Buy two 4tb extern drives. Copy your photos onto both. Leave on at your mom’s house in a closet. Leave the other in a locker at work or a safety deposit box.

No monthly fees, no techbro cloud capitalists.

Honestly, I’d buy 6 external 20tb drives and make 2 copies of your data on it (3 drives each) and then leave them somewhere-safe-but-not-at-home. If you have friends or family able to store them, that’d do, but also a safety deposit box is good.

If you want to make frequent updates to your backups, you could patch them into a Raspberry Pi and put it on Tailscale, then just rsync changes every regularly. Of course means that wherever youre storing the backup needs room for such a setup.

I often wonder why there isn’t a sort of collective backup sharing thing going on amongst self hosters. A sort of “I’ll host your backups if you host mine” sort of thing. Better than paying a cloud provider at any rate.

From a read of that issue, it looks like it never was.

I keep seeing Zulip tossed around as an alternative, but I don’t know what’s up with their licencing. There’s also Framateam, but I think that might just be Mattermost as a service.

Matrix would be great if it wasnt so user-hostile, but it is :-(

Hooray! I actually bought a legit CD on eBay and couldn’t get it to work some years ago. I shall try again with Heroic. Thanks!

Has anyone managed to play “Black & White” this way? Ive tried so many ways I’m not sure I have it in me to do it again.

That can come with its own problem that’s worth looking into. I’ve got 2 USB3 SSDs attached to mine, and the minute I add another one, I get complaints in the logs about insufficient voltage… even with a powered USB hub.

It seems that there’s a limitation in there somewhere, though I’m not clear on what it is. To be safe, I’d make sure that each drive is independently powered rather than relying on getting enough juice from the device or hub.

The Pi should be able to handle torrenting no problem, but, note that you’ll want to use a separate hard drive as the Pi uses an SD card as its primary disk and those things aren’t known for dependability under the load of constant IO from the torrents.

Croc can be especially good for this.

Sadly, no. That game is definitely keyboard-only. Though I have played successfully with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse in the past.

Some games just don’t lend themselves well to a controllers based input.

While the Deck is capable of running some big AAA games, I personally find that it shines in the low-power, “chill” games that you can play for a while, put down, and come back to when you’ve got some more time.

I’m a big fan of RPGs, so my #1 recommendation is Sea of Stars. Dragon Quest: Builders is also good, along with it’s sequel, which is arguably better.

A good multiplayer game with endless hordes of monsters vs. your magic is The Spell Brigade.

You may not know this, but the Deck can also be plugged into a TV or monitor, and with the help of a USB-C hub, can support a keyboard and mouse too! If you go that route, then I can’t recommend Dyson Sphere Program enough. Ooh! and Timberborn! It’s both adorable and beautifully designed.

If you’re more of a 3rd-person shooter type, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is fan-fucking-tastic (my favourite series of all time) and it’s currently on sale for £5. There are 3 games in the series, and make sure you start with the first one! You don’t regret it.

Finally, note that you’re not bound to the Steam store if you don’t want to be. If you install the Heroic Launcher for example, you can get DRM-Free games from GOG for example. Sometimes you’ll find that games are available on both platforms, but cheaper on one of the other, and GOG games don’t come with controls on how many people can be playing it at the same time.

Ooh! Has anyone managed to do this with Majel Barrett’s (the Enterprise computer) voice yet?

Basically the IP stops responding to any traffic. At one point I set up a constant ping, and every once in a while I got something like “destination host unreachable”. It doesn’t happen often enough for me to move the service onto a physical device though. That’s work and I’m tired like, a lot.

I installed a Pi-Hole largely to serve as a local DNS, but enabled the ad-blocking 'cause it seemed silly not to. My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.

With that aside though, it seems to work quite well. Just make sure to (a) use a reasonably-powered device (my Pi Zero appears to be taxed by it) and you should probably use an Ethernet connection 'cause my Pi Zero regularly flakes out so DNS requests fail due to the IP being “unreachable” for a half second.

What’s the recommended VPN for a case like this?

“My Time at Portia”: it’s not exactly the best-coded game ive ever played (weird geometry and animation bugs, and some of the plots feel half-assed) but the world is big, and complicated, and there’s lots of crafting and relationships, and overall Good Vibes. I built a bus stop last night and married a nice girl who sells flowers. I recommend.

It’s currently on sale on GOG for €3.

They’re all on the high seas and they’re all excellent.

If you build for a containerised environment, standing up your service in Kubernetes with HPA gives you all the scalability (and potentially cost) benefits of serverless without all the drawbacks.

“Oh hi! Here’s some code. I didn’t write it and don’t understand it, but you should totally run it on your machine.”

Plus the FF extension is really full-featured. I can clip in different formats or even take a screenshot if the webpage makes clipping hard.

I didn’t even know there was a Firefox extension! I might give it a look.