Drain uncloggers are a caustic. Meaning they are a strong base that eats stuff away. They are generally safe to use except for two very specific circumstances.
you really don’t want to use them if you’re on a septic system. It will kill the good bacteria that eats your poop. It’s not a deal breaker, your system will repopulate eventually. But it could lead to a backup. In my opinion - just don’t use that stuff with septic tanks ever.
if your pipes are old af and on their last legs. Or some of your joints are shoddy. Draino might eat through that last little bit of metal and cause a leak. But to be fair, a snake could bust something open too. This isn’t a problem with modern plumbing. Nothing you can do about it except watch for leaks no matter what you do (or replace that old plumbing).
I’ll offer some advice. For like $35 bucks you can buy a real honest to goodness plumbing snake that’s hand operated. Mine has a little orange saucer thingy the snake coils up into. You pull out some of the snake, and stick it in the drain. You push with one hand, and you use the other to twist the snake via the big hand crank knob thingy. You push a foot or so of the snake down the drain, then pull out a bit more of the snake from the saucer, and then push that bit down the drain (always hand crank spinning). It’s SUPER easy to do.
The one I have is like 25 feet long, and I have cleared some of the nastiest clogs with that thing. I’m talking 5 foot long clogs of my wife’s hair/grease/soap grossness. Draino would never clear that - but the snake makes short work of it in less than 10 minutes. I spend a few bucks on some rubber gloves instead of hundreds on plumbers and expensive Draino.
TLDR: get a hand snake. They work amazing, are super easy to use, and are less money than Draino (and plumbers)
I’ve been a synology user and fan for over 15 years now. Both personally and at work. They used to be powerful-for-the-price, efficient devices with good software. Photos, drive, media server, file storage, and docker containers were the big use cases. They were easy to set up securely for remote connections, and I’ve never seen one fail.
Nowadays though, I’d recommend something else. They have started on the enshittification journey. They removed hardware decoding features, they force you into their hard drives now, the hardware is overpriced, and other diy systems have caught up wrt features and ease of setup. Synology isn’t bad today, it’s just not the only game in town anymore. You can get more for less money with the same amount of effort.
WRT to data collection-I don’t think they collect anything now. But I’m not sure I trust them anymore. It probably won’t stay that way.
I’ve installed Ubuntu and fedora workstation on 5 machines in the past 6 months. Not a single install required using the terminal even once. A couple of those installs were on sketchy hardware and everything still just worked.
Meanwhile I installed win11 on a new machine a couple of weeks ago and it had missing drivers on install, trouble activating, and the login screen switched to Chinese characters after a few reboots (it is a known bug).
Par for the course in Boston and southern New England generally speaking. You can have my firstborn if you really need it, but I reserve the right to break your balls forever.
We’re not nice but we are kind. It’s how we keep each other sane when the fuckin sun goes away at 4:30, and the plow just un-shoveled what we just finished shoveling (cue the ice storm to make that snow extra wet and heavy only to later freeze into a foot thick block of ice).
That may be so, but perception is reality. Nobody trusts it. The first thing everyone thinks is “that’s going to bend”. It doesn’t need to be true to sway people’s purchase.
I’ve had good success with makemkv for ripping both blu rays and dvs. I’ve not had good success making a duplicate disk though. It can be done but it’s been a very long time. I used to use handbrake in that chain but it got to be too much trouble. I resorted to ripping all my stuff, serving it up digitally, and only taking the disks out when nostalgia hit.
But ya - makemkv and handbrake used to get the job done a long time ago, you can search in that direction. Maybe there’s a newer better way.
No no - not like that. Like crappy overpriced laptops. Like “I’m a piece of crap laptop masquerading as a good one and sold to people who don’t know better at a price way way way too high”.
It’s often a laptop, something us nerds wouldn’t buy generally speaking, so they tend to have hardware issues. So newer tends to be better. So plain old Fedora workstation with gnome. I pin their favorite programs to the dock, and show them the basics of the interface. I show them the software button and say they can install anything they want from there, and that they should do the updates that pop up from there.
Zero issues. Honestly does a better job than windows - things are more intuitive for the non tech savvy.
Edit: mint is pretty good too if it works. It’s one of those two systems.
I put two identical drives in my build - that was a mistake. I can never tell which is which. :) I’m sure I’ve had each OS on each drive, and if there was a difference in performance - I’ve never noticed it.
I’d put the Linux drive first as you’ll probably migrate to using only that over time. Let windows share. But I honestly don’t think you’ll notice any difference.
I don’t know why there’s so much nvidia hate going on here. It’s MUCH better than it used to be. Lots of distros mentioned work out of the box with nvidia cards, and if you pick something else - it’s just a matter of installing the right driver. On fedora for example you just go to the rpm fusion site and follow the very easy directions.
Another option not mentioned yet - get a portable Panasonic or equivalent blu ray burner. 1) they still make and sell new ones 2) you can rip the disks once and have digital movies 3) you can play the dvd/blu ray/whatever on your pc OR use the usb c from there (like with a laptop if you own one).
Should cover all your bases and give you more options (all the options?) than you asked for.
Drain uncloggers are a caustic. Meaning they are a strong base that eats stuff away. They are generally safe to use except for two very specific circumstances.
you really don’t want to use them if you’re on a septic system. It will kill the good bacteria that eats your poop. It’s not a deal breaker, your system will repopulate eventually. But it could lead to a backup. In my opinion - just don’t use that stuff with septic tanks ever.
if your pipes are old af and on their last legs. Or some of your joints are shoddy. Draino might eat through that last little bit of metal and cause a leak. But to be fair, a snake could bust something open too. This isn’t a problem with modern plumbing. Nothing you can do about it except watch for leaks no matter what you do (or replace that old plumbing).
I’ll offer some advice. For like $35 bucks you can buy a real honest to goodness plumbing snake that’s hand operated. Mine has a little orange saucer thingy the snake coils up into. You pull out some of the snake, and stick it in the drain. You push with one hand, and you use the other to twist the snake via the big hand crank knob thingy. You push a foot or so of the snake down the drain, then pull out a bit more of the snake from the saucer, and then push that bit down the drain (always hand crank spinning). It’s SUPER easy to do.
The one I have is like 25 feet long, and I have cleared some of the nastiest clogs with that thing. I’m talking 5 foot long clogs of my wife’s hair/grease/soap grossness. Draino would never clear that - but the snake makes short work of it in less than 10 minutes. I spend a few bucks on some rubber gloves instead of hundreds on plumbers and expensive Draino.
TLDR: get a hand snake. They work amazing, are super easy to use, and are less money than Draino (and plumbers)
Edit/update: I’ve got one like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/RIDGID-EZ-SPIN-Drain-Cleaning-Snake-Auger-80168/332294628