cabbage

From Nick Cave's latest album, Wild God.

The song prompted a fan to ask Cave the following:

what makes you decide whether a lyric is great or should be dumped cos it’s utter shit, cos, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, you walk a very fine tightrope between the two, my man.

Which Nick Cave chose to personally answer on his website. It's a fine read.

One of the all time greatest songwriters. There's not a single song on his first album (Kristofferson) that is not made for the history books.

Nick Cave recemtly referenced him (and his cleanest dirty shirt) on his newest album (Wild God, song Frogs), in a song that is all about life and death. Seems relevant somehow.

Then I headed back for home
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing
And it echoed through the canyons
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday

I am currently using GNOME Backups (aka Déjà Dup Backups) to backup all my files to a "backups" folder in my Dropbox. This is not a good solution - first because I want to stop paying for dropbox, second because I don't want to keep everything in the cloud, third because everything is stored twice on my laptop and storage is precious.

I therefore want to manage back-ups locally instead. I would like to keep using Déjà Dup, as it has worked really well and effortlessly.

My initial idea is very bare bones. I could keep an old laptop running 24/7, connect a hard drive, and use SSH file transfer in Deja Dup in order to store everything on that machine. That said, I have a few concerns as well.

1. Is this a good way of doing things? Should I be doing something else instead?
2. I'm not always at home - will it be a problem if the Backup software cannot find the folder because it's not on the correct network, or will it have the sense to wait until it's connected to the correct wifi?
3. Will the old laptop use a lot of power, or is it regrettable for any other reason? Is it possible to make it automatically hibernate for example during the nigthtime? Or to have it spend very little power unless anything is connected via SSH?
4. Would it be better to get a dedicated device, like a Rasberry Pi or something? I don't have all too much faith in my old laptop not making noise with the fan running at random times.

It looks like my partner will be getting a new laptop running Linux soon enough as she has to hand in her work computer, so it would be good timing to get a proper solution into place.

Thank you in advance!

I picked up a Ducky One Mini at a flea market yesterday, and after cleaning it extensively it seems to be working pretty well for the most part. I'm using it for writing and coding, so not having dedicated arrow keys will take some getting used to, but other than that it seems neat enough for the price I paid.

However, the alternative graphic button (on the right side of the space bar) is completely unresponsive. Pressing it just makes no difference at all. I used a tool that maps keyboard presses in Linux (xev), and it showed nothing when Alt Gr was pressed (just like the Fn button), so it seems no signal is being sent from the keyboard to the computer.

It could be that this is due to some setting made by the previous owner, or maybe there's something else going on. Maybe I need to update the firmware. Maybe it's broken. I have no idea.

The back-light behind some of the numerical keys is also disabled or broken, but it doesn't bother me much as I'm not a big fan of back-light anyway.

But if anyone has any suggestions what to try for the alternative graphic key it would be much appreciated! For now I have re-routed right super (Windows button) to be read as Alt Gr, but it's not very convenient when writing Latex and using a lot of curly brackets. :)