How do you know what hard-drive to buy?

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Alex Soojung-Kim Pang - Cambridge in the hard drive

For buying hard-drives, there are a few factors to consider:

  • How much hard-drive size do you actually need right now? Do you need, as a minimum, 1 TB, or 2, or 10? Do note that for hard drive 1 GB = 1000 MB (as opposed to 1024), 1 TB = 1000 GB (as opposed to 1024), so if you buy a 1 TB hard drive, it will be around 10% smaller than you expect it to be. If you buy a large hard drive, even if you plan to buy a 10 TB hard drive, you might notice you got a 900+ GB hard drive.
  • How much capacity you’ll need in the next period of time until you’ll buy another drive? Will you need another 1 TB, or 2, or 3?
  • What’s the cost per GB/TB for a specific drive? This is one good way of comparing drives?
  • Which drives are most reliable? You can Google “hard drive reliability statistics” and find recent data such as this one ».
  • How fast do you need the drive to be? Do you need 5400 RPM (rotations per minute; 5400 is slower) or 7200 RPM (a bit faster)?
  • How will you back-up the data? It might be a good idea to save the day-to-day, very important files and projects you work on a Cloud Drive syncing solution (Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive are fine solutions). For extra data, you might need yet another hard drive, internal, external, or in a NAS solution.
  • Are you willing to wait for promotions to appear? Currently, Western Digital does from time to time (once every few months) discounts on Amazon.com. Currently, the 10 TB, 5400 RPM, internal, NAS hard drive from Western Digital is a good deal that appears on Amazon.com from time to time. Prime Day will be in October 2020 this year, as opposed to July, in previous years.
  • Generally, I prefer to buy hard drives from Amazon.com, delivered from the US, rather than buying them from Romania, for price discounts.

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Flight in Hayao Miyazaki’s movies

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Flight in Hayao Miyazaki's movies

When you look at the themes of the movies of Hayao Miyazaki, you might notice there’s something missing – the director’s love for flights, air, heights.

I like that a lot about his movies.

I also like the courage that some characters display. When I say “courage”, I don’ mean “complete disregard of fear”, but, much rather, the courage to do the right thing. Sometimes, courage can mean showing humility and just doing a good, positive thing.

“Răul poate să-l facă oricine, cât de nevolnic ar fi. Binele însă e numai pentru sufletele tari şi firile călite. Răul: lapte pentru copii; binele: carne pentru adulţi.” (Nicolae Steinhardt »)

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Better than X? But what’s X’s minimum level?

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Robertino Radovix - Volti dell' India

There’s this quote:

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?

(Matthew 16:25-26, NIV; Source »)”

This means that every person on this planet has a soul that values more than the whole world. Do you think you’re better than X? That may be, but that person has enormous inner value. Just by existing.

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Efectul fluture și COVID

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Butterfly - Butterfly

Dacă știți despre “Efectul fluture”/“Butterfly effect”, e greu să nu vedeți legătura între COVID-19 și posibilul efect fluture.

Ca justificare, dacă o persoană X are sau nu COVID și infectează sau nu o altă persoană poate avea un impact major asupra vieților multor oameni.

E un efect de domino masiv, în care un gest simplu de protecție (mască, săpun, izolare) poate preveni o reacție în lanț.

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“Write only on the positive things!”

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WillLin - +樂水 Hotel De Plus

I follow Seth Godin.

From time to time, he writes about an extraordinary book, something which impressed him, a special project.

But rarely, if ever, does he mention average books, not-so-great-projects, and so on.

And I think there are two or three reasons for which I, unlike him, should write about less-than-great things:

  • It trains the muscle. You learn how to write better about books in general if you review lots of them. If you write a lot about movies, you learn how to write about movies. I wrote one of my first reviews on any movie about “Le Notti di Cabiria” (1957). It wasn’t that good. For some other books, when I didn’t write lots of reviews, I wrote poorly. Sure, if all you write is one or two paragraphs about a movie/book, it doesn’t matter all that much what you say. But even then the constant exercise should help you write better.
  • You learn how to read a book/watch a movie better. If you write about how the actors played their roles, next time you see a movie, you will focus more on that aspect. If you constantly write about the ideas/emotions you got while watching a movie, you will pay more attention to this. And this is good.
  • “The gold is in the dark. And one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.” ~ Carl Jung. There are some movies (and books) which are not-so-great, but, still, you might get one idea or two. On an overall scale, it’s more likely that a top book (by critics or sales) gives you more ideas than a poor book, but that’s not always the case.

All these are specific to things that can’t be offended if I write poorly about them. I will generally refrain to write something negative about a real-life, can-be-offended, person.

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Abandoning games

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Frederic Rivollier - I give up

When you play most computer games, you need to beat the computer 100%. If you play a strategy game, you must destroy all the buildings/units your opponent has. If you play chess, it’s a checkmate or a draw. In a fighting game, you need to go to 0%.

The thing is, it’s unlikely for a computer to still beat you, when he’s at 3%, and you’re at 100%. But he never gives up. And I wish it would. There’s a huge probability you’ll win. But in order to do so, you need to do some boring stuff, which makes you feel in power “Oh, how good I am, with this much advantage I can win. Oh, I’m so good, look at me!”. In order for you not to lose this feeling of power, I think, game creators don’t create an algorithm for abandoning games by the computer. “Let him enjoy his winnings!”.

I just think it brings no real value, other than the pleasure of winning when you pretty much can’t lose anymore.

The AI from StarCraft I doesn’t abandon games, but in StarCraft II it does. :)

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