2021-03-02 - Synology

With the internet down I started looking into sorting out a few of my machines, organzing small, content rich files. I like audio books but without the internet or a smart device audible audio books become a pain in the ass. You can play them from the web using the Audible player but you can't exactly download and play them unless you use compatible players or compatibe sortwas so I looked into something I had done in the past,stripping DRM so that I could use them on anything like my cheap little sandisk. I ended up sitting at my computer until 6am pulling down and removing DRM. Hours and hours of content in such small files.

An openreach engineer turned up to take a look at our phone line that they packed in a few days ago. My biggest fear was that they were just going to lift and shift the line, taking a problematic line and trading it with another user who has a good line. If the person who the shift is given to doesn't really use that much bandwidth or isn't hugely reliant on the internet, they may not notice the lift had ever happened so they may not ever complain about it. I guess in the companies eyes thats the problem solved but to me it seems like a cop out. We should all have access to the services that we are paying for. I would much prefer a company actually invest in and improve their infrastructure rather than squeezing every last drop of profit they can out of ailing technology.

We took delivery of a Synology DS720+ NAS and an 8TB drive. Now I can start to move files off of the main machines, put them on the NAS and then wipe the machines. I can keep them as near empty as possible now and just pull from the NAS when needed. So far its pretty neat. Setup was simple enough, plug and play, search for IP and then cofigure the rest from the devies web interface. Its got an absolute ass ton of features, most of which I will never use BUT its cool in that it almost has a split personality. If you have no idea what you are doing, it has a preset mode for folk like that and it also has an advanced mode where you can go in, tweak all kinds of things all the way down to configuring how you want storage to be used, how you want to setup raids and all that.

Now I have to pull my finger out, transfer all of my files over from the currently active machines and then spend god knows how long organising the stuff.