I’m from the UK and recently was in Toronto so rented a car to get around and also to drive to Montreal. We will observed that all the cars were very limited in colours. Is it a North American thing?
In the UK, it has been getting less diverse but still a fair bit of variety
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.
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
Was about the say the same thing! Heard multiple people say our grid can’t handle the EVs but not one of them have commented on this!