What I've learned running Linux and Windows off of USB flash drives

I was in a pinch. I needed to make a full disk backup of a PC, but I had no external storage device with me to store it on. The local Wi-Fi network was also way too slow to transfer the disk over it. All I had was my laptop with an Ethernet port, a Fedora Linux USB stick, and a short Ethernet cable. I took the following steps: boot the target...

In December 2024, I did something that I had never done before: I participated in a short (~6 hours) Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It was the nerdiest thing ever, and I loved it! The setting After another day of keeping a critical production service up, the whole team met up at Kvest to play Dungeons and Dragons, as a team event. The game room...

Good news, everyone! Doing IPv6 networking stuff on Docker is actually good now! I’ve recently started reworking my home server setup to be more IPv6 compatible, and as part of that I learned that during the summer of 2024 Docker shipped an update that eliminated a lot of the configuration and tweaking previously necessary to support IPv6. There...

Just like most people out there, I have some files that are irreplaceable, such as cat pictures. At one point I had a few single-board computers sitting idle, namely the Orange Pi Zero and the LattePanda V1, and a few 1TB SSD-s. I hate idle hardware, so I did the most sensible thing and assembled a fleet of networked offsite backups for backing...

Imagine that you have an unencrypted drive containing your private data and one day it starts throwing a bunch of errors. You have backups of the data so you’ve got that part covered, but would you feel comfortable sending the drive in to be warrantied? You have no control over who has access to that drive, and due to the drive failing you can’t...