I am enjoying my Secrid wallet if you’re looking for a thinner card holder with room for some notes but not coins. They come in leather but also different materials. It’s made in the Netherlands and reviews say they last a long time.

Borgbase - 1TB for $90 a year but they have smaller options. I then use Restic as my previous Borg setup kept stopping and couldn’t figure out why

When you have nextcloud, immich, vaultwarden and navidrome, this is real data that you’re talking about on services that I use several times a day. I had an overnight blackout that took me a few hours to recover from. No data lost and have a 3-2-1 backup system but that takes time and energy to fully recover from.

After that, bought the cheapest UPS I could find, installed NUTS and not had issues since. Most blackouts seem to happen overnight and all have been less than 5 minutes.

Buying a UPS that would last for 12 hours minimum (happens just after I go to sleep and I realise in the morning or happens at work and not back home until then) is much more expensive and difficult than installing CUPS to have it switch off. Then I can wake up, turn the machine back on, wait a few minutes and everything will be back up. I can run tests but if I need to go to work I can leave that to later and what works I can use.

Worked in the UK for one of the largest Japanese multinationals. Our team required several government accounts with different passwords. I asked IT what are my options and they said we have none, and that their team used a text file on a shared drive so I did it on Excel instead to make to make it more searchable. If they’re not willing to let you install keepass or buy any software, what can you do!

I found the Cisco free networking courses really helpful when trying to figure out my network stack. Some of the earlier stuff you probably know but you can skip through quickly, especially if you don’t care about getting the “qualification”. https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/learn/training-certifications/training/netacad/index.html

I would personally recommend keeping the router and adguard/pihole server separate. If you mess something up, it’s easier to quickly switch the router DNS to a public one whilst you try to fix it, especially if you have anybody else at home who won’t appreciate losing their internet because you messed up something (which will happen but let’s you learn)! It’s also a good idea to keep this separate from your main server for this very same point. You might accidentally use up the entire hard drive or have some messed up update on one software take all the RAM, making everything else unusable (both happened to me at different times, and one was overnight before I was working from home which was not fun to try and fix first thing in the morning!). It’s not always clear which device is causing and what went wrong so can take some time to fix but gives you flexibility to fix in your own time.

That’s why I would recommend getting a used thin client for £30ish (GBP) from eBay or somewhere like that. I have my pihole and home assistant on there to be clean and separate in case my server goes down. Then the internet still works, the lights still work, and things like nextcloud and jellyfin just have to wait a bit.

It also allows you to upgrade devices separately (e.g. when my internet provide unexpectedly upgraded to 2.5G I chose to buy a new router and one of the switches, and upgrade the Ethernet socket on my home server) but kept my existing WiFi access point and pihole/HASS server which still work fine after years of use. Most of my clients at home can’t handle higher speeds so no point upgrading the rest of the network until they can (if ever). I have separated my WiFi access point and router because of the location of my incoming wires and home layout, which you could also think about doing. I’ve always thought getting seperate devices focusing on one thing they do best makes sense, and can actually be cheaper to buy.

Not sure about routers themselves but have heard good things about openwrt. I do NOT recommend the TP Link Omada series!

Please nobody buy roku. It’s become full of ads and monitoring.

No IT formal education, training, career or any job here. I’m an accountant by day and this is all a hobby for me, allowing me to save on subscriptions and having complete control of my family’s data

Fuck man, as a father this hits hard. At first I thought how is he so chill, maybe this happens all the time. Then when the kid appears and is so distraught… shit

Purely anecdotal but I accidentally fell into this during university when studying for final exams. 3 hours sleep at night, 3 hours in early afternoon. Was great and never felt better so tried to keep it after exams but it was just impossible. Once I got back to real life, it was impossible to keep such a rigid and inflexible system. I didn’t do it long enough to see any long term effects but just found it impossible to keep anyway so naturally reverted back to 7-8 hours overnight

My manager and a team mate had to go to the US for work earlier this week. They’re both British citizens but Indian heritage so was genuinely worried for them. Work made sure their papers were in order and they had local contacts just in case. It was “no more difficult than usual” (it’s always been hard for brown people coming in with “random” security checks). There is no way I would be going though, would flat out refuse.

One made it home but funnily enough the other is stuck in Vancouver on the connection as theres some fire in Heathrow. At least he’s out of the USA!

This, the limit on how much it could be, and the ban on charging any additional fees, absolute game changers! The changing them not being able to tax deduct mortgage payments has also changed behaviour. I mean, landlords are still a huge drain on society and rents are mental but these steps help

Reminds me of the group limit attribute in nextcloud. You could try looking at the ‘Custom profile scope’ section of https://docs.goauthentik.io/integrations/services/nextcloud/ to see if it helps to work out what to do

Exactly. I’m already thinking about pulling my pension pot out of any US investments. It’s a tiny amount but maybe we can start a movement to keep pension investments in countries and systems you believe in, not whatever mix are typically used

If we rolled back a decade, Putin wasn’t around and something happened like idk, China invaded western Russia, I can imagine us helping Russia.

I should change it to “your population is mostly white so yes you can count on us”. I say this as an English born non-white person who has seen the differences in public reactions to Ukraine and other conflicts (Syria, various African ones, Gaza etc). Can’t say for certain it’s because of this reason but certainly feels like it!

That’s a very good point and can’t believe I didn’t think of that! Surely the British army would have to protect “his majesty’s realm” or some bollocks like that.

I just read that Canada hosts Britain’s largest overseas base, although it seems to be for training purposes.

From the UK and personally, 100% yes but not sure I feel the rest of the population would agree. I mean, a lot of us turned our backs on the EU and there’s a lot of cross over with US right wing nutters.

However, I would believe that when push comes to shove, we would be generally willing to defend Canada, Australia and NZ over anyone else, and then European countries at the next level. The reaction in support for Ukraine was pretty universal here and there are still lots of donations and support that is not shared with any African, Asian or Central/South American countries having similar problems.

Basically, you’re white so yes you can count on us!

From a UK or German IP address, Google maps has it as Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).

We’re being dragged into this mess so will look to report it

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Will have to reconsider my choices here!

Why is it shitty? I am not trying to deny it, just really curious what it is about

After some research on here and reddit about 6 months so, I settled on Borgbase and its been pretty good. I also manually save occasionally to proton drive but you’re right to give up on that as a solution!

The hardest part was choosing the backup method and properly setting up Borg or restic on my machine properly, especially with docker and databases. I have ended up with adding db backup images to each container with an important db, saving to a specific folder. Then that and all the files are backed up by restic to an attached external drive at well as borgbase. This happens at a specific time in the morning and found a restic action to stop all docker containers first, back them up, then spin them back up. I am find the guides that I used if it’s helpful to you.

I also checked my backups a few times and found a few small problems I had to fix. I got the message from order users several times that your backups are useless unless you regularly test them.