corresponding file) that sets up swap:

[root@vm1:~]# free -hw
               total        used        free      shared     buffers       cache   available
Mem:           2.8Gi       664Mi       955Mi       4.0Mi       3.0Mi       1.3Gi       2.0Gi
Swap:          3.7Gi          0B       3.7Gi

[root@vm1:~]# systemctl list-dependencies swap.target 
swap.target
● └─dev-disk-by\x2ddiskseq-1\x2dpart3.swap

I'm wondering where the unit comes from? Can I rely on this and never configure swap ever again?

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.