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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I think you keep missing my point. This isn’t about a “usual web form”. You aren’t entering your address or something. You’re configuring a service or server. Those are very different worlds. I understand that those kinds of forms where you enter your address (or whatever) wouldn’t ever have a default in there. In that context a default doesn’t make any sense (default name, default street, default city?). And even in the cases where it might, it would be - as you pointed out - unexpected for the kinds of users that usually fill out “web forms”.

    When you’re configuring a server/service, that’s a very different world. Many fields could have defaults, and you wouldn’t want to hard-code those into your config. That is what this is. It’s essentially a web interface for a config file, which often has default values for any field you don’t specify for a variety of reasons. Defaults DO have special meaning here. That’s the whole point I’m trying to make! In that world it very much makes sense. The best way to show it is obviously a matter of personal taste, I actually like (and prefer) the greyed out way for reason I mentioned above.


  • Being shown what’s the default isn’t the same as having it actually in the field. For example the default might change, then these values would change with the default. There are also cases where they are inherited or something similar, where the upstream value isn’t as fixed as defaults normally are. So there is a functional difference to showing you a greyed out default and actually having that default be in the field.

    Especially for things that essentially are a web interface for a config file where the config file gets larger with values that aren’t needed (this includes both NPM and Proxmox, as examples). Instead of like 3-4 lines it could now be like 20. It also becomes unclear when looking at the values later if they were actually set to that value intentionally or if it just happens to be the default that got filled in because some UI was used that filled all fields with their default values.

    Showing the default outside in a label or as a tooltip-hover is an option, but has implications for the space needed and readability. And this way is actually much clearer if you want to look over a config and you need for example the default port or something, it’s in the exact place you expect it, shown in grey to make it clear that it wasn’t set intentionally but that it’s just the default. In some UIs there’s room for defaults, in some not. I personally vastly prefer them to be shown like this, as you might have guessed already.




  • always […] why would it be an implicit default?

    Cause that’s what I intuitively expected, because in the tools that I use daily, that how it is there. Here are some examples of other administrative web interfaces that use grey to show you the implicit default that I happen to have running and could find in like 3 minutes. So much for your overconfident “always”:

    • Proxmox PVE or PBS. Basically every dialog. Example network interface configuration: example
    • TrueNAS, example “Add Dataset”
    • OPNsense, example “Firewall Rule”, the destination port range has an implicit default and is grey:

    Note: I’m not talking about a form to fill in your name with “john doe” or whatever, and even that I can’t even remember seeing either. Cause it just says “Name:” and nobody needs an example.




  • ARC is the in-memory cache used by ZFS. If it’s completely off the effect can be dramatic. Under no circumstances should a larger cache cause anything to get slower, ever. Even the raspi didn’t have memory that is that slow that this is a reasonable outcome. By default on most distros, ARC size is capped to 50% of physical system memory. Keep in mind it is a cache: if something else needs needs the RAM, it will be released.

    As a concrete example: I was recently working on a server where a maintenance task that should take like 12hrs or so at the worst somehow took 2 weeks (!) and still wasn’t finished. That was ARC being disabled.


  • What size is the ARC set to? I’ve seen cases where it was fully disabled, which (unsurprisingly) seemed to murder performance and is probably even worse when in such a CPU limited platform. You stating that only 1.5 GB of 16 GB were in use makes this seem likely.

    In general, if you care even remotely about performance, a raspberry pi is probably the wrong choice for a NAS. Even a single disk should have no issues saturating a 1gbe link. That being said, even a pi should manage 1 GBit/s on ZFS, especially when reading.



  • I’ve had nothing but issues with NC instant upload, and stopped using it. It’s error prone and needs constant hand holding for no good reason. It didn’t handle taking a picture and then deleting it instantly very well (and will throw your notifications at you for this, often more than 1). When you have limited connectivity it will utterly confuse itself and ask you to resolve conflicts for 100 files for no reason, when it could just checksum server and client files and notice they are all the exact same. Also when set to only upload on WiFi, and not being connected to WiFi it often still spams notifications that the “upload failed”, despite not being supposed to upload anything. And btw. it could upload files just fine, they failed only because upload on mobile is disabled!

    It’s a nightmare. Commonly also referred to as a cluster fuck.



  • Doing the calculation isn’t hard. It’s harder to know how much energy (be it electricity, gas, or whatever) you actually use. It also varies wildly with meals, as some need multiple stove tops (is that the right term?), possibly for varying lengths of time and/or the oven.

    Please note that you can not really deduce the energy consumption from a power rating, as those usually are max values and not what it’ll actually need.

    I have good enough energy monitoring that I can measure the usage (sort of), and having rather high electricity cost at around 0.40 €/kWh I do pay some attention to it. Running the oven for like an hour will be roughly 1€. Boiling water for pasta or something is probably more like 20 ct (includes cooking the pasta). Just using a lid actually helps a lot here if you make use of a lower power setting after reaching a boil and putting in the pasta.

    It’s gonna have to be a very elaborate meal to break 3€. So while it does matter and add up, compared to buying fully prepared food from a restaurant, it isn’t that dramatic even with very high energy prices like these.

    Cooking appliances use a lot of power, but they don’t run for whole days at a time, so the energy used also isn’t that dramatic. There’s a relatively recent video by technology connections that goes into detail, and might be of interest (link).