My ecotank died just like all the other inkjets. It went few weeks without printing and blue nozzle dried completely up and on the pipes I can see dried up ink on other colors as well. So I had to dig up old Brother HL3040 back to the duty which I retired after print quality started to drop (it needs new fuse unit or something similar, so not that big of a deal) and I thought having an option to print nice color pictures would be nice.

So, if you plan to run ecotank (which does have pretty good printing quality when it works) set up a scheduled task on your computer to print something, in color, quite frequently even if it wastes some ink and paper. I think the main issue with mine was that even if I print stuff somewhat often there was a period where I only needed b&w documents so color nozzles went unused for a while.

I might get a new set of nozzles and ink tanks for my unit as it’s a ton cheaper than a whole new printer, but if you’re looking for a printer this is something to take into consideration, regardless of their marketing material.

Edit: Mine is Epson, didn’t know that ecotank term is used by other manufacturers.

The actual number will be much higher.

Ukraine reports almost 9000 tanks destroyed. Some time ago I made a rough calculation on what wikipedia lists on Russian military hardware and based on that they had around 14 000 tanks before the war started. I don’t think that even Russians themselves know how many of those are in any kind of usable and/or repairable state and which are just scrap metal laying on some field in the middle of nowehere stripped of anything useful.

Additionally, Ukraine reported destroyed tanks in single digits per day for quite a while, but for last few days the numbers have gone up, I’d guess because of counter attacks in Kursk and/or because Ukraine is finally receiving some ammunition for their hardware. Whatever the case might be, majority of Russian tanks are destroyed anyways and I’d guess that what’s left is soviet relics and a significant portion of those are just scrap metal (which is of course a useful resource) instead of anything even close to combat ready.

more specific to a subset of people who have time to bother

And that subset of people needs to have at least some kind of mindset to learn the viable minimum skills to even start with and a will to learn more and more and more. I’ve done various kinds of hosting as a career for couple of decades and as things change I’m fighting myself if it’s worth my time and effort to keep my home services running or should I just throw money to google/apple/microsoft/whoever to store my stuff and manage my IOT stuff and throw the hardware into recycling bin.

I have the skill set required for whatever my home network might need up to a point that I could somewhat easily host a small village from my home (money is of course a barrier after a certain point), but I find myself more and more often thinking if it’s worth the effort. My Z-wave setup needs some TLC as something isn’t playing nicely and it causes all kinds of problems with my automations, my wifi network could use a couple of sockets on the walls to work better, I should replace my NVR with something open source to include couple of more cameras around the yard and have better movement recognition and cameras should go to their own VLAN and so on.

Most of that stuff is pretty basic to set up and configure (well, that z-wave network is a bit of it’s own thing to manage) and it would actually be pretty nice to have all the things working as they should and expand on what I have to make my everyday life even more simpler than it already is. But as there’s a ton of things going on in life I just rather spend few hours gaming from my sofa than tinker with something.

That’s of course just me, if you get your reward and enjoyement on your network then good for you. Personally I think I’ll keep various things running around, but right now in this place I’m at, the self hosting, home network and automation and all that is more of a chore than a hobby. And I’m pretty sure I don’t like it.

I agree with you, nuclear response would make things very difficult with China and their allies, but there’s plenty of traditional firepower available directed to Russia if things escalate to that point and should Russia attack with nukes I don’t think they’ll have a lot of support for their actions from the east. And triggering nuclear response would likely end up in a MAD scenario which is something I think (and hope) no one really wants to see trough.

But that still leaves a pretty big field to work with traditional ammunition and a skilled pilot from Sweden could still reach Moscow in 20 minutes or so to turn multiple military targets within the city into a rubble. And there’s plenty of airfields closer than Stockholm with equally capable fighter jets. For the ground force, Finns and Estonians could at least in theory reach Moscow in 10-12 hours since majority of troops defending it are already down on some field in Ukraine and our artillery forces move pretty damn fast.

The amount of destruction Russia could cause is of course still an enormous humanitarian crisis, but even if they could turn Kiyv to wasteland (and kill millions while doing it), it still wouldn’t change the outcome of full Nato response without any bullshit politics limiting on actions if anyone is allowed to strike on the Russian soil.

Medvedev found keys for the booze cabinet again? They seem to happily forget the fact that Moscow is well within reach of multiple Nato countries by now. Obviously a ton of things need to change before anyone with a gun is standing on a red square, but Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Poland (among others) are quite capable of hitting the Kreml (in theory, and in practise if needed) with fighter jets in less than 30 minutes. Additionally their ports opening to gulf of Finland are in reach of both Finns and Estonians with traditional artillely, and at least we in Finland are pretty capable and accurate with our hardware.

So, even if they find some old soviet relic still functional, Nato has multiple options to level multiple cities at Russia before their missile hits the ground. Nuclear attack against Ukraine would of course be a humongous tragedy with terrible price on civil casualties, but I’m pretty confident that it would be the last thing the Russia we currently know would do as a country.

As far as I know it is the default way of handling multiple DNS servers. I’d guess that at least some of the firmware running around treats them as primary/secondary, but based on my (limited) understanding at least majority of linux/bsd based software uses one or the other more or less randomly without any preference. So, it’s not always like that, but I’d say it’s less comon to treat dns entries with any kind of preference instead of picking one out randomly.

But as there’s a ton of various hardware/firmware around this of course isn’t conclusive, for your spesific case you need to dig out pretty deep to get the actual answer in your situation.

have an additional external DNS server

While I agree with you that additional DNS server is without a question a good thing, on this you need to understand that if you set up two nameservers on your laptop (or whatever) they don’t have any preference. So, if you have a pihole as one nameserver and google on another you will occasionally see ads on things and your pihole gets overrided every now and then.

There’s multiple ways of solving this, but people often seem to have a misinformed idea that the first item on your dns server list would be preferred and that is very much not the case.

Personally I’m running a pihole for my network on a VM and if that’s down for a longer time then I’ll just switch DNS servers from DHCP and reboot my access points (as family hardware is 99% on wifi) and the rest of the family has working internet while I’m working to bring rest of the infrastructure back on line, but that’s just my scenario, yours will most likely be more or less different.

And, just to clarify for those who didn’t click the link, that’s gap in usage. So Russia still shoots twice as many shells than Ukraine, but it’s getting closer. Article doesn’t mention if that’s because Ukraine has more shells available or if Russia shoots less, I’d guess it’s because of both.

losing 1380 personnel, but only 1 tank

That’s what I’ve been following too. And additionally, based on quick’n’rough estimation from wikipedia numbers, artillery reserves are pretty much depleted too, so Russia is fighting on what ever soviet era relics they can refurbish and what they can manufacture/buy. I don’t think they’ll have short of ammunition any time soon, but diminishing numbers of barrels should start to show up on these statistics ‘in the near future’, whenever that might be.

My bank uses 6 digit ‘customer number’ (which is set by the bank) and that’s verified with an app and a personal PIN (app shows ‘login attempt ABCD at mm.dd. hh:mm’ where ABCD is shown on login page too) or via SMS OTP (again with ‘ABCD’ verification). And again with personal pin + app or OTP to confirm transactions. The app itself can be protected with a fingerprint or phone pin and every new installation needs to be registered to the system, so I can’t just use my phone app to access my wifes account (or anyone elses) but I still can map multiple accounts (like corporate ones) to the same installation.

I think that’s pretty reasonable approach.

Did they damage that target? Disable it? Destroy it?

I haven’t seen any public statistics for this, but based on my understanding, if you hit pretty much any modern tank on top hatch or some other weak spot with a javelin it’ll at least disable the tank as it pretty much melts everything inside the crew space/engine bay. Those might be repairable, but most likely not in the location.

And what Ukrainians will most likely encounter is not a modern tank, but a T-62 or some even older soviet relic, which doesn’t have active armor and those can be stopped with a good throw of molotov cocktail. So, my somewhat uneducated guess would be that every decent hit is a destroyed tank. Of course there’s missed shots, less than optimal impacts and all that, so actual number isn’t 100%, but I’d guess that it’s not far off.

And for tanks there’s also a guestion if Ukraine can even find anything to shoot at. On Ukrainian reports destroyed tanks have been in single digits per day for quite a while, so either Russia has learned on how to defend their gear or (in my opinion more likely) they just don’t have that many tanks anymore. Obviously across the whole Russia there’s a ton of relics around, starting from T-34’s from WW1, but I guess no one knows how many of those are in condition where they could even move on their own and even if they did it’s guestionable how effective those would be on todays battle field.

But javelins are still pretty neat hardware and they can easily destroy pretty much anything on the field, the only guestion is if Ukraine can get those close enough to hit anything interesting.

Unfortunately they didn’t get all of them. Russia has sent a ton of drones and missiles at the last few days, offically targeting energy infrastructure, including a dam near Kyiv.

As a rule of thumb, if you pay more money you get a better product. With spinning drives that almost always means that more expensive drives (in average) run longer than cheaper ones. Performance is another metric, but balancing those is where the smoke and mirrors come into play. You can get a pretty darn fast drive for a premium price which will fail in 3-4 years or for a similar price you can get a bit slower drive which will last you a decade. And that’s in average. You might get a ‘cheap’ brand high-performance drive to run without any issues for a long long time and you might also get a brand name NAS drive which will fail in 2 years. Those averages start to play a role if you buy drives by a dozen.

Backblaze (among others) publish their very real world statistics on which drives to choose (again, on average), but for home gamer that’s not usually an option to run enough drives to get any benefits from statistical point of view. Obviously something from HGST or WD will most likely outperform any no-name brand from aliexpress and personally I’d only get something rated for 24/7 use, like WD RED, but it’s not a guarantee that those will actually run any longer as there’s always deviations from their gold standard.

So, long story short, you will most likely get a significantly different results depending on which brand/product line you choose, but it’s not guaranteed, so you need to work around that with backups, different raid scenarios (likely raid 5 or 6 for home gamer) and acceptable time for downtime (how fast you can get a replacement, how long it’ll take to pull data back from backups and so on). I’ll soon migrate my setup from somewhat professional setting to more hobbyist one and with my pretty decent internet connectivity I most likely go with 2-1-1 setup instead of the ‘industry standard’ 3-2-1 (for serious setup you should probably learn what those really mean, but in short: number of copies existing - number of different storage media - number of offsite copies),

On what you really should use, that depends heavily on your usage. For a media library a 5400rpm bigger drive might be better than a bit smaller 7200rpm drive and then there’s all kinds of edge cases plus potential options for ssd-caching and a ton of other stuff, so, unfortunately, the actual answer has quite a few of variables, starting from your wallet.

While that might play a very small part on their strategy I don’t think anyone in Ukraine thinks twice before shooting it should the situation really need it. It would make a nice trophy, agreed, but I think the mentality is that if it doesn’t burn then nice and even if it does the charred remains are still a trophy and a big PR win via social media.

I don’t know how willing they are to give up Crimea and I suppose one of the reasons the war is happening now is that the west closed their eyes when Russia annexed areas from Ukraine. At least on the news Crimea is often described as ‘temporarily occupied’, so I think at least offically they’re targeting 1991 borders.

But yeah, it’s solely up to Ukraine, and I believe they’ll have very similar support regardless of the border, at least as long as they’re not claiming anything beyond 1991 borders from Russia.

I’m not exactly sure what happened between 1991 and 2013 around there, but I’d argue that they should have the original indepencence borders and that’s it. But it’s not my call by any stretch, Ukraine and their people are the ones who should settle where the border is.

And the global west should support their cause. Sure, it’s not particulary easy for anyone right now, but for the majority of the people in EU supporting Ukraine is financially mostly a inconvenience. You might pay a slightly bit more on your bread and butter, but currently no one is coming for you with guns, which is very much a reality in Ukraine right now.

I’ve seen my share of fire around metal and the amount of steel on those things the fire shown on the picture doesn’t do much. Of course all the plastic on hoses/wiring, seat covers and things like that, the crew obviously included, wouldn’t be fine. You obviously couldn’t just hop in and drive the thing off from that point and if your task was just to disable the tank and trust that you have the area under control so that it couldn’t be recovered for repairs any time soon, sure, the first drone would have been well enough.

I don’t really know either, but based on the videos from the lines it seems like Ukraine gladly spend few cheap drones to make absolutely sure that the things they stop won’t move again. Additionally, some models, even if their crew is dead and the engine is dead, can still autonomously respond to incoming fire (assuming of course that there’s still juice in the batteries and the weapons systems work), so that alone for me is enough to spend another drone to confirm that the thing is dead and stays that way.

It’s hard to tell. First one likely detonated on impact to the drone cage/camouflage and shaped charge possibly breached the roof from the turret and/or engine bay depending on where it actually hit. But I don’t think the “tank” part of that took too much damage. That might have been running with somewhat minor repairs and maybe an engine swap.

The second hit was between the turret and the frame next to main barrel which absoutely rendered that thing as scrap. I’d say that a single drone is pretty cheap price to verify that this particular unit isn’t coming after you ever again. Specially since Russia has very limited capabilities to produce new ones.

In theory you just send a link to click and that’s it. But, as there always is a but, your jitsi setup most likely don’t have massive load balancing, dozens of locations for servers and all the jazz which goes around random network issues and everything else which keeps the internet running.

There’s a ton of things well outside your control and they may or may not bite you in the process. Big players have tons of workforce and money to make sure that kind of things don’t happen and they still do now and then. Personally, for a single use scenario like yours, I wouldn’t bother, but I’m not stopping you either, it’s a pretty neat thing to do. My (now dead) jitsi instance once saved a city council meeting when teams had issues and that got me a pretty good bragging rights, so it can be pretty rewarding too.

Guy reporting to Putin and Ukrainian chiefs have quite opposite interests to give estimations and I don’t know how accurately you can draw lines on the maps, so I’d guess that the russian guy underestimates the area by a lot in a hope that his window doesn’t suddenly break with his body and Ukraine likes to give a round number, even if reality is 830km² or whatever (I don’t believe that they’d publicly lie about the area to be 3 times bigger than actual, but 20% on those cirumstances is pretty much just a rounding error).