

My Linux distro already comes with a PDF merger. Let’s get some PDF files to merge.
$ for i in $(seq 1 5); do echo $i >$i.txt; pandoc -o $i.pdf $i.txt; done
Now I’ve got five PDF files to merge.
$ pdfunite *.pdf merged.pdf
And done.
Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.


My Linux distro already comes with a PDF merger. Let’s get some PDF files to merge.
$ for i in $(seq 1 5); do echo $i >$i.txt; pandoc -o $i.pdf $i.txt; done
Now I’ve got five PDF files to merge.
$ pdfunite *.pdf merged.pdf
And done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LRC_(file_format)
For time-synchronized lyrics.
It looks like my Scandroid audio files from Bandcamp have embedded non-synchronized lyrics.
$ metaflac --list *08*.flac
[snip]
comment[12]: UNSYNCEDLYRICS=Beware the shadows of the drones
Destruction wrapped in pretty silicone
They’ve taken everyone I’ve known
And now I walk these empty streets alone
In my memory the past is fading
The future has been redesigned
It’s hard to focus on it when I’m running out of time
Surrounded by streetlights at midnight
My destination is unknown
I walk these empty streets alone
Digital dreams thrive in the moonlight
I’m only flesh, circuit and bone
I walk these empty streets alone
Beware the faces of the clones
Deception sent from Neo-Tokyo
They’ve erased everyone I’ve known
And still I walk these empty streets alone
I don’t know how widespread that is.
Note that lyrics are themselves copyrighted works, regarding simply sharing them. That is, if you want to create, say, “Lyricsnet, the new Fediverse service” or something like that, you may attract attention from IP owners.


You can see every hop an IP packet takes at IP level with traceroute or mtr.
Do you get many hallucinations?
Magewell Pro Capture card
I’ve been kind of shifting towards use of USB devices over internal cards.
All of the USB devices that I have still can be connected to computers. Ditto for DE-9 serial ports, though I might need a USB adapter.
But I’ve seen ISA->PCI/AGP->PCIe obsolete a lot of old hardware that I’ve had sitting around, and that’s just on the PC. That includes my video capture hardware.
If you’re willing to wait until 2028 when memory prices are expected to drop, and if you’re willing to get new hardware if memory prices drop, I’d give real consideration to waiting until then. There’ll also probably be better hardware and better models then.
If you can constrain yourself to MoE-based LLMs, they’ll generally deal better from a performance standpoint with not entirely fitting in VRAM better than non-MoE LLMs, as experts may not get loaded into VRAM at all.


Just as a warning, this post is liable to be deleted due to Rule 3. I had an earlier hardware post that I commented on deleted for this reason earlier today.


Why am I not surprised to hear APC is crap compared to Eaton?
Keep in mind that this isn’t my personal experience talking here. I also don’t know if the user in question is correct, or if it might be specific to some portion of the respective brands — both make a wide range of UPSes, from inexpensive to pretty pricey. But I did remember reading that, and it did seem potentially germane to OPs problem, so…shrug
Someone with a multitester or oscilloscope or something and some of those units could probably examine further, see what the actual behavior is for a given model.


My UPS (APC)
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/117oa9i/why_is_eaton_ups_so_much_more_expensive_than_apc/
Why is Eaton UPS so much more expensive than APC and Cyberpower?
In what ways is Eaton so much better that it can demand nearly 2x the price?
UK person here, so not sure how it differs country to country, but every APC UPS we’ve had has excelled in utterly trashing the batteries. Where I have to change batteries in an APC every 18-24 months, an Eaton will go five or six years without killing them.
There’s some further discussion talking about how the APC units hold the charge voltage at a high level, and the Eaton ones, once the batteries reach target voltage, bring it back down and only bring the charging voltage up occasionally for brief periods to maintain the charge in the battery.


I was originally going to use for my important documents
Not quite what you’re asking, but if your concern is avoiding data loss, if you don’t already, I’d set up a backup before I started setting up a RAID or similar setup.


Gotcha. Yeah, the stuff in fstab is just a convenience; it’s equivalent to running a bunch of mount commands at boot. You might be able to just run “mount” again without the '-o remount" option. I was just listing that in case you were seeing some kind of errors in trying to manually mount it.


Nah, that’s good. What I mean is, if it’s in /etc/fstab, it should be possible to manually mount it without a reboot. Have you tried manually remounting it after power comes back?


Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue?
I don’t know why you’d need a reboot to remount the thing. Are you just not familiar with how to add something to /etc/fstab and mount it manually and are relying on some kind of auto-mounting system that only happens to run at boot, or is it giving some kind of error?
If an error, what happens when you do:
$ sudo mount -o remount /mnt/the-mount-point
?


I was going to mention that, but also that while I’m sure that it’d handle power loss while it’s unmounted the filesystem I don’t know what happens if the backing storage goes away while it’s in use.


rsync is a fine tool, but it’s not really for backups. It’s for unidirectionally syncing data, which is part of a backup.
There are tools that use librsync to do a backup system, like rdiff-backup or duplicity.
I have used rdiff-backup in the past, but restic supports deduping data keyed off content rather than filename, which is functionality that I rather like having. I drive a restic job from backupninja, which handles doing things like notifying you if a backup has failed.


I’m not personally familiar with Synology’s products, but if what’s going on is that you’re using some built-in feature of a Synology NAS to copy files from a USB drive to the NAS and seeing an error, I’d probably try copying that particular file to somewhere else on a PC, cutting the NAS out of the loop, to make sure that you don’t have, say, a corrupt filesystem where attempts to read the file contents are failing.
Desktop PC with a lotta hard drives in it and big fans that don’t have to spin fast and make a lot of noise.
I use a USB DAS JBOD enclosure with fans, which is also an option if you have a mini-PC and just want a bunch of drive space.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCDDGHMJ
This particular enclosure has physical buttons that lock in place so that the power state is restored on power loss, something that (to my surprise) a number of USB DAS enclosures apparently don’t do.
You could try reducing the fan speed. That might be okay, if the hardware doesn’t actually need the cooling. If the BIOS has fan curves, go fiddle with that. If it doesn’t, dedicated fan controllers do exist.
If the server is a standard ATX motherboard and if your rack has vertical space, you can also probably get a new ATX case of whatever sort you want, preferably taller, and get something with larger, slower fans and transplant the hardware. A lot of rack servers are vertically-cramped to let a datacenter put as many in a rack as possible, so you get stuff like 1U machines with those dinky 30mm fans. In general, the larger the fan, the less noise per airflow.
searches
https://www.amazon.com/RackChoice-Mini-ITX-Rackmount-Chassis-Standard/dp/B0D296DVD8
I’ve never used that, but it’s a 3U and has three 120mm fans.
If you don’t care about cost, there are also sound-isolated racks. These have some sort of sound-blocking material like plywood on the outside and sound-absorbing foam on the inside. I have been interested in these in the past, because I would like one, but everything I’ve seen has been absolutely obscenely-priced, probably because datacenters don’t care about noise, and few people are running racks in homes or offices. I doubt that the people that sell them get much volume.
EDIT: Example sound-isolated rack:
https://tripplite.eaton.com/smartrack-quiet-server-rack-18u-sound-suppression~SRQ18U
Rule #2.
Rule #3.
Rule #7.
Rule #8.
Like, he literally managed to violate half of the community rules in one post.