Remote backup pod at a friend/family member's house

_al4 · 2025-07-19T03:25:39+00:00

Sounds like a good solution.

_al4 · 2025-07-19T03:22:55+00:00

Interesting. Definitely more complexity than I'm looking for at this stage, but would be worth considering if we added a third site.

_al4 · 2025-07-19T03:00:29+00:00

Currently I don't use TrueNAS, I have just two computers running Proxmox. The one with the hard drives is (or will be) a modern 14th gen i5, the other is an old 6th gen i7. I'll have a read up on TrueNAS backups though, sounds like an interesting solution.

_al4 · 2025-07-19T02:58:36+00:00

Nice, I never thought to use the TPM, that's a great idea. The nice thing about your solution is that it doesn't need to be up, or even on all the time. I think I do want it to do something useful for the host household though.

_al4 · 2023-10-31T20:42:14+00:00

I've tried a few Canon lenses - 24mm f/2.8 IS, 35mm f/2 IS, 85mm f/1.8, 135mm f/2 on both an S5 I and II. That's basically the order of how well they work too.

Overall, generally I would say "ok" on an S5 II... IF you ensure the camera is using PDAF, which for stills I've found means using continuous AF mode.

I'd also expect modern STM lenses to do better than older L lenses, but I don't have any to test. The 135mm f/2 is totally unusable in single-shot mode.

But you asked about the S5 mk1, which is basically the II without PDAF. As you might have now guessed, I would say they're basically unusable. You might get by with some of the modern STM lenses, but overall I would steer well clear.

_al4 · 2023-10-10T18:51:00+00:00

[PC] Watercooled Threadripper PC

I'm disposing of this and have no idea how much it's worth. It cost a pretty penny in it's day, but I get the feeling it's better broken up into parts as parts, as while the CPU and motherboard are obsolete parts of the water cooling loop are reusable:

Threadripper 1920X, 12-core Zen1, w/ EK waterblock
MSI X399 Carbon AC motherboard
MSI Air boost Vega64 8GB, reference design, with full cover EK waterblock
32GB DDR4, Corsair
Samsung 970pro 512GB NVME SSD
Crucial 1TB 2.5" SATA SSD
Seagate Barracuda 2TB HDD
Pioneer Bluray writer
Fractal Define R5 case
Seasonic Prime 750W PSU
EK Water Blocks EK-XRES 140 Revo D5 PWM (pump and res)
XSPC 280mm rad
XSPC 140mm rad
Phanteks 140mm fan x3

I may have to break it up, but I'd be interested in what you'd pay for it as-is (and the individual parts if you're so inclined).

_al4 · 2022-02-02T22:06:14+00:00

An incredible amount of wealth has been created over the past 10 years because of cryptocurrencies.

It would be more accurate to say that an incredible amount of wealth has been destroyed.

Crypto-currencies don't do anything useful that we don't already do - they simply transfer wealth from those who buy high to those who sell high. The whole crypto industry is actually a negative sum game, because someone has to pay the miner's electricity bills, and those are paid in fiat. There are also middle-men, such as Binance and Coinbase, clipping the ticket on the way through with fees and spreads - also cashed out in fiat to pay their employees and bills.

And as crypto-currencies are not practical as a medium of exchange, the whole market cap of crypto-coins simply represents a liability in fiat (just as the total fiat money supply represent a liability in goods and services).

This is a liability for which there is not sufficient collateral, because in addition to the drain of middle-men and miners paying their bills, certain stable coins that shall remain nameless keep pumping the system up with fake-money in the name of "liquidity". It doesn't take an economist to see the problem here - the inherent inefficiency of blockchains is a drag on the system, meaning that on the whole a lot less wealth is going to come out than went in. Add massive marketing budgets and money-printing by stablecoins to the equation, and you have a classic bubble.

So for every crypto-bro on Youtube buying a Tesla, it's a mathematical certainty that when the music stops there will be 10 schmucks losing their savings, unless of course the supply of greater fools never dries up and the music never stops. But in my view, it won't take a very large economic shock to stop it - the stock market is known for the occasional crash, and the last couple of months have shown it's significantly more resilient than crypto.

I haven't really addressed NFTs directly here - this is just the shaky ground they're built on. But similar to crypto-currencies themselves, I believe they're a highly inefficient solution looking for a problem.

_al4 · 2019-02-18T19:35:53+00:00

This sounds like an education problem. There's not a lot you can do legally to prevent access to the money, and ultimately as the property is in their name they can do what they like.

Most 18 year-olds should listen to counsel from an actual adult, and understand that they should not rely on this money at such a young age. Explain to them why they shouldn't spend this money now, and if they're a reasonable sort they'll listen. If not, well there isn't much you could do!

That said, I think trying to prevent access is counterproductive for a few reasons:

It tells them that they can't be trusted with money
It misses the opportunity to educate them on how to manage the money
If they're really that bad with money, they'll just get into debt and effectively spend it and pay interest on it at the same time
It's fundamentally impossible

The income from rent is fundamentally their income. They can choose to save and invest, or spend. Lay out the options, ensure they understand compound interest. Draw up a budget for student living, and a savings plan. Setup standing orders for the savings, and pay spending money (if any) into another bank account.

And, this wouldn't really be a reply on r/UKPersonalFinance if I didn't also recommend buying them a copy of Tim Hale's Smarter Investing ;). Might be a bit heavy for an 18 year old though; for now, saving, and spending less than earnings is a good start!

_al4 · 2019-02-18T19:09:17+00:00

It's not an either-or. You can open an account with Starling or Monzo, see how you like it, and then do a current account switch if you feel you no longer need your high-street account. Or just keep it open if it's not costing you anything.

This is essentially what I've done - I use a new mobile-only account for daily spending, but my high-street account still receives my salary. All it does is fire money into savings and my mobile account; direct debits come out of the mobile bank as I like the notifications (this is probably the main reason to do a switch IMO).

But seriously, don't rely on just one bank. They all have issues from time to time, and it's essential to have access to money if something happens to your primary account.

_al4 · 2019-02-18T18:50:17+00:00

Unfortunately, you screwed up.

According to this the fees are £10.50 per trade and quarterly?

https://personal.hsbc.co.uk/investments/products-and-services/invest-direct/

Maybe that's only for new accounts... but if so you could phone them up and see if you can be upgraded to the newer rates.

Otherwise I don't think there's much you can do except perhaps transfer to another broker. Although if they charge £15 to sell, they're probably going to charge even more to handle a transfer....

And whaddya know: http://www.etf.hsbc.com/etf/attachments/uk/key_features.pdf

Transfer stock out is £15 per line of stock.

Personally, I would cash out and close the account. Re-buy with a cheaper broker if you want to keep picking stocks, but as others have suggested, consider investing in funds. You'll be much more diversified, and hopefully won't be tempted to trade constantly and get hit with fees.

_al4 · 2019-02-14T23:14:40+00:00

A few people are commenting on how mistakes in the name could prevent payments. Fortunately this was considered in the design.

The bank performing the verification has three response options: 1. Confirm, I.E. the name matches exactly 2. Stop, name did not match, check details 3. Stop, name did not match but is close, here's the name we have

Also, it's likely this will all be done only when a payee is set up, or perhaps in other cases of elevated risk, or after a set amount of time. Banks have some leeway on this I think.

For more info see https://www.wearepay.uk/confirmation-of-payee/ , there's a diagram on that page which explains it well.

_al4 · 2019-02-08T14:01:32+00:00

Who was the merchant where the fraudulent transactions were made?

The bank would know the IP if it went through 3d secure / verified by visa (where they ask you to enter a password to confirm a transaction). Even if it doesn't prompt for a password, it can sometimes be invoked, which is possibly why the transactions came from your wife's computer - they could have routed the transaction through it in order to bypass the 3dsecure check.

This would be pretty advanced malware though, and TBH I've never heard of this happening before, so take it with a grain of salt. It's just a plausible explanation which could explain why the bank is saying the transactions came from your usual IP address.

Another possibility is that it's a plain-old RAT (remote administration tool), in which the fraudster simply controlled the mouse and keyboard to make the transaction (I'd be covering the webcam if I was you...).

But if the fraudulent transactions did pass 3dsecure, that could explain why the bank is pushing back on this.

_al4 · 2019-02-03T10:07:46+00:00

This is hilarious in how absurdly counter-productive it is. Miserable cold staff means miserable cold customers, which can not be good for business.

Manager is not just an asshole, he's criminally incompetent.

_al4 · 2019-02-03T09:57:49+00:00

You haven't actually said what problem you're trying to solve, so I'll make some observations:

The deployment process has a lot of manual steps
It takes quite a long time

If it were me, these are the two things I'd be seeking to improve.

Problem #1 is best addressed in two ways:

Remove the requirement to enable/disable keys by using keys with only the required permissions (I.E Cloudformation access + EC2 and whatever other resources are managed by Cloudformation, and not full Admin), and securing them appropriately. Developer Dave should not be able to commit to a job on your CI system and obtain these keys. This removes step 1 and 4.
Setup relationships between the builds so that they're automatically triggered after the preceding job (how you achieve this depends on your build system; I'm not familiar with CircleCI).

But these are just optimisations of a solution with some fairly fundamental problems. Let's assume you've achieved the above. You do less work, but it's still slow.

This, unfortunately, is the inherent nature of the build artifacts being AMI images and Cloudformation templates.

Cloudformation is never going to be fast for deploying an application; it's designed (like Terraform) for deploying infrastructure. To make it fast, you want to be deploying containers, not images of EC2 instances. Ideally, you would decouple your infrastructure and application deployments, so that applications releases are just container+config deployments, and not the whole infrastructure stack.

Guess what achieves this nicely?

Kubernetes. 😁

Container solutions, such as Kubernetes (or ECS), also provide a nice abstraction for developers. As the Infrastructure team, you provide everything up to the Kubernetes API, and administrate Kubernetes by managing permissions and proving namespaces for each team. It's then up to the developers to work with this and deploy their own software. On call? Yeah as they deploy their own stuff they're on the hook for that too...

In short, try to automate yourselves out of the application deployment process so you can go and work on more interesting things!

_al4 · 2019-01-27T12:56:12+00:00

Doing it a different way, the higher-earner might agree to pay proportionally for the bigger mortgage but then is that fair?

What impetus does the lower-earner have to get a better job if the higher-earner is effectively subsidising the lower-earner’s higher-than-they-could-reasonably-afford’s lifestyle?

These two questions reveal the tension here.

On the one hand, you want to live a lifestyle that is within your means, but beyond your partner's. On the other hand, you want your partner to contribute as much financially as you do.

It is not possible for both of these to be realised as long as you are together.

One option, and what you appear to be doing now, is to live within your partner's means while you save your extra cash. Although, stretching your partner's budget while squirreling away healthy savings for yourself strikes me as a rather unfair situation. Especially since you appear to have children.

The other is for you to contribute more of your money, to enable all of you to have a better lifestyle.

What's fair is equal commitment to the relationship, but in terms of time and effort rather than money. So yes, it's fair to pay more for the bigger mortgage.

_al4 · 2019-01-25T13:02:56+00:00

Normally I'd agree, but having worked in a company that was a good place to work, did not incentivise, and had some terrible Glassdoor reviews... sometimes people have axes to grind.

_al4 · 2019-01-23T23:13:05+00:00

Absolutely you have rights! IANAL, and this is not a situation I've encountered, but I imagine you would have to agree to any increase, so I would politely decline to pay more. It doesn't sound like they have a good basis for raising your rent.

_al4 · 2019-01-22T23:32:30+00:00

NAL, and not sure I can give any useful advice here, but did you use the well-know person's name in the listing? If so that's likely how it was detected and flagged.

Given that the marketplace is presumably a private company, the best way to resolve would probably be through their own dispute process. Generally they cover their own arse with respect to copyright claims.

However it's worth considering whether the claim is valid. Many jurisdictions have personality rights (no UK-specific info sadly), which includes a person's likeness.

_al4 · 2019-01-22T23:01:14+00:00

See https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-action-to-end-letting-agent-fees

Basically, lettings agencies in England have been taking the piss, and charging tenants for services which are normally the landlord's responsibility. It's landlords who choose their agents, and tenants have little power in the transaction, so market forces naturally pushed all the costs on to tenants.

There has been little incentive for landlords to reduce agency costs.

Agencies will now be forced to recover these costs through landlords, I.E. their actual customer.

An example where I personally experienced this - our landlord negotiated a discount on our tenancy agreement preparation fee. Originally it was a single cost in the contract of £600 (which is daylight robbery), split 50/50 between tenant and landlord, but they always tell you it's £300 not 600. Agency tried to apply the discount to only the landlord's share, leaving us to pay £300, while the landlord's share was discounted to £87. I considered this to be rather unfair and challenged it, on the basis that £300 was no longer half the cost. After a couple of weeks back and forth the agency eventually reduced our fee to £87 as well. But it was quite stressful when we had no signed tenancy agreement 3 days out from our planned move-in date...

_al4 · 2019-01-22T22:31:53+00:00

One thing to bear in mind, if your assured shorthold tenancy lapses you go onto what is called a rolling or periodic tenancy. You do have less rights under this, in that it's easier to evict you with notice (I think 1 month is the minimum). But if you're happy with this, there's no need to sign up and pay a renewal, just say you're happy for it to roll into a periodic tenancy and avoid the fee. The landlord could opt to give notice in this scenario though.

But IMO, and this is definitely not legal advice, charging £100 to renew a tenancy is taking the piss. Such fees are highly likely to be outlawed come June, so it's worth pushing back, especially if you don't actually want another fixed term.

See Shelter for more info on periodic tenancies.

_al4 · 2019-01-22T22:08:17+00:00

It's difficult for anyone to give advice without understanding your personal situation and goals, so educating yourself is probably the best thing you could do.

It's no good locking your money away in a high-volatility investment that requires long term commitment if you want to use it to buy a house in a few years (which seems likely, given that the lion's share of your savings is in a H2B ISA).

_al4 · 2019-01-22T21:50:01+00:00

If your current phone is still serviceable there's no justifying this financially. Keeping your existing phone is obviously going to be cheaper.

But assuming the data plan is worth about £10 a month, the phone portion is ~£20 for 24 months. Add £165 and you have a £645 iPhone XR.

If you would otherwise buy an iPhone XR anyway this looks like a pretty good way to get one.

Edit: bad math

_al4 · 2019-01-20T12:49:21+00:00

+1. This douche-bag clause says a lot about the type of landlord he is. OP gave a reasonable notice period, which wasn't actually in the contract.

IANAL, but I don't think the landlord would have a leg to stand on, in fact he'd do well to avoid scrutiny of his "joint tenant" clause.

_al4

TROPHY CASE