DE:MD was great, I really hoped for them to finish the story. With all the horse-trading of the companies and IP, who knows if we’ll ever see one.

I don’t back up anything I can rebuild. I have multiple half-assed methods in use together for the rest of it:

• Backups daily of homedirs on desktops and laptops using Borg and Vorta to external usb drives. These devices get rotated out annually. I used to run 2-disk RAID1 and when I rotated the disks out, split them and sent them to family but now I’m taking my chances on having them local and putting them in a fireproof box.
• Code repos are synced to github or srht.
• Monthly backups of homedirs are sent via borg to rsync.net.
• Desktop and laptop homedirs get periodic (roughly monthly) burns to Dual-Layer BDRs which I put in the fireproof box and sometimes hand off to family.

As someone who has played thousands of games of Shattered with >600 games just on my most recent phone (108 of those ascended) and has ascended with all the sub-classes… git gu… no, no, no, ask questions. Some of the mechanics are kind of subtle and exploiting them can take thought. I personally find the Huntress/Warden the easiest (because the spirit bow has unlimited ammo letting you sell off thrown weapons and the free seeds and dew drops can keep you alive).

I’ve been in the weird space of on-prem “cloud” infrastructure (mostly kubernetes) for the last seven years but I’ve been doing infra, middleware, and devops for more than twenty years and have my own way of working that’s nearly GUI-free.

Tools I use every single day:

• tmux
• The one true editor and org-mode.
• The other one true editor.
• Bash, sed, awk, and the indispensable Shellcheck.
• Munging data with
  • jq and jiq for JSON.
  • yq similar to jq but processes YAML, JSON, XML, and TOML.
  • mlr is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort all in one for CSV and TSV.
• curl and httpie.
• ag (the Silver Searcher) out of habit but ripgrep is awesome too.

Less often but very useful:

• socat a swiss army knife for sockets.
• ansible
• terraform

Languages, because I write my own tools:

• Go, a lot of it and I still don’t like it.
• Python, and I tolerate it (Perl is still better for getting things done but lost mind share).
• Rust, and I like it.
• Elixir, and I love it.
• Guile and Janet when nobody’s looking and I don’t have to share (though the Nix folks don’t mind me…).

Came here to mention Endless Sky. Great game!

Don’t be misled if you were a fan of the old Mac games Escape Velocity or EV:Nova, Endless Sky is inspired by/derivative of EV but is not the same and you’ll (well, I did) find out the hard way that the old strategies don’t carry over.

This desktop right here (running a couple of ZFS pools) has drives with more than 3 years on it…

$ for d in $(find /dev/sd[a-z]); do sudo smartctl --all --json $d| jq -c '[.model_name,(.power_on_time.hours/8760)]' ; done
["CT1000MX500SSD1",2.2034246575342467]
["WDC WD140EDGZ-11B1PA0",0.3791095890410959]
["TOSHIBA HDWE140",4.040639269406393]
["TOSHIBA HDWE140",5.925684931506849]
["WDC WD80EMAZ-00WJTA0",3.359246575342466]
["TOSHIBA HDWE140",5.925684931506849]

runs like a top (better not jinx myself).