I have some scripts that use restic to backup to locally connected USB drives weekly.

The USB drives are connected to smart plugs that I control via home assistant and some webhooks. So the drives are off and stay off when not in use for the backup. I also don’t turn them both on at the same time.

I bought an Odroid HC2 years ago with the intent to have it connect over wireguard and mount to the NAS VM. Then I could put it in a friends house and use it as an offsite backup.

I also sometimes backup to backblaze

Man suggests the next 25 years may have some surprises - world goes nuts.

I have Unbound and a pihole. Started with just unbound but found I needed device specific rules that I couldn’t do. So I setup pihole and some devices use that as published through the DHCP. Things like the Mrs didn’t want certain ad blocking on her devices, but I did everything else. Also means in future I can block more just on the kids devices.

Ha, DNS is the only one of those that I have sorted. I have some reading to do.

In 2025 RAID does not work. It will not protect you from errors. it’s all a mirage. The only sane option these days is ZFS.

Centralised identity management, particularly for machine logon, NFS and maybe a few of the services I run.

Just Cause 3 is great fun.

I recently picked up Metro Exodus and it’s been a great experience.

God of War is OK,looks nice but felt a bit constrained and formulaic.

Something’s are so important they’re worth doing badly.

I’m going to bed.

Not on it’s own. But as part of a multi layered approach of does help.

Watergate scandal

Find a radio station you enjoy and experience new to you music

Hottest 58yo you’ll see

Just get a cheap old office PC from eBay or local market place for £50. Add your disks using ZFS (don’t use raid as it basically doesn’t work in modern systems). I’d be tempted to get one 4tb internal drive and one external usb to use as your backup drive.

I see you are a gentleman of fine taste 🧐

I’d be very happy to never hear a scandal described by having “gate” as a suffix.

Lots of good suggestions so far, Brave New World and Don’t Look Up would be right up there for me. But my #1 is this…

The Machine Stops (PDF) Written in 1909 so out of copyright, this book is so ahead of its time it makes remarkable reading today. The amount of things predicted that describe the modern day is incredible. It’s also not that long, so well worth a read.

I know everyone tries to avoid this and I’m sure you’re trying to learn on the cheap like everyone else, but honestly, get a few lessons with a good local tutor. You’ll learn more from them in a few short hours than you will with months of trying to do it yourself.

Famous guitarists never seem to say how much hard work went in to perfecting their craft, but it is a lot. And all the good ones took lessons and some still take lessons even though they’re on international tours and have sold millions of albums.

+100. Best thing I ever did.

Thumb position is very important and you probably need the guitar neck far far higher than you expect. Get that right and things become easier. There are some good spider exercises for practising. I found barre chords are impossible on a poorly setup guitar but are easy if you have it setup well.