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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • First things first: Synology as a beginner NAS is perfect! It’s what I recommend to everyone that is getting started out. So good move there.

    I think you should get a four-bay NAS. You don’t have to put four drives in it; you can put two drives in it and have an upgrade path for later. Plus the drives are far easier to install and remove. The processor will also be better in a four-bay NAS, which will give you more options if you want to play around with a docker container or run a VM.

    To answer your questions:

    1. If the NAS you choose has a USB port on it, you will be able to connect things like external hard drives, thumb drives, etc. NASes with USB3 connectors support USB 3 drives. Just be sure to use a file system that is not proprietary. So NTFS is out, but exFat is fine.
    2. I have connected to volumes on the NAS and have connected the NAS to other volumes without issues. It will work fine.
    3. I had two NASes sitting right next to my head in my office at ear level — probably the worst case scenario for noise. I barely noticed them. I could hear them crunching away during backups, but it wasn’t bad. I never heard a fan running — just the internal drives making their read/write noises.
    4. The drives fail before the NASes do. Synology had some issues with bult-in power supplies going bad after a few years. Their modern NASes now have plugs with a power brick on the cable, which I assume was in response to this issue. It’s a lot less expensive to replace a power cable than a whole NAS! But beyond that one issue (which affected one NAS of mine), the NASes I’ve been using have lasted for … oh, 8 years now.
    5. There are many choices for syncing data with your synology NAS. They provide Synology Drive, which gives you a local drop-box-like folder syncing option. They support rsync, and they provide HyperBackup, which is a block-level backup utility. You can choose a Synology shared drive as the destination for a Time Machine backup on a Mac. (I assume you can do this with Windows’ backup solution, but I’ve never personally used it.)






  • Using the search bar in iPad OS to solve equations does not require access to the internet.

    If you have a keyboard, press command-space. You can then enter an equation that you want to solve in the search bar. If the syntax is correct, it will give you the solution. Try this equation as an example:

    (2+pi)/(3^3)

    It will display this result: 0.1904293575

    If you press enter and you do have internet access, then it will send the equation to Safari and execute a search in your default search engine. I’m not sure why it odes that; that doesn’t seem too useful.

    Some other operations you can do in the search bar:

    sqrt(n), cos(n), sin(n), tan(n), log(n), ln(n), etc.

    Some other functions that I’ve used in Excel also work in the search bar, such as min(12,2)

    My guess is that it supports many or all of the functions that are supported in Numbers.

    With this, you should be able to quickly solve just about anything you would type into a calculator app.



  • What bothers me is that Apple doesn’t document its features very completely. Here’s an example:

    In CarPlay, I do a lot of navigating using Apple Maps. I discovered years ago that I could say “Details” to Siri to get the map to zoom in to allow me to see upcoming turns. I could say “overview” to get it to zoom out to show me the whole trip on the map. Very useful! I had to discover this feature by accident, though. As far as I know, there’s no button in the interface to do this, and there certainly isn’t a list of commands that Siri users can use, CarPlay or otherwise.

    Even more infuriating is that this feature was removed about six months ago. Does it exist under some other spoken command? Who knows? Apple doesn’t document anything!




  • Seeing people recommend nginx proxy manager, I’ve tried to set this up but never managed to get the certificates to work from letsencrypt (“internal server error” when trying to get one). When I finally got it working a while ago (I think I imported a cert), any proxy I tried to setup just sent me to the Synology login page.

    I think WebStation is causing this. I just investigated my Synology NAS and discovered that the default web portal is redirecting ports 80 and 443 to the synology login portal (which lives in ports 5000 and 5001 depending on whether you use SSL or not.)





  • It’s scaring me how similar your situation is to mine! I also just finished scanning in a bunch of photos that my grandmother took. I chose to host the photos in the Photos app, and considered for a long time whether I would let that sync up to iCloud. Sure, the photos would exist on Apple’s cloud. But if I die, they can only be accessed from my Apple devices. If someone can’t get into them for any reason, they’re as good as gone, because Apple – as good a company as it is when it comes to customer service – can’t be counted on to let anyone else into my account to retrieve data.

    So I stored them in Photos, and will store copies of them on my NAS, in hopes that having them in multiple locations will increase the chances that someone else can access them. Same thing goes with my data – I ignore iCloud, but I store that data on my Macbook Pro, inside of its periodic backup, on my NAS, on the backup of the NAS, and potentially in the future, on a thumb drive. More locations means more chances of being able to get at the files in the event of a catastrophe.