I bought a 21 inch 1080p Viewsonic monitor from a thrift store just the other day for $6. I got it just for this use case.

I had a spare for this purpose up until about a month ago when the backlight went out on one of my daily drivers.

Also, a couple of days ago I got a pretty nice steelcase apex 3 keyboard with RGB lights for $5.

I use Debian everywhere but if I need a Live Linux environment to recover files, clone a drive, wipe a drive, or really anything else I use ventoy and a Linux mint iso.

I’m a cool grandpa with old hardware.

Smash the office, build more housing

And the RTO demands are about intentionally lowering headcount without paying unemployment or severance so they can boost their numbers.

I have a script that does an unencrypted backup to my true truenas machine.

Truenas has built in functionality to upload encrypted or unencrypted backups to various cloud providers. It is using rclone on the back end but it also handles the connection to your cloud storage really nicely too.

Yeah, a lot of people leave their phone out of the EDC because they use it to take the picture.

The case is a good stand-in.

The drive is LUKS encrypted. It is an option when formatting the drive using Gnome Disks in Linux.

Whenever you plug it in, it asks for the password.

On the drive I have a bash script that syncs my home directory to a folder on the drive using rsync.

I don’t create new files personal files very often and they are backed up in other ways too (to a NAS and also encrypted and uploaded to cloud storage) so I tend to only run the sync script about every other week or so.

I have a separate script and folder to backup my work laptop as well. for the work laptop I back my home directory and the /etc directory, because I have some customized configurations in etc. I run this every week.

Because the drives are USB C I can plug them into my phone for transferring files. The encrypted drive can be mounted using an app called ZUGate.

In my previous role I was in IT for a small organization. We issued cell phones to all employees.

I had one of those paperclip containers with the magnetic rim on my desk full of sim card removal tools.

I have been using this pair since 2020, I lost them for a couple of months and picked up a pair of Tozo t8s. I didn’t like them as much and the case was too big.

When I found them again, I gave the t8s to my son.

BTW, They still sell the t6s on Amazon.

You and my dad would argue over who’s tools those are.

He did the same thing with the color orange.

How did that exchange go?

They try to tell you that you can’t use your last name?

Ubuntu is great. I used it for years.

This is going to sound petty, but one thing that annoyed me for years was the ads for their enterprise crap that they put into the terminal whn running updates.

I tried Debian 12 when it came out and I love it. I switched all of my systems to Debian.

I would much rather use a community driven distro than a corporate one.

Also, I applied for a job with Ubuntu The recruiter sent me the most insane take home written interview packet. I took a look at it and decided I didnt want to work with a bunch of people who would fill that packet out.

I think I was spoiled from google domains always including it by default. Using a new registrar now and I just assumed.

It’s not worth the cost of a P.O. box. Gonna drop the domain.

I didn’t realize that it didn’t support it until after purchase. And I still want the domain name.

Isn’t that the same problem with more steps? You would need to setup a corporate address right?

Just for shiggles, I setup and ran a minecraft Java server on an old phone for a little while. I did this through Termux.

It was surprisingly good.

Most people get a new phone every 2-3 years. If people use their 2 most recent phones as simple servers, then these are not 10 year old devices.

Lost at 3

Moved from a junky setup where I was forwarding my domain mail to gmail. And sending mail through gmail using the smtp server provided by my web host.

I was having too many issues.

I switched to fastmail. It is quite good. And you can get some free basic web hosting included with your paid service.