I always plug in. I don’t know if it works with calibre server.

My unmodified kobo syncs with calibre.

I wish you both the best.

Damn… I feel for you. It sounds like you are in a tough spot. There’s lots of good advice on this page, and the one thing I will add is to protect and keep working on your relationship. Money is the core component of many (or was it most?) relationship problems.

You can get through it, but (IMHO) you need your wife right there with you (or at least, I did). We were doing ok until I tried to start a business and dropped my 9-5 job. Revenue was slim, and then at one point I earned nothing for 6 months. We were on the bones of our arse - living off a meagre kindergarten teacher’s wage paying rent and food. Without my wife, we would have drowned. She did amazing things in budgeting down to the last penny, no luxuries, riding everywhere, spending time together. It was hard and there was no end in sight for a long time. We were very lucky and things turned around. But I would have not managed it without her (and her incredible budgets).

It sound like you have been deep in it for longer than we were, and I wish you all the best in working your way out.

While there is a slow, but steady, stream of interesting topics, the number of responses is typically in the 10s (at most) rather than hundreds or thousands. Often its just 0. And the quality of the responses is still lacking mostly, although some of the tech channels I follow usually have one or two people with good knowledge.

Plus… waaaay too many old memes. (Yeah… I know I can block them, but I do like living dangerously and browsing all sometimes to look for interesting channels)

Be wary of RAID 5 or 6.

They both have a « write hole » problem (or though much less so in RAID 6). Any power failure which causes an incomplete write can cause a complete RAID corruption - meaning all data is lost. Hardware RAID controllers usually have an onboard backup battery so they can store some information to complete operations should there be a sudden power failure. Software RAID does not have this, and you need to provide a UPS with automatic clean shutdown as the battery runs low using nut or some equivalent.

Some people go as far as to say that RAID 5 should never be used.

You also have very long recovery times when you replace a failed drive (days). Any other failure during this time means total data loss (of course RAID 6 gives you a second redundancy). Weekly Resyncs are very slow too (hours to days), and (unless you constrain your max throughput) will bring your system to its knees.

zfs does not suffer from these problems, BTW.

I run software RAID 5 via mdadm and have a UPS. I’ve replaced drives twice with no issues other than a slightly nervous long wait during recovery. I’m too cheap to buy the extra HDD for RAID 6, and may end up regretting it one day.

My $0.02c worth - I have run all sorts of servers at home over the years, and one of the main challenges around the hardware is managing heat.

I’ve used mini-ITX mobos and tiny cases for builds. They look gorgeous, but at some point, when you stick enough drives in there (assuming you can) or make the CPU/GPU busy, you are going to have a heat problem, or a noise problem, or both.

On my mythtv build I used M-itx and a gorgeous Lian Li small case. It was a beautiful add to my home theatre stack, but in the end I drilled a ton of small holes in the top and added a slow 140mm fan to control the heat without noise.

The same goes for my file server - it was a slightly larger case with no GPU, but once I added my 6th HDD and had a ton of services running, heat became an issue and I was having to add extra fans, which could only be 80mm so they ran fast and noisy.

My new build I’m going to go all the way with a Phanteks Enthoo Full Tower and a few 120mm fans. I’ve decided that looks don’t matter

The other problem for me with these tiny builds is cable management. I’m complete shit at it, and small builds requires some skills. A big case gives you space to spread those cables out.

Lastly, you can get ATX or EATX mobos with 6, 8 or more SATA connectors - room for growth! And there are very low power options available.

I’ll soon have the appleTV + TV upstairs, laptop in the office, and the monster server downstairs with cat-6 + Gb fibre throughout.

The thing to remember with these examples is that those companies would have royally fucked up their purchases. Big companies always impose a culture and a mindset.

AT&T would definately have crushed the internet with a monopoly - we would have had to use AT&T approved internet devices, and they would have brought long distance type charges to it. Oh so your email is going overseas? That’s an extra 10c.

Same with Google and Netflix. They were all able to continue with the founders vision and create something special.

Closed. Otherwise dog sneaks in, climbs up on the bed and falls asleep. The he slowly but surely takes over the whole bed.