I recently bought an external PCIe enclosure so I could make use of a specific PCIe device in an editing setup. One of the nice things about this particular enclosure is that it also happens to come with an m.2 slot for NVME drives as well.

Usually when I edit with my home set up, I'm provided with the storage by the client, and even if not, at the very least, video media, plus backups takes up a lot of room and NVME drives are expensive so I'd usually opt for something cheaper as the actual location for the footage and assets. I figured then that it might be take advantage of an NVME drive of a smaller, more affordable capacity and use it just as a location for video render cache that I just clear after every project wraps. The high speeds of these drives seems like it would be a good fit for this purpose.

However I've heard that SSDs, including NVME are famously short lived and have particularly short life spans in terms of number of write operations. Is that still the case and would the constant writing and clearing of relatively small video files actually be kind of the worst use of one of these drives?

My understanding between TB4 and TB3 is that they're essentially the same, it's just that the standard of TB4 essentially mandates that the device must do all that TB3 maybe could do. Minimum bandwidth is increased and I think I read something about power delivery minimums as well. This eGPU chassis I bought came with it's own TB4 cable, which is actually the first Thunderbolt cable I've seen that specifically says "4" on it.

I assume the reason they supplied this is because, given what it does, an eGPU chassis is going to need to support some pretty bandwidth for a GPU. In my case though, I'm actually using this chassis not for a balls to the wall kick ass Graphics card, but actually to allow me to attach an old and very humble i/o card from Blackmagic. It's currently working just fine for that purpose.

Thing is, the supplied TB4 cable is pretty short and the chassis along with the ATX power supply mounted on it makes for a pretty hefty desk-space consuming setup. I'd like to move the whole setup somewhere fairly far off from the laptop to save me some precious desk space. I looked up 2m thunderbolt 4 cables which I understand is the longest distance you can get for TB4 and still maintain bandwidth and while it's not too bad, the prices are high for a cable. It occurs to me though that since I'm barely using a fraction of the available bandwidth anyway, could I use other, cheaper, long cables. USB4 comes up a lot in my search for 2m TB4 cables for example. (although they are mostly from AliExpress so don't know how good an idea it is to buy from them). If the chassis has TB4 controllers in it, as does the laptop to which it's attached, can one just put a USB4 cable between them? Are they physically different?

For that matter, since my bandwidth needs are so tiny, could I just find cheaper, longer TB3 cables?

I don't know my terminology very well. I just bought this eGPU enclosure. It also comes with an m.2 slot I suspect that's probably what this 4 pin power slot is for.

I have a spare ATX PSU to power this thing with and it's not modular, the cables come out of the PSU box in a big messy bundle and there's no where to detach or attach cables. There's lots of different connectors that come out of this bundle but alas no square arrangement of 2 rows of 2 pins as needed by this chassis.

There are however 2 such connectors that are kind of joined together through a little plastic catch, but in a manner where you can slide them apart. It's clearly intended that you can be able to separate these if you want to, but them being attached to each other in the first place has me a little worried.

The cable from which they each branch has TKG written on it and each of the connectors has L and R printed on it respectively. If I separate them, I can definitely fit one in to the slot, but is there any reason one shouldn't do this?

UPDATE: It works!! Initially the chassis wouldn't power on but I discovered that if I simply don't plug in the 4 pin slot at all then it does. I'm pretty sure that slot is for powering an m.2 drive if you have one and that was one of the things that made me decide to buy this particular chassis so it doesn't look great but I'm hoping that if I actually had an m.2 drive to test it with, that plugging in that PSU connector to the 4 pin slot would work, but at the moment, when there is no such drive connected, the entire chassis doesn't power on. Even better still, the blackmagic card works!! This is great because the manufacturer actually responded to my email asking if it would work too late and I had already ordered it and they said it wouldn't work so the fact that it does is a big relief. Word of advice for anyone testing this with standard computer monitors instead of proper reference monitors like me, it might say "out of range" or similar on your monitor for a lot of standard video frame rates, but for testing purposes, I was able to get it to work at 60p. No good for a real project, but hopefully with a real reference monitor that wouldn't be an issue.

I occasionally do some paid editing work in my home suite. I use a MBP and I just use whatever storage I have left on external drives or buy new ones as the project budget permits. Most of the time, my work is done on-site using a production company's facilities so it's not a big time operation here at home.

I also like to download and watch video over my wifi to to TV or my phone in other rooms of the house (don't typically move the laptop much). I tend to use the laptop's internal drive for that.

I'm beginning to outgrow my storage for both purposes, but only just. I could continue as I am for quite some time, deleting media at home after I watch it, and buying physically fairly small drives to put away in cupboards for work. However, I'm thinking I could fix both storage needs for a very long time by spending a bit bigger (but not MUCH), and getting a proper RAID. My mind immediately went to NAS, but it occurs to me that, that mightn't necessarily be the most cost effective or efficient way to go given the limited scope of my needs.

My home network is very slow consumer equipment, and I have no ethernet infrastructure at all. I thought I could maybe just hook the NAS up to the laptop via ethernet but then at that point, isn't that just DAS with the extra complications of networking? Would I need a switch between the 2? My home streaming is just done over wifi, since everything is compressed media anyway.

If I buy a decent thunderbolt DAS RAID and expose it to the wifi network via the laptop, would the costs stack up in terms of power consumption and wear and tear of the expensive lappy (given it'd be powered on nearly constantly)? Are there NAS devices that I can directly attach to the lappy for editing, but leave on and connected to wifi for home streaming? Would it need any additional networking equipment in that use case? Can I run jellyfin on it? I feel like a NAS doesn't make sense but would like help puzzling this out.

I have been trying in vain to do this in both automator and shortcuts.

The trouble seems to be happening right at the very start. I can't seem to figure out how to get selected files from finder to be passed as input to a shell script running exiftool.

I actually thought this might be a good thing for me to test using chatGPT for as it's meant to be good at this type of thing and while I assume the shell scripts it was generating were probably good, it couldn't seem to get me passed this basic first step.

I've tried making the shortcut a quick action, which by default adds the 'receive' action to the shortcut, but somehow it seems to be impossible to get the output from that to be the input for the shell script, nothing works. This was tested with a few debugging steps to log the output and it definitely looks like that first step is where things are going wrong. I really don't get it. This was way harder than I expected.

I wouldn't want to find out the hard way. I have a BMD decklink 4k mini monitor PCIe card. I used to use it in a PC, but I upgraded to a laptop. To replace with an external input device is too expensive unless I downgrade capability significantly.

PCIe chassis are more expensive than expected but I've noticed ones that specifically call themselves 'eGPU enclosures'. For some reason when they're marketed to that specific purpose, they cost a lot less, probably because they often don't come with power supplies (which I actually have spare).

I'm looking at 2 such eGPU enclosures and they are a decent price and I think they should work, but I'm a little scared by them specifically saying "eGPU". Would I likely have any problems buying one of those for my PCIe device rather than for a graphics card? Or is PCIe, PCIe regardless?

I'm trying to avoid having to throw away my decklink mini monitor 4k that I used in my old PC build. It's a PCIe gen 2 4-lane card.

To replace this card with something new of similar function that uses external ports, I have to either buy something quite a bit worse in terms of function for a little bit more than my current PCIe version currently costs, or something equivalent in function for way, way more than the 4k decklink costs.

I figured best bet would be to just get a PCIe enclosure to keep using my old card with the new laptop but the costs of those enclosures are STAGGERING, just unbelievably high. The cheapest I could find is 2nd hand and so old it uses TB2 ports. I thought that might be okay with thunderbolt adaptors for modern connectors but it occurs to me that Apple Silicon driver support could be an issue. Any idea if it would even work?

When I want to find an app I haven't pinned to the home screen I swipe up from the bottom of the home screen to bring up a search bar where I can search for an app by name or scroll through list of all apps on the phone.

Thing is the search bar on my new pixel phone is actually a Google search bar that will search apps locally at the same time as providing web results, especially if it can't find the app by name.

It's a nice idea in theory but in practice I find it annoying, especially if I've just made a typo. Also, I'm just never going to use this search bar for web searching anyway because for that I would want my chosen browser so the web results are of no use to me.

I actually remember my old phone used to do what I wanted it to do, then one day it switched to what my new phone currently does and after a long time I found the solution to return it back to it's previous behaviour except now I've forgotten what I did.

I only want to search my phone's local storage for apps matching my keyword when I access the app drawer. How do I get rid of this Google search bar? (I'd love to get rid of the Google search bar from the home screen itself as well but I understand I can't do that without root on stock android.

I'm trying not to just resist everything new in mac OS right away, but this whole focus concept and do not disturb mode turning on without me asking it to and not having any option to disable it is just too much. I can imagine maybe using this in some exceptional circumstances where it actually occurred to me to do so, but I definitely want it to be a conscious decision.

In the preferences I could find no off switch. I tried setting it to only turn on when I'm in Antarctica and off when I'm not but it didn't seem to actually work as the little moon icon remained there even after this. I also tried to scheduling it to operate in a one minute window but even after that window elapsed it continued to be in 'do not disturb mode'. I don't tend to get a whole lot of notifications nor rely on them much but frankly the idea that they're being suppressed not under direction from me is infuriating and I don't want that to happen.

So I've seen passing ironic references to DARE in American media representing it as a bit of a joke. That media was intended for American audiences so didn't really elaborate on what the program entailed but I somehow already knew without any need of such context that it was an anti-drugs public outreach campaign and was able to laugh along having had various similar laughable campaigns aimed at youth in my Australian childhood.

But then on reflection I realised that the whole DARE thing specifically, was familiar to me, like I'd personally experienced it too, but what I remembered was a TV commercial and also seeing it as late as the 2000s. From what I've now read about the campaign it seems to have been US-centric and maybe a bit in the UK and based entirely around talks at schools. I went through my fair share of shitty talks at school, but not DARE specifically, but I can't shake a memory of an ad I swear I remember seeing, in Australia, specifically about use of marijuana, implying that the effects of smoking it aren't fun or enjoyable and then at the end of the ad having a logo or graphic referring to DARE. But I can't seem to find any evidence that this, or even any DARE commercials ever existed. It doesn't help research that we have a brand of bottled Ice Coffee in Australia called Dare who have had lots of high profile ad campaigns so that's almost entirely what comes up from search results. I found Flinders university (An Australian university) paper about the role of schools in Alcohol education which talks about DARE and its utter inefficacy but seems to be referring to the American context and specifically about alcohol. So doesn't really prove anything.

From what little I remember about the ad it was focussing on the fact that marijuana can give you an increased heartbeat and feelings of paranoia and trying to imply that this was somehow something that always happens and is the only effect of smoking it. Had some sort of tagline like 'there's nothing fun about marijuana' or some similar idiocy.

The game is here. . Tremendous fun and despite it's lack of depth, I've had fun trying to beat my records but ultimately, it gets tired fast given there's only one "level" so to speak albeit a randomly generated one.

I really like the mechanics of this one and managing them against fuel load. It's similar to a game called Space Rescue by Ostrich Studio which I also liked but both these games seem to be kind of little prototypes so there's very little to them.

On my MBP, if I'm streaming something to the chromecast for any appreciable length of time the display sleeps. That's not a bad thing, it's supposed to do that, but the trouble is, if I want to pause playback, it's not a matter of simply hitting the pause key to immediately pause. This is because pressing any key wakes up the display and presents the login prompt.

To pause, I have correctly type in my password, and then in the appropriate app hit the pause button. This process takes several seconds and if I needed to pause because of wanting to freeze on something I'm viewing, or because something around me is happening that demands immediate halt to playback for me to attend to it, then this lag between the decision to pause and when I've finally paused is really just way too long. To make it worse, if I'm streaming youtube and this happens, the playback controls presented via the browser on the video page stop controlling the chromecast stream, the pause key does nothing. I can eventually pause (though not seek) via the player notification controls but it's not ideal.