"Baqpaq takes snapshots of files and folders on your system, and syncs them to another machine, or uploads it to your Google Drive or Dropbox account. Set up any schedule you prefer and Baqpaq will create, prune, sync, and upload snapshots at the scheduled time.
"Baqpaq is a tool for personal data backups on Linux systems. Powered by BorgBackup, RSync, and RClone it is designed to run on Linux distributions based on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch Linux."
There's no need to be fancy unless you really like diddling around.
My current method: Buy a can of potted meat. Do not open it. Use a utility knife to score around the circular indentation in the bottom of the can. Pop out this indented part when it finally surrenders. Scoop out the can's contents. Wash the can thoroughly and maybe dull the sharp edge where the indented part was removed. (SHARP!) Get a bit of fiberglass insulation and stuff it into the can as a wick. Done.
The stove is now usable and with the wick it will light easily even in low temperatures, and the flame will be more regulated.
What you finish with is too light to register on the scale at the post office. Can't beat that.
Fuel: Buy denatured alcohol anywhere paint is sold. (And if you are stealthy, and at a place like Home Depot, you can also get a small "sample" of fiberglass insulation to use as your wick there while you're at it. You need only a tiny bit.) Carry the fuel in a 16 oz/500 ml bladder like Platypus sells. To reseal the "bottle", squeeze out the excess air and make sure that the cap is on tight. Alcohol vapor will escape from a bottle with a push/pull dispenser cap and leave you short, especially if carried in a rigid, fixed-volume bottle. (Talking from experience.) And the little bladders weigh essentially nothing and take up no space when empty.
Measure fuel by using the cap from the bottle that carries the fuel. A cap full is about 1/4 ounce or 7.39 ml. After a while you get really good at measuring out exactly how much you need.
The book needs some updating and much better illustrations, etc., etc. but I've quit backpacking now anyway. I live outside the US these days, and though I've been back a couple of times just to go backpacking, it hasn't worked well. Too hot, too wet, too dry, too expensive, disintegration of national and state parks, too much incipient violence. I've gotten death threats just for being on a public trail that someone else regarded as their own. And so on.
True => "I am the only one in the company that has a degree (MSc compsci). I know stuff the others never heard of." -- RamblingCTO
Learning on the job will teach you part of what others know, and none of the rest. Learning on your own will teach you what you're interested in and none of what you hate.
I'm no shining example. My whole life has been a series of mistakes, but I've been happily unemployed 20 years as of July 7, 2025, after I quit my last job (in state government) after deciding that I'd rather die than to keep working there. I'm good at saving money, so I'm OK, and living in Ecuador now, which is nice.
The advice for decades has been to get to know people, and find work through your connections. I'd say now, looking back, as a pathologically shy person, that that sort of social engineering is probably the key, along with being helpful on the job and always appearing happy and upbeat. People really like enthusiastic people who are always cheerful, and that would be good for you if you can pile it on top of expertise, especially if it's accompanied by credentials.
Education is something that no one can ever take away from you. It's a tool you can use any way you see fit. What sort of education and how much are for you to decide. Me, I spent 10 years struggling after high school before finally getting a B.A in English.
Three years later, after deciding that I wasn't going anywhere, I started over and ultimately got a B.S. in physics and computer science with minors in math and chemistry, finishing that after 12 more years (with a big break in the middle to save up enough money to continue). And pretty much did shit work in state government for the rest of my working life.
If doing it over, I would be a LOT more aggressive and not hope that I'd get rewarded for doing good work. You have to go and grab what you need or fail boldly, I think. And you are the only one who cares how your life works out, despite what you might or might not hear from anyone else, let alone an employer.
A couple of interesting posts by David Heinemeier Hansson...
"This work by Keith Waclena is copyright 2024 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license."
Viewable online or downloadable as: PDF; EPUB; Kobo EPUB
I'm a US citizen, have been living in Cuenca, Ecuador for almost all of the last 12 years. I was last in the US June-August 2024, intending to do some backpacking in my old haunts in Washington state, plus a bit of sightseeing.
Too hot, for one thing, even in western WA, home of wet, gray winters and (formerly) gorgeous mild summers. Now you can't even go for a hike without registering on recreation.gov, and then also having to drive possibly hundreds of miles out of your way to show up in-person at a national park headquarters anyway. For what, I don't know -- maybe to be fingerprinted. Roads and trails have also seriously deteriorated since I lived there. Infrastructure maintenance seems to be regarded as an unaffordable luxury these days, something to be needed only by freeloaders, never the rich overlords.
The US also felt really creepy, even compared to my last visit in late 2019. These days, in Ecuador, I'm used to going everywhere on foot and dealing with people in a low-key, individual, informal way, but being in the US is more and more like finding oneself in a bad dystopian science-fiction movie.
People there are isolated from one another, it's all about driving around or standing in long lines for self-checkout at stores, or getting into a confrontation with store policy when just trying to (as a 76-year-old) prove that (1) I exist and (2) am really truly old enough to buy beer (via scanning my driver's license for the appropriate data). Yeeps.
The US is now just a crazy, lonely, assembly-line place full of discouragement and homeless people. And I'm not talking about some urban slum -- this is Olympia, WA, which used to be really pleasant.
And guns. If you look, you notice them. Back in 2019 I fended off three aggressive dogs illegally running loose on a suburban trail in advance of a horse-riding couple, then had the guy say he had a gun and had him threaten to kill me for pepper-spraying his dogs, then had him ram his horse into me, then threaten to kill me a second time. Life these days. Nope.
And even I (little old quiet invisible no-criminal-history me) worry about being hassled or even detained coming into the country, just because. I was already questioned around 10 years ago at the Atlanta airport about what I had been doing in Ecuador. None of your business, dipshit.
So, the US was my home country but, ah, no. Not any more. I'm glad to be where I am now, free of that, all of it. I'll probably never go back, definitely never for anything I can just safely read about at a distance, like a tech conference.
>I was already questioned around 10 years ago at the Atlanta airport about what I had been doing in Ecuador. None of your business, dipshit.
Oh, it's my favorite, not when coming to US as a noncitizen, but being asked this by my country's border agents. "What have you been doing in $country?" -- I know they have no way to deny me entry and will be to lazy to do paperwork to delay me for more than 5 minutes, so I smile and give a non-answer, like "chilling" or "eating kebabs". Not their business indeed.
"I promise, America will soon be the Cybertruck of countries - uglier than you could have imagined, built for rich chuds, borderline inoperable, and on fire."
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (1986) The best book I ever read. Covers all of modern physics. Written in a "physics for musicians" style, and I don't mean that in a condescending way. It's praise. Besides the tech, there is lots on politics, espionage, international relations, and military history, including sections on the German, Soviet, and Japanese activities before and during WWII.
"Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" (1995) Great explanations of how the fission-fusion-fission process works, all in millionths of a second. I still can hardly believe how Rhodes is able to explain some of the most complicated technical concepts and processes in ordinary language. A truly amazing writer.
Me myself, I joined a project that shipped on time. The lead developer, a contractor, begged for just three more months to make it all actually work properly.
Nope.
We shipped, and then it took two more years to finally get it functional.
And the contractor was banned from ever working there again (a WA state agency).
"Baqpaq takes snapshots of files and folders on your system, and syncs them to another machine, or uploads it to your Google Drive or Dropbox account. Set up any schedule you prefer and Baqpaq will create, prune, sync, and upload snapshots at the scheduled time.
"Baqpaq is a tool for personal data backups on Linux systems. Powered by BorgBackup, RSync, and RClone it is designed to run on Linux distributions based on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch Linux."
At: https://store.teejeetech.com/product/baqpaq/
Though personally I use Borg, Rsync, and some scripts I wrote based on Tar.
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