If you're looking for a VPN to hide your "grey" activity or to get round geo-locking I can (highly) recommend VPN Unlimited from Keep Solid. They often have special offers on subscriptions making their price unbeatable. Their plan allows for up to 4 devices at a time (IIRC). [VPN Unlimited - Fast & Secure VPN service](https://www.vpnunlimited.com/) On the other hand if you are looking to "phone home" or set up a small system for itinerant users you can try Softether VPN which is very easy to set up and maintain, and is completely free - however they currently have a bug for android clients, but with a workaround. [SoftEther VPN Project - SoftEther VPN Project](https://www.softether.org/)

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

I have just re-read your initial post and realised that I hadn't noticed the fateful words "Oracle VirtualBox". This piece of s**tware will update itself and then totally forget to mention that you need to manually update the Extension Pack which needs to be installed and kept updated on the hosted VM. In the past this has led me to lost shared drives, weird mouse behaviour, etc.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

Filter2024 or FilterTOS FilterTNG FilterDS9 FilterVGR

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

I can recommend mRemoteNG which is a multi-protocol, multi-tab remote client for RDP, SSH, VNC etc. The current release is quite old, but there are some betas about - results may vary. Development appears to be in transition, but it works so well that a few quirks are acceptable (e.g. latest beta requires a click in the window to set focus when changing tabs on SSH connections). Choosing Redirects is easy and includes the clipboard (works perfectly in the same tab, between tabs and between host and client).

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

Do you do like me and pop them in your mouth to clean them?

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

I moved to Logitech, Logi as they are now known. After various models with more or less successful lives under my ham-fisted use I finally opted for their Signature M650 L - note the "L", this mouse comes in two sizes! It is quiet, precise and has so far lasted 2 1/2 years with no sign of trouble. Wife & daughter have since got the same ones after using mine (Not the L version, they are not ham-fisted). Your one with the dodgy scroll wheel might have been fixable by a simple air-blast to clean the optical system.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

Just a thought, have you tried the enclosure on a USB 2 socket?

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

To add to the discussion, here are some thoughts and information: * Poor throughput could be linked to the RAID5 being either degraded or still being built. I found some Youtube videos showing that (for your model) you would get about max 40 MB/s write speed in such a case, opposed to about 80 MB/s with a healthy array. * As mentioned by others, these entry level enclosures have pretty low hardware specs and most often do software RAID inside the box. This can seriously impact performance. * USB 3.0 throughput can reach 5 Gb/s, or 500 MB/s after overhead etc. USB 3.1 can do double that. USB 2 can do about 1/10 of that. So you are getting USB2 speeds at best. * Have you checked transfer speeds on another PC? * Finally, your NAS initially came out in 2010, which is a century ago in IT terms. I run a pair of Asustor NAS with 2.5Gb/s ethernet interfaces. I get 250 MB/s read and write speeds with a simple Windows Explorer copy [^]. These NAS do however have a couple of NVMe SSD cache drives in them. A third NAS with 1 Gb/s and no cache drives gives a solid 100 MB/s. I have yet to test VM perfomance, but the NAS can expose iSCSI volumes so I am expecting to see similar performance from inside a VM.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

I grew up a rabid RAH fan and devoured everything I could get my hands on. I suspect that I have read all his works for Young Ados (Have Spacesuit..., Podkayne... etc. and Space Family Stone - don't forget, he invented the Tribble!) and probably all of his main work (and yes, Starship Troopers was one of my favourites) but my interest petered out towards the end as Lazarus Long started to become the hero of all of his tales and he seemed to be trying to include all his previous timelines. Revisiting him some 30-40 years later much of his work has not fared well; Farnham's Freehold initially pleased me as a tale of dimension/universe hopping, now the second half just seems weird and racist. Some tales retain their magic, such as Glory Road and the eternally great By His Bootstraps; however I feel that many of his great "classics" were "of their time" and would be totally misunderstood by a new generation of readers (Stranger in a Strange Land for example). I will however always have a place in my heart and mind for Time Enough For Love which has supplied me with so many great quotes over the years.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

Can we have a link to the web page with these podcasts? Someone might be able to figure out the stream addresses.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

Yep, 17 years ago I was already installing a honey pot/logger for internal users trying to grab stuff they shouldn't from a web app serving technical drawings. Try having a Chinese subsidiary, you'll soon find out about internal data breaches!

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

Quote:

Just pay for it, FFS

Coming soon to a browser near you! "Want the most pertinent search results for you query? Sign up for Google Extra today!" (Terms and conditions apply. Your initial subscription of $4.99/m may be doubled without warning, tripled if you search for pr0n)

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

If you're encoding to h265 a video bitrate of about a 1000 kb/s should be quite sufficient. Profile: Main@L3.1@Main. YUV 4:2:0. 8 bit depth. AC3 should do for your sound needs, though using the original mp2 for simple 2-channel audio tracks could save some time at the expense of slightly larger file size. It should be possible (with VMWare) to assign a graphics card in pass-through mode to a VM (or even a GPU on a multiple GPU card). If you already have on-board graphics you could simply add an NVidia card for encoding via VM. Hope this helps

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

Another +1 for Handbrake. If you are converting mainly DVDs (480 lines) rather than BluRay discs you will get very good quality and lightning-fast, low-cpu, conversions if you have a graphics card with h264/h265 NVENC capability. If doing heavier-lifting encodes, it would appear that pure CPU gives better quality (last time I looked at the subject). I currently use a GTX 960 which is quite economical to purchase second-hand. Here is a side by side of a frame from a 480p VOB file (left, 20.7 MB) recoded to h265 (right, 5.5 MB) at a blistering 670 frames per second. No banding or noise in the blacks. http://www.clumpton.com/uknwebimg/clipboard_2024-01-04_09-14-41.png[^]

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

Salvatore Terress wrote:

I do not know how to describe "hardware platform".

He means, "what are you running it on? A PC, Raspberry Pi, etc.". If, by any chance, it's a Raspberry PI, check dmesg to make sure that you have neither low voltage nor high temperature conditions. Also check your SDR USB dongle for overheating.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

As others have said, a small "cube" PC should suffice. HOWEVER I see no mention of the required operating system. Recently my nephew consulted me on new server hardware to run the latest version of their ERP software, but that was nothing compared to the OS requirement (Windows Server 2019 minimum, CALs, SQL Server, 1 license per user) which could have tripled the cost of the replacement. What do they require? Will it run single user on Windows 10/11? Frankly, seeing as they only require 8GB ram I doubt that it merits a Xeon with Windows Server on it.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

Going a bit medical (sorry)... Have yourself checked for sleep apnea, it can come on later in life due to slack(en)ing of various throat muscles. It can wake you up and often causes excess urination. Give the melatonin a chance, the wife and I use it but it needs about a week to really kick in. Get your prostate checked, mine was 4 times the normal size, a simple op cleared it and got rid of one of my main reasons for waking up in the night. However, I still wake up at 3 am if I have been doing anything more than social media on the computer before going to bed. Usually I have to get up, have a cup of tea and google whatever was bothering me (last night it was asynchronous Python) and then I can get back off to sleep. So the best advice I can give you is to watch a couple of episodes of M.A.S.H. (or anything similar that you know off by heart) before going to bed.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

"off of" Often when reading a novel, if I come across this grammatical turd, I dump the book and never go near that author again. I can say no more, I could explode with anger just seeing the words in my own post.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

I have (mostly) successfully upgraded Linux (Debian) one release at a time with no serious after-effects. However in one case it killed the main app it was for (NextCloud) because it changed the php and Python versions and a lot of the app is version specific - regressing to php v7 was a total pain, it took me three days of fiddling to get it done properly. Python was easier. Another upgrade that went sideways was my Domoticz server, however that was fixed by a simple re-install. So, in conclusion.... for Linux, it all depends. As for windows, I upgraded from 95 to XP and then to 7 with very little trouble, upgrading that to 10 caused one or two driver problems and USB behaviour became very flaky. Since I needed a 64bit OS for some software this was the occasion to finally do a clean install. I have kept a pared-down copy of the final 7 version as a VM since 10 killed some software.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

DeltaOrionis wrote:

Also, out of curiosity, how long have been without formating a Windows computer? My current record seems to be around 3 years.

I've just checked and my current Windows 10 has been on the PC since June 2015! This was an in-place upgrade from Windows 7 which I installed in May 2014 when moving to 64 bit. For those of you who are cringing already, please note that I have changed mobos twice in that period.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8