You can install and run pkgs in an embedded install via unionfs_mount. I have done this for over 12 years (as of mid-2025) without any problems whatsoever. No jails or VM, and it's quick and easy to set up.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Choose one of your data discs (NOT system disc). Mine is /mnt/HDD.

2. Enter the following commands (change the name "extensions" to whatever you choose):

cd /mnt/HDD
mkdir extensions
mkdir extensions/usr
mkdir extensions/usr/local
mkdir extensions/var
mkdir extensions/var/db
mkdir extensions/var/db/pkg
mkdir extensions/var/cache
mkdir extensions/var/cache/pkg

1. Then go to "Command Scripts" and add the following commands in this order (all PostInit and usually the first commands). They're all important!

rsync -a /usr/local/ /mnt/HDD/extensions/usr/local/ 
mount_unionfs -o rw /mnt/HDD/extensions/usr/local/ /usr/local/
mount_unionfs -o rw /mnt/HDD/extensions/var/db/pkg /var/db/pkg
mkdir /var/cache && mkdir /var/cache/pkg
mount_unionfs -o rw /mnt/HDD/extensions/var/cache/pkg /var/cache/pkg

1. Of course, you should modify the above commands to reflect the name of your selected data disc and the name you choose for your primary directory (in my case /extensions)

2. Reboot XNAS

You should now be able to add (and later upgrade) all desired pkgs, and they will remain and operate the same as if you did a full install.

You might hear of the so-called "dangers" of unionfs_mount - THEY DON'T APPLY TO AN EMBEDDED INSTALL, which by its very nature makes it impossible to screw up your system. Should there ever be any problem installing a package(and I've never experienced any), all one has to do is disable the command script items and reboot for a "clean" install.

Circuit-level energy monitoring, with your data under your control.

Accurate, open, browser-based power monitoring for homes and small commercial buildings. View real-time power, store history locally, create detailed graphs, and connect to the tools you already use.

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A KLM flight to Curaçao became an 11-hour flight to nowhere after a power bank reportedly belonging to the airline’s former CEO exploded while being charged onboard.

If systems designed to withstand war cannot cope with sustained physical attacks, civilian bit barns have little chance. The episode also underlines a familiar but easily neglected lesson: resilience within one cloud region is not the same thing as maintaining an independent backup elsewhere.

Physical destruction is not the only threat. A major outage of the UK air traffic control system in September, which stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers and led to thousands of flight cancellations, was reportedly triggered by a military aircraft filing an incompatible flight plan. Presumably Flight Lieutenant Bobby Tables has been reprimanded.

The apparent failure to validate the flight plan data was not the worst of it. NATS, which runs the UK's air traffic control system, reportedly told airports and airlines that no backup system was available because it was undergoing a "complete overhaul." Nor was there a backup of the live data, supposedly because of the "vast amounts" involved.

If your system produces too much data to back up, you had better be running a particle collider or a giant telescope. Otherwise, you may be in the wrong business. More charitably, backup strategies are complicated, expensive, and difficult to test. They also suffer from the insurance problem: while nothing is going wrong, management sees only capital and operating expenditure with no obvious return. //

The development of marine insurance in 14th-century Italian city-states spread risk and helped make what became today's global trading network viable. The loss of a vessel was no longer an existential disaster for its owner. Provided insurers understood and priced the risks correctly, the market could grow in lockstep with mercantile activity. Data resilience has a similar dynamic, although it is rarely described in those terms. Modern IT would be impossible without it, and moving off-premises amounts to sharing some of that risk with an outside provider. //

It may take the combination of geopolitical instability and intense competition for storage to make enterprises perform similar calculations about their own precious cargoes of information. When AWS can lose an entire region and critical national infrastructure can fail without an adequate backup, those risks have plainly not been priced in properly. There is no global market where AWS, NATS, or your organization can buy the data equivalent of war-risk insurance, although imagining what one might look like suggests some intriguing possibilities.

Until something like that happens, we'll have to play by the old rules. Work through what happens if your primary data store disappears. Match backup provision to the actual risks, and if you cannot afford to protect all the data your organization needs to survive, determine how to survive with less. Backups, like insurance, are all too easy to let slide.

People seem to approach this from the wrong angle. The question here should always be what data do we actually genuinely need to be able to back up and restore? //

The problem was this was 30+ years ago. Imagine even in a small salon we'd backed up decades of booking data on the basis that we could easily store it given the cheapness of storage.

Now compound that problem across all businesses and throw in loads of AI toss. How much stuff is actually in backups that is never going to see the light of day again?

The volume of data that you could back up in comparison to what you genuinely need gets more and more skewed over the years. Which is part of this problem and a reason why so many people either don't have a proper strategy or find it just doesn't work when they need a restore.

IoTaWatt is probably the only monitor in it's class that can literally be used to monitor any power system.  It is in use in over 60 countries worldwide.  USA split-phase 120V/240V is easy, but also 230V single-phase as in Europe, 230V three-phase as in homes in Australia, Germany and norway to name a few. Most folks only care if it will work in their situation.  The answer is an unqualified yes.

There are also many commercial/industrial users monitoring high voltage three-phase systems including 277V/480V industrial with 600Amp service using several megaWatt-hours per day - more than most households use in a year.  Then there's a site in Uganda measuring voltage and power used to charge rental electric motorcycles using Solar Energy.

This is all possible because IoTaWatt uses simple external sensors that are available for any and all voltage/power combinations.  Just install, plug into the IoTaWatt and select the sensor type from a dropdown menu in the configuration app.

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By teasingly striking at their children’s egos and emotions without teetering over into bullying, fathers build their children’s resilience and train them to withstand minor attacks and bouts of negative emotion without getting worked up or acting out, teaching them impulse control and emotional regulation.

In light of this, it is worth considering dad jokes as a pedagogical tool that may serve a beneficial function for the very children who roll their eyes at them.

By continually telling their children jokes that are so bad that they’re embarrassing, fathers may push their children’s limits for how much embarrassment they can handle.

They show their children that embarrassment isn’t fatal. //

So to all the dads out there, I salute you. We are not just amusing ourselves with silly puns; we are improving the health and well-being of our kids.