In order to follow a proper 3-2-1 backup strategy, you should have three copies of your important data: two local on different media types, and one off site. For local, I have a DAS with two 14TB drives configured in a RAID 1 array1 and a RPI5 with a 4TB drive (my most important data is around 1.5TB). For the off...

On whether LLMs and agentic AIs are a positive and beneficial invention, I tend to lean more toward optimism. Although they can certainly make mistakes and hallucinate, they are useful. Regardless of where you stand, we can at least acknowledge that there's an intelligence at work, which raises the question: are...

I recently switched from Namecheap shared hosting to Cloudflare Pages. I have two websites that are both plain text html files that I edit by hand (for now). For my needs, paying to host two plain text websites that take up a combined 300MB is a bit overkill. I also had previously pointed my nameservers from...

I have music collection of over 12,000 tracks. I prefer to actually own my music (ie digital files) and being able to play it on any device I choose rather than using a service like Spotify. That said, I also prefer using OGG over MP3, and the majority of my music collection is (currently) in OGG Vorbis format. Over...

We all have that friend or family member that believes in the most ludicrous things, convinced of a conspiracy that doesn't fit into the reality shared by the rest of us. I don't think an empirical mindset is the default for humans, but is something that's built over time, usually through education (though I wonder...

One of the most challenging things about the CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) exam isn't subnetting, spanning-tree, routing protocols, ACLs, or calculating longest prefix match. The most challenging thing is figuring out what study resources to use. There's a ridiculous amount of CCNA study material...

Reddit is now requiring you to have an account and be logged in to use old.reddit.com, the less cluttered and bloated desktop website. Ars Technica has a great article with a breakdown of Reddit's reasoning behind this, but essentially they claim they're worried about scrapers accessing content without paying for it...

I picked up a Palo Alto Cloudgenix ION 2000 off of eBay and decided to try and stick OPNsense on it. It has a ethernet ports, 4GB of RAM, 128GB SSD, and an Intel Atom CPU. What I hadn't considered was a lack of any video out on this thing, making it difficult to load a different OS. After some searching, I came...

I was recently handed down a D-Link DNS-323 NAS which I thought would be great for my brother to use. Although the stock D-Link firmware functions okay, it's officially EOL and there hasn't been an official update for it since 2013, and therefore using outdated protocols. I did some research and found the project...

A few months back, Ars Technica published Password managers' promise that they can't see your vaults isn't always true. I haven't used an online password manager in 5 years. Previously I had been using Bitwarden, which is fine, I just prefer to take ownership of as much of my digital life as I can. My setup is...

This post is not about electric vehicle hesitations like range anxiety and more complicated trip planning. No, this post is just me complaining about the digital experiences that come with owning a modern vehicle, but especially with an EV. Yes, this is yet another edition of "Bad Technology that Chuck Doesn't...

We're in the process of moving and it's eye-opening just how much stuff we've accumulated over the span of just two and a half years. During that time, my in-laws from Viet Nam stayed with us for several months, and we welcomed our son into the world. As a result, we made a lot of purchases and learned a few things....