Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • wildfire

    my skin is electricity 
    I hear the air crackling 
    when your hand moves on paths 
    I've allowed to be traced
    little fires lighting up along the way
    soon I am wildfire
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • usb-dos word-wrap and sound

    I learned some differences between how I think and how other adult users of usb-dos think this week. As a result, I also learned a little about how several computers handle sound and how several editors handle word-wrapping.

    It all happened during an 1h30m usb-dos install party I threw at the public library. Three non-techy women brought old laptops and/or a usb drive. It wasn't exclusive to women, but that's who came. The goal was for each woman to download, flash, boot, backup, and customize usb-dos.

    One woman wants to play King's Quest (1990) with her 4-year-old (and, let's be honest, by herself). A 9-year-old whose mom forgot to bring a computer or flash drive has a similar goal. She wants to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (1989).

  • A backup plan

    After much hemming and hawing I have finally, finally settled on a suitable 3-2-1 backup plan that works for my budget, runs unattended, alerts me when there's a problem, and only uses programs and services that I don't find objectionable. That's a lot to pack into one sentence, so let's break it down.

    My entire backup strategy is based around Borgmatic. After looking into a number of options, including a custom script, vanilla borg, restic, rclone, and a few others, I determined that Borgmatic was going to be the most configurable and most hands-off solution that would reliably work for my needs.

    Borgmatic uses a .yaml-based configuration, which is cool with me. In a minimal configuration, you will choose the directories you want to include in your backups ("source directories") and the destinations that the source directories will be backed up to ("repositories"). To achieve a satisfactory level of backup redundancy, you'll want at least two, and so in my setup, I have two repositories configured: one to a secondary hard disk on my NAS, and one to my remote backup host of choice, rsync.net.