I recently had a drive fail in my 4 bay nas. Amusingly, synology branded drives seem like they’re pretty close to p ice parity with OE drives these days.

Solid natural wood is a horrible material for loudspeaker cabinets. Granted, this fact isn’t limited to just speakers. Wood expands and contracts with humidity, which means making boxes of any type out of solid wood complicated. Cabinet doors have floating panels in the center for exactly this reason. That’s why you should use breadboard ends if you want to frame a wood table, otherwise your table will risk warping and cracking. There’s also the whole non-uniform density thing. Most loudspeakers use something like MDF as a substrate and will veneer the outside. MDF is both stable and uniformly dense, which makes achieving a “dead” (or non-resonate) enclosure a lot easier.

As someone with a foot in Windows and Mac, they both suck for different reasons and you’re trading pain in one for pain in the other.

Windows sucks because of all the stupid one drive and AI garbage. No, I don’t want my desktop and tons of other directories in one drive, stop asking me. The constant migration of settings out of control panel is maddening. Windows 10 end of life is fine, but cutting off older PCs from windows 11 for “reasons” was an absolutely horrible choice.

Mac is fine if you do super basic computing, but if you want to do much of anything it’s very annoying out of the box. Window management is annoying unless you get an app like magnet, the ribbon can’t be displayed on dual monitors and there’s no way of fixing the primary monitor, keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent across applications like command delete and keyboard shortcuts in general suck (command + shift + 3-5), the OS greatly dislikes network storage, etc etc. Macs were somewhat isolated from marketing needing a “new” OS every year until recently. Now they’re in the change for the sake of things to list on the new OS page trap.

Linux isn’t without fault, but my experience has been much more pleasant.

More work location flexibility is certainly something I would appreciate. The company I work for is hybrid and with the looming economy mess I’ve been putting off job hunting. I would much rather be somewhere with a network should things go sideways.

Noise cancelling headphones and background music helps a ton when I’m in the office. Stupid open office…

White collar professionals who spend their days developing and deploying software or working on compute infrastructure? Sure, some of them have been on Linux for decades. Although many big corpos love Windows and Microsoft products, so at best you’re going to have a foot in both worlds if you work at one of these companies.

Some admin jobs that don’t require bespoke software (ie very little beyond say an office suite) have started making the jump recently to save $$.

Basically every other white professional that needs to work on a computer with industry specific software like people in medical, engineers, business? Odds are they use windows since the software they use for their job is probably only built for Windows and maybe Mac if they’re lucky. Very few employers are going to mass deploy Linux to run applications via Wine. These employers have support contracts for the major software products their employees use and they won’t get support if they’re not running software on its native OS.

This whole reply was top shelf!

I am not sure that I completely understand your premise. Products are generally available during a depression. The best financial course of action today is to save money… unless the dollar becomes devalued too, which will make imports more expensive.

In terms of finances, doing things to lowering your fixed monthly bills is always a good idea - looming depression or otherwise. Since you’re in Texas and you’re all engineers, perhaps look into solar and/or battery storage for electricity? Do the math first obviously. A small(er) garden can help save some $$ but you have to be careful how much you spend on it.

If you’re coming from the perspective of wanting to provide value to your family, simply helping out around the house (cooking, cleaning, etc) and taking on projects you’ve all been putting off will probably go a long way. Your labor might not be cheaper than a builder’s now, but… Doing home repair/improvements, landscaping, building an out-building, building some outdoor shade, etc could be really appreciated.

If you’re looking to earn some $$, farming seems fairly depression proof, but should a depression hit people won’t be buying cash crops. Relative to labor input farming will likely not be very lucrative. Starting a side hustle/business might be a better option. It seems like the demand for repairing basically everything would go up. People will also be looking for cheap local distractions.

The YOLO option is to buy a ton of imports from a country you expect will have their currency strengthen relative to the dollar and then sell those items once the cost of them goes up, but this sounds super risky.

It’s good to hear that you have equipment already. If the wooded areas of your property have been that way for a while, odds are the soil in that area is pretty good. Granted, clearing the trees could take some work.

Before buying anything I suggest focusing on your goals and planning. If you’re more on the hobby vs commercial side of the spectrum I suggest starting small. Our garden is only 175 square feet of beds and pots, but it greatly reduces the amount of produce we buy during the summer and fall (yay zone 6).

I have another idea, but am going to break it out as a top level comment.

If you’re thinking about growing anything start considering:

• Your goals. Are you looking to sell some/all of your crop? Is this meant for sustince? A supplement to groceries?
• Land management. Do you want to let fields go fallow? Rotate crops? Grow cover and/or summer/winter crops? Till or no till?
• Equipment. Do you need to buy anything to help with maintenance, plowing, planting, harvestint, or processing the harvest?
• What you intend to grow. Do you want a few main crops? A ton of verity? Do you care about how easy it is to store? How do you want to balance calory density, nutrition, and flavor? Are you looking for single year or multi-year crops?
• What grows in your zone?
• Layout. How are you going to layout the planting area(s)? Do you need to worry about fencing? How about irrigation? Do you care about containing crops and/or weeds?
• Required inputs. Things like water, fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, etc. You will want pest and fungicides even if you’re going organic

Note that all of the above are strongly interrelated.

We have a decent size fruit/veg garden that’s mostly annuals. Despite having done this for 10 years, the last thing on my mind for the next season is whether or not I should buy fertilizer now.

A final suggestion: go in open eyed to the amount of effort this will take. The amount of labor required by our garden follows a boom and bust cycle. On some weeks I’m out there once for an hour. On other weeks I’m out there multiple times a week. If you’re not able to devote continual time to the garden then your crops, and yeilds, will suffer. Harvesting and processing is time consuming and is greatly influenced by what you grow. Doing something with perishable crops before they go bad can also be a challenge. Even with 40 sq ft of raspberries our family of four can’t keep up so we have to jam/can/freeze them or turn them into compost. The same is true of tomatoes and a bunch of other produce - especially if you plant crops that actually taste good and you pick them when ripe.

Same