Nightcoder's blog

I already own the perfect open-back headphones within a $2,000 budget—the HIFIMAN HE1000 v2—but I decided to pursue the best closed-back headphones available. Life is short, and I spend several hours daily listening to music through headphones, whether working or walking. Music is a constant in my life. Now I wanted closed-back headphones for better isolation from external noise. I share my office room with two parrots, and while I adore them, their songs and screeches often disrupt my ability to fully immerse myself in music. To find the best closed-back headphones, I began by reading dozens of reviews from reputable sources like audiophile-heaven.com and head-fi.org . After compiling a list of top contenders, I visited several large stores in the Greater New York City area, such as B&H , to test them. For models unavailable in stores, I ordered “used, like new” options from Amazon and Walmart to save money and ensure returns wouldn’t be an issue, as the headphones had already be...

For many years, I wanted to get a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device to share files between the PCs and other devices on my home network. However, the high prices of good NAS models always stopped me. A decent model with reliable hardware and software could easily cost $700 or more. So I set up what you might call a "poor man's NAS" by connecting an external USB drive to my router and sharing it across my home network. However, I constantly ran into problems with this setup (I use Windows on my PCs). For some reason, my PCs would frequently lose access to the shared drives, and it often took a frustratingly long time to reattach the network drive. For instance, one PC on my network might still have access to the shared drive, while another PC wouldn’t be able to access it at all. This issue persisted for years and was a constant headache. It’s not just me, either—my friend, who is also an advanced PC user, experienced the same problems with external USB drives connec...

I love this handy little application called Clipdiary . It monitors your clipboard and automatically saves its contents to a clipboard history. You can retrieve data from the clipboard history whenever you need it—even years later. All data is stored locally on your computer—there are no servers or cloud storage involved. The program also supports database encryption (AES-256), allowing you to password-protect your data. For example, you can configure it to store only the last 100 clipboard entries or set a password, so your clipboard history is accessible only after authentication. You can also clear the history database at any time. My most common use case is selecting and saving text that I'm writing online. For instance, when I'm writing a post or comment, I periodically select all the text and copy it to the clipboard. This way, if something goes wrong—like encountering an error after submitting a post and losing your text when navigating back in the browser—you can easil...

Here's how to connect to your UGREEN NAS via SSH: 1) Enable SSH in UGREEN NAS WEB UI -> Control Panel -> Terminal: 2) Download Putty (SSH Client) 3) I recommend setting up a hostname for your UGREEN NAS instead of using the IP address everywhere. You can do this by navigating to Control Panel > Device Connection > LAN: 4) Open PuTTY, enter the hostname or IP address of your NAS, and click "Open": 5) Keep in mind, that only admin users will be able to log in via SSH. Here's where you choose the user's role: 6) Log in using your NAS username and password. Once logged in, you can freely explore and perform actions as needed. In the example below, I briefly navigated through the NAS file system for demonstration purposes.:

 As much as I love my UGREEN NAS, it doesn't come with a built-in app for backups. There's one, actually, but it only allows backups between different NASes or between your NAS and your PC. While I needed to set up a backup from one drive on my NAS to another drive on the same NAS. I tried a few Docker containers with web UI, but I wasn't able to make them work, or they didn't work as I wanted (for example one app encrypted the backups, and I wasn't able to change this. And I didn't want my files encrypted, I just needed a simple copy). So in the end, I decided to go with creating a script that runs rsync for a backup and schedule it with cron. I just needed to back up my music folder from one drive to another. Here's how I did this: 1) Log in to your NAS via SSH . 2) Run:   sudo nano /usr/local/bin/backup_music.sh 3) The Nano editor will open, paste this there (update the script to use your paths) SOURCE="/volume1/4TB_NVME/Music/" DEST="/m...

This is a draft version of an article about the importance of backups and how to set them up. Hopefully I will later find time to make it a quality article, but for now I think this draft can still be useful for people. So here it is. Definitely do backups! In my almost 30 years of having a PC, I lost so much invaluable stuff... For example my digital paintings, including 3D paintings (made in 3D Studio Max), my coding projects, my custom-made Anki cards database ( https://apps.ankiweb.net/ I highly recommend it for learning new stuff!), which I was making for years.   And recently - part of my music collection that I've been creating for decades:  - Everything was sorted - The best recordings were chosen. For example if it's something I love, like Black Sabbath's Paranoid album, I'd get 10 different recording and choose the best sounding one (In the case of Black Sabbath - Paranoid, I highly recommend Kevin Gray's master) - Songs were rated (so for example I could...

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Recently, I realized I didn't know as much about SSDs as I thought and had been relying too heavily on CrystalDiskMark for testing. Since then, I've educated myself on SSDs, learned how to test them better, and even acquired several different SSDs for testing and experimentation. If you're interested in learning more about SSDs and proper testing methods, please read on. First, let's start with testing SSD speed. Many people use CrystalDiskMark for testing storage speed. However, you should know that using CrystalDiskMark is not a good way for testing speed. It's a pretty limited test that cannot emulate the real-life scenario of copying large files. Even if you select a 64 GB test file size, CrystalDiskMark will simply allocate 64 GB disk space, but will only write or read a small portion of it. This is very misleading, in my opinion. The main issue with CrystalDiskMark is that it doesn't read or write enough data to reach the cache limits of a drive. As a resu...

Here will be an article on how to use Equalizer APO & TDR Kotelnikov compressor plugin to protect from sudden loud sounds