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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Yes. 50s. Canada.

    I taught myself. I was 19 and working for a small company (3 employees total) and had a van for work for hauling around equipment. My boss called me to his house one day and told me that he was taking the van for a six-week fishing trip. “You can take my BMW. You know how to drive stick, right?” I shook my head “no.” “Well, you’ll figure it out”. Fortunately, he lived in the country so it was all quiet backroads for most of the trip home. By the time I got into the city, I (usually) didn’t stall it at traffic lights.

    A couple years later, I took a three-day motorcyle (newb to driving licence) course. Three out of fifteen students knew how to drive a manual transmission car. Only the three of us passed and got our licence - the others were having trouble stalling 'cause it was the first time they had ever dealt with a clutch. (note: this was typical, the ones who didn’t pass could come back and try the final test again the following weekend).







  • Refurbished ThinkPads are awesome!

    • Availability - ThinkPads are very popular in corporate environments and are generally replaced every 2-3 years. Although mostly Intel CPUs, there is a wide variety CPU+GPU available from lightweight to high performance.
    • Tough + well built + last forever
    • Easy to upgrade/repair. They’re very user-accessible and its simple to upgrade RAM or SSD/M.2 drives. Plus, because they are so popular in the corporate environment, replacement parts (from batteries to WiFi+Bluetooth chipsets to trckpads) are very available and cheap.
    • Well supported in most (if not all) linux distros. Graphics just work, trackpads just work, WiFi just works.
    • Cheap.

    Sent from my ThinkPad T580 (with both an internal and removable battery, I get 10+ hours of battery life)




  • I wrote a bash script that runs daily which 7z (AES256) the databases (well… I dump the DB as text and then 7z those files), web files (mostly WordPress), user files, all of /etc, and generate a list of all installed packages, and then copy the archives to a timestamped folder on my Google drive (I keep the last two nights, plus the last 3 Sundays).

    TBH, the zipped content is around 1.5GB for each backup. So my 17GB of free GDrive space more than enough. If I actually had a significant amount of data, I’d look into a more robust long term solution.

    If there was a catastrophic failure, it’d take me around six hours to rebuild a new server and test it.