My advice is avoid tape backups. The cost, risk of media degredation, and management overhead make them not worth it, especially for a homelab.

Also, restoring an entire VM is almost easier than recovering a single file, just because of the sequential nature of reading data from a tape. Data recoveries are pretty slow in general.

I backup to an external hard drive with regular copies to iDrive S3. Been doing it that way for a number of years with no problems.

Ignorance and hubris are consequences of youth. The fact is that your parents do probably know quite a few things that you don’t, if for no other reason than they have more lived experience. That shouldn’t necessarily make you feel foolish. Part of growing older is realizing that you possess a microscopic fraction of all the knowledge in the universe. Meaning that most people know things that you don’t and you could learn something from them. That’s wisdom. Some adults never embrace that, seeing their ignorance as an asset and turning their hubris into blind arrogance. Those people should feel foolish because they are fools. But they probably don’t.

I don’t agree with every decision my parents made. But in my mid thirties, I do now understand why they are the people they are and why they made some of the decisions they made. They were far from perfect parents. But they did ok, especially in light of the incredibly shitty examples they both had for parents.

Why try to reach an agreement with someone who is just going to rip it up and throw it in your face in a few years? Backstabbing and broken promises are a byproduct of empires and the US has a long trail of those behind it.

Boss decided to block anything related to gaming, for example. You visit a small game developer page and it initially works but after a few minutes, you get a “blocked” page (but customers can’t see that because nowadays everything uses HTTPS and they don’t have the self signed CA on their system - they just see HTTPS certificate error). I tried multiple times but always the same result, after a few minutes is blocked.

That’s not “AI”. That’s just a “man in the middle (mitm)” attack. AKA, https proxy. Fortinet firewalls have been capable of that for many years. It’s not uncommon for businesses (e.g. banking and finance) to proxy all internal web traffic in order to make sure personally identifiable information isn’t being shared with shady websites.

Proxying traffic on the guest WiFi is pretty sketchy though.

Hells Bells by AC/DC.

And you thought J. Edgar Hoover was paranoid.

Indeed has been steadily enshitifying for quite some time so this tracks.

I hate scammers. People who call you pretending to be the “IRS” and claiming that you’re about to be arrested for unpaid taxes. Sick bastards who make money ripping off (mostly elderly) people.

One time I started getting those phone calls. I went down to the customer service department where I worked, which still had a fax machine, stuck a blank piece of paper in, dialed the scammers number, set retry x100, and hit send.

I called them back an hour later to see if they were getting the message and the guy gave me an earful. I politely explained that every second of his time that I wasted was one less second he got to spend ripping someone else off. He hung up on me but I kept calling back until they finally disconnected that number.

Totally worth it. Fuck scammers.

Well they wouldn’t if not for that hefty bailout by the American taxpayers that they got back in 2008.

If you’re one of the largest and oldest car manufacturers in the world and the most “innovative” thing you’ve managed to do in the last 20 years is rebrand Buick into a young family brand, then you probably need some good competition.

A little bit of peril is good for you.

Whoa. At what point does a person think to themselves, “Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the problem.”?

Somehow I think my baby years were probably less embarrassing than my teenage years.

“Never interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake.”

No better way to commiserate with your drowning constituents than with a family trip to Schlitterbahn.

I remember reading that. It was pretty funny. Jihad is easy. Running a country is not. Who would have thought.

Scheduling bill payments through my banks online bill pay. I will pay bills with a credit card when I absolutely have to. I don’t use ACH autodraft at all if I can avoid it. Online bill pay is usually free, it helps centralize all my bill payments, and if there’s a problem I just call the bank instead of having to mess with the vendor.

It also helps make sure I don’t forget to pay a bill, which my ADHD brain would do all the time otherwise.

I don’t and have never wanted to “stress myself.” There is no off switch for the stress. It’s always there. It’s been there almost as long as I can remember.

I was diagnosed at 28. If I waited much longer I would probably be a full blown alcoholic today. I managed my symptoms by self medicating (i.e. drinking) which was a really poor substitute for actual medication. That was the only way I could temporarily shut off the stress.

Getting diagnosed and properly medicated dramatically improved my quality of life.

“Drinking water backwards.” And no, I’m not talking about an enema.

Say you have the hiccups.

Get half a glass of water. Bend over at your waist like you’re about to pick something up off the floor. While bent over, rest the glass against your upper lip and drink the water.

Poof Hiccups gone instantly. I know it sounds insane but it works.

I was today years old when I learned that many people don’t have an inner monologue. The human body is so fascinating.

Oddly enough, if I don’t take my ADHD meds, I tend to talk to myself out loud a lot because my inner monologue gets kind of “muffled” in the “noise” and I rely on it very heavily to think through.