partial_accumen

Long ago I ran a Windows Media Center PC in the living room and used the hell out of it. When WMC finally went EOL, I look for alternatives and found Plex. I never got around to setting up a Plex box, and now I see it too is ready for the scrap heap. I think this is what getting old is. You plan on doing something and never get around to it. Time passes much faster up here in age.

assuming I’m worried about a smash and grab

For your specific use case, how about this:

Get a cheap USB thumb drive and a long USB cable. Put your disk unlock password on that thumb drive, and semi-permanently affix the USB drive to your building. You said you’re in a basement. Put it on top of a rafter with a metal fitting that would keep the drive from being taken without removing the screws. Run the long USB cable from the thumb driving in your rafter to the USB port on the machine. Alter your startup script to mount the thumb drive read the password from the thumb drive to unlock your main disk. Don’t forget to immediately unmount the thumbdrive in the OS after the disk is unlocked for extra safety.

If someone is doing a smash and grab, they’ll unplug all the cables (including this USB cable going to the thumb drive) and take your machine leaving the disk encryption password behind on the USB thumb drive.

I don’t have a recommendation for you, but if you exhaust your leads there is a large comparrison table with all kinds (and ages) of remote access solutions that you could search against for your criteria (open source, supported, etc) here:

Comparison of remote desktop software on wikipedia

Generally a company doing something bad enough to encourage a large enough boycott to affect the bottom line is making quite a bit of money. They calculate the loss of sales due to the boycott over time and can plot when the value of the bad business is lower than the boycott. Many times they continue with the bad behavior in spite of loss of business from the boycott because the business might be at the edge of viability anyway. So extracting the last bit of value out of the company is a net win before the rotting husk is sold off in pieces for the value of its assets or the brand is sold to the opposing group that actually likes the bad behavior that was being boycotted so it becomes an asset again.

alwayshasbeen.jpg

Thankfully the other two haven’t fallen as hard as Seagate has.

If you want keep thinking that don’t look too hard at Western Digital’s scandals and catastrophic drive failures of the past. In my early working days I made good money swapping out hundreds of failing Western Digital hard drives.

Large enough that management schools are forced to teach about how ever real reform won’t be enough to save you from bad actions.

Sadly, in the world of multinational business, that isn’t how management schools perceive boycotts.

Oh, I agree with that. Part of the cost of a product is how much bother the consumer will have to put forth to get their desired use out of it. That’s part of what a brand is supposed to communicate to a buyer.

Okay, I agree with you that you’re not wrong to be upset at Seagate customer service. Its also perfectly within your rights to stop using Seagate. I just want to point out that if you continue to follow your policy of “one and done”, and the continued deteriorating customer service experience all companies are providing these days, you’ll soon be left with very few places to do business with.

There are only 6 or 7 airlines that fly out of my local international airport. I’ve had disappointing customer service experiences of one degree or another from every single one of them. If I was following a “one and done” approach, I’d have no one to fly commercially with.

Specifically with magnetic hard drive manufacturers, there are only 3 left in existence: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba

If you’ve sworn off Seagate, that means all of your future purchase have to be accommodated by the remaining two. I hope that is enough.

What was Seagate’s excuse for not honoring the warranty when you filed a claim?

My logic was that in 2008 when I bought a brand new seagate hard drive, and it was dead before I plugged it in, they refused to honor their warrenty.

If it was a new drive bought from a retailer, why didn’t you return it to the retailer?

I want to see desktop

Some kind of VNC setup

For a Windows user RDP is familiar and fairly high performance experience. I’m a fan xRDP for Linux desktop users accessing graphical desktop in Linux. Its not hard to set up in Linux either which is nice.