Thanks! Also a bit of fun directly responding to the post before it. I was ultimately inspired by the “allure of the pine forest” post from a bit ago, thinking “Hey, I have some photos that look just like this…”

I think I am going to have fun with this (photo from a ~1999 PDA camera module [original resolution])

It wasn’t super relevant to the story, but yeah, I could just browse the files right on their PC, definitely a “Not intending to share it for free” kind of situation, completely devoid of any authentication or security.

I’ve actually taken note of my navigational skills over the last couple years… I grew up in one state, and then a few years after graduating college, moved to a different state. When I was growing up, phone navigation didn’t really exist as it does now, cars didn’t have built-in navigation, and standalone navigation devices were slow and not all that great (at least the ones I could afford).

I find that when I return home, even 10 years later, I am able to navigate all the places I used to go unaided with ease, back-roads, niche routes, able to travel for hours without getting “lost”.

When I moved, though, I had very recently gotten my first smartphone, and google maps was very convenient to “learn” the new area. I ended up just continuing to use navigation since it was convenient. I’ve found that beyond the major main routes, I don’t have the same kind of “built-in” navigational skill that I do for my original home-turf. I never really learned the area.

I am moving towards a smart-phone-less life, and I’ve been able to let go of a lot, but GPS navigation remains a sticking point. I need to start training myself to navigate unaided in my current area.

Many many years ago in the paleolithic era when 2.4GHz was king, a neighbor in the next unit over had an unsecured wifi network… I connected my old laptop, figured out where the connection was best (turned out to be beside the stove in the kitchen?), piped the connection out the ethernet port and into the WAN port on my router, and set up my own “secured” network lol. I’m fairly certain anyone with a straight-up unsecured wifi network doesn’t have the skills or knowledge to detect someone leaching their bandwidth. I did that for like 3 years without a single hiccup until I moved and finally had to start paying.

I didn’t know what these were until a couple days ago, I saw them posted elsewhere and did a little digging. There must have been some release on Sunday because I went to the mall to meet up with some people before heading elsewhere, and there was an absolutely apocalyptic line with hundreds and hundreds of feet of little rope barriers, armed security guards, people brought chairs to sit in line since god knows when… all in front of a tiny little shop that sells things that all just look like funko-pops to me but are apparently unique and desirable for whatever reason… There were even more people all over the mall with bags from that shop carrying the weird little fuzzy things around.

Costco bought RAC in a stunning buyout in 2437 after Costco’s CEO Harambe Memelord Disney Jr. offered RAC’s CEO Squiggy John John John John Johnson a 2-for 1 deluxe latte coupon and an extra big-ass fry.

It’s funny, I was JUST hankering to take my SW out to browse the airwaves, and then I log on to see this post.

I have a Halicrafters S-119, still runs on tubes. Picks up 2-16MHz.

I already spent some time rummaging around for my antenna, but I can’t find it and don’t have a spool of wire handy, so I’ll need to work on that. Last time I had it set up was a couple years and 2 moves ago.

That solidifies my suspicion that it’s a standard Android feature… I also don’t get many spam calls, and only distinctly remember performing that action on this most recent phone.

Based on OP’s comment “…I always assume that rejecting the call outright will also be detected as a deliberate action and therefore a person is on the other side…”, I figured maybe they didn’t know about that feature and/or have an iPhone and they somehow don’t behave that way.

I also miss the old days of Android… I got a smartphone specifically to play Pokemon go in 2016 lol, up until that point I was still rocking one of those Casio Gzone indestructible flip-phones. Walked into WalMart, bought the cheapest LG whatever phone I could find (Android 5 I think?), caught a bazillion Pokemon. I remember buying multiple batteries for longer sessions, because you could just pop the back off and replace it on the go.

They run a custom vendor-locked distro named QTS, so they’re not really as easy to modify as a normal system, I don’t think you can even install programs like that.

I’ll definitely bookmark it though if I ever get around to building my own solution, thanks!

I don’t know if it’s a universal thing, I’ve never bothered to research further. On my several-year-old Oneplus phone (Android), if I single-press the power button, it mutes the ringer and vibrate but the call doesn’t end or reject (I could still then go and answer or reject the call normally, it doesn’t affect the user interface, just the ringer/vibrate). That’s how I’ve been “rejecting” unknown calls for a long time. A simple, elegant solution that doesn’t give the caller any hints.

I have no idea if it’s a QNAP-wide issue, or just some specific models, I haven’t bothered to do that much research. I’m guessing that the discs WOULD spin down if you have that option selected if they weren’t constantly being pinged a couple times a minute. That constant pinging is the part I can’t seem to track down.

An excerpt from a post I was reading while researching this sums it up prettt well: “700 posts about spindown/sleep/standby not working in the QNAP HDD Spin Down Forum. No one seems to be able to resolve it. Qnap clearly couldn’t care less.”

The only solution that I’ve found that seems to work is to install some other operating system on it, which kind of defeats the purpose of buying a turn-key NAS, and is slightly outside my comfort zone right now. I just ordered a kill-a-watt, so I’ll see how much power it’s taking with/without drives and go from there if it’s worth my time to dive into an OS swap, or building a custom rig.

If you can figure out how to get a qnap to spin down its disks, please let me know lol. I’ve been searching for months and haven’t found a reliable solution. I basically only need to access it once a day at MOST, so having the disks spinning away for like 99% of their life sucking down power is something I’d like to avoid. The problem seems to be that even with a perfectly clean slate, no services running, the system set up in their own RAID0 SSD pool, the HDD’s, even with 0 bytes of data on them, are being pinged for access at least once a minute. I’m assuming it’s some log being written to, but it’s not anything visible in the file system, and I haven’t been able to find any solution online, lots of people seem to have the same issue.

I’m tempted more and more every day to just grab one of those low-power embedded ITX boards and build up a custom rig. Other than the disk spinning constantly, the TS-462 does everything I need perfectly.

I’ve been building a small 10" server rack and have also been using the bone PLA for the “beige” parts to match my stack of variously-yellowed desktops, but yeah, this will be awesome to have “authentic” beige! The bone white is a little too brown/tan if you look too hard.

I should pre-order some. I wonder if it will be a constant offering, or if I should order like 4 rolls haha.