David Baakman

I confess, I sometimes make really stupid mistakes. I backed a Neeo back in the day. At first it looked like a nice device, but after broken promise after broken promise, they suddenly wanted more money (‘oh, btw, the original price was without taxes’ (and to the US readers: no, that is not how it works in Europe)), and I was stupid enough (fell for the sunken cost fallacy) to pay up, even though I had the option to get out, and get my money back.

I have been searching for a practical way to manage my documents at home. While the amount of paper documents (letters, bank statements, etc) that I get is decreasing, I still like to have a way to archive them in a proper way.

I know the tendency is to not have these documents at all (’log in to your account to download your receipt’), but personally I don’t like that idea. What happens if (either by accident, or on purpose) the document disappears when you need it, how do you know it wasn’t changed?

So, my ‘new laptop’ was still working perfectly fine, and there was no real reason to replace it (although my daughter was using my old laptop a bit too much - so now she has her own laptop :)). But still, since I saw the video on Linus Tech Tips I really supported the idea. And as I am not going to invest 224993.37 dollars, but still believe in the put-the-money-where-your-mouth is, I did buy the Framework 13 one-and-a-half years ago.

I’ve used Dropbox for a long time; I used it to sync my photos from my phone, to automatically download books from publishers, and to just store random documents. I’ve been a user on the free tier, and I bumped more and more into limits - having to move old photos manually out of Dropbox to get more space for new photos. So, started looking for alternatives, and as I already had my home server running, looked mostly at self hosting it.

With my new NAS, it was also time to rethink my backup strategy. I used to have a simple strategy on the NAS itself:

• Stored all data at a RAID-1 array
• Once a day, ran a small rsync script that would create a snapshot (at a separate disk), using --link-dest to only store the actual changes (and hardlinks to unchanged files)
• Once a week, used rclone to sync the backup to Backblaze B2 (and had Backblaze configured to perform deletes after 6 months)

My data is as follows:

I use Gnome as my desktop environment for my private laptop. As a Linux user, at the moment I was distro-hopping, I also tried different desktop environments:

• started with KDE: as everything is customizable, this gives a lot of options and possibilities. But also a lot of possibilities to screw-up (or at least, make everything inconsistent). For my use-case I found it a bit too customizable.
• then Gnome: maybe a bit too minimalistic. As far as I know, they have really thought about the workflow. But as someone who uses multiple operating systems, I found the default gnome workflow too different from what I expect.
• Mate: didn’t like the Gnome 2 look, can imagine when you’re really used to that, you like it, but as I don’t have an intimate history with Gnome 2, I don’t care about that feel.
• Cinnamon: liked the defaults. But in the end didn’t go for it, but to be honest, don’t really know anymore why

In the end, I gave Gnome a second chance, and opted to go for as little customization as possible. The first time I installed it (and updated it), a lot of extensions broke, were not compatible with each other, and were basically just giving headaches. So, for the last two years, I’m using Gnome.

At this moment, I have an HP Microserver Gen8 as a NAS. Next to it, I have my old homeserver that I bought 10 years ago, to host Home Assistant and some Docker containers.

This is a historical grown situations. I started with the Microserver just as a NAS. When thinking about running some applications on a server, a few options came along. Either I could upgrade my NAS (it fits a Xeon, and the memory could be increased), or buy something new. The easiest solution at that time however was to start using my old machine that I still had laying around. With a 3th gen Core i5 and 32 GB memory it had more than enough power, and it was free, as I already had it. This had the additional benefit of separating storage and compute. So, that I could make stability and security of my NAS a priority.

My first NAS was a Synology DS109. Apart from the fact that it didn’t have redundant disks (I actually bought a DS109j as well, to give to my parents and act as a replica, but in practice, I’ve never set up the replication), I really liked it. Synology’s support is outstanding, their latest firmware release is from 2017, 8 years after the device came to the market . But in 2015 support officially ended, still an impressive 6 years.

I’ve bought my first SSD 13 years ago, in October 2009. For 199.98 euro, I bought the 80 GB Intel X25-M, to be used in my work laptop. Just before that, I had a chat with someone from our infra department, and asked them casually how much trouble I would get into if I swapped my harddrive in my laptop for an SSD (I learned - they didn’t really like it when I bridged my ethernet connection to connect my PDA to the network…). The answer was: not really, they were quite interested in the speed improvement themselves.

Somebody at work asked my input for good books for starting (Java) developers. As this is something that might be useful for others as well, I’ll post my list here as well. This list contains books that I found to be the most influencal to me - and are timeless. So, by design, I won’t include really specific books (the ‘how to use scrum’ of ‘spring 5.0’ type of books) and books that were really good, but I would not recommend in 2022 anymore (eg, ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’, ‘Extreme Programming Explained’).