Tootfinder

laptop was emitting electronics-in-distress pheromones, and it stopped working without AC power. it's old enough that I felt ok about getting a new one.
new laptop is fine, but somehow I lost my Blue Prince cloud save, and of course it isn't in my disk backups. so I'm starting over, again.
(old laptop will go to Free Geek, which might try to refurbish it, but will probably just extract a few organs for transplant, and then e-compost the rest)

Thanks to @…'s great list: https://codeberg.org/Taffer/canadian-alternatives I just switched my S3-compatible backups to a Canadian pr…

canadian-alternatives
A collection of Canadian alternatives to common Internet services in the spirit of the various Awesome lists.

My 6a’s still running GrapheneOS, it just keeps updating itself. Gotta say, that’s pretty slick. Haven’t bothered resetting it; there’s a ton of stuff on there and I don’t feel like juggling backups all day. Managed to do a couple, but honestly, nothing else hits like GrapheneOS, so not resetting it.
https://soci…

Übernächstes macOS dreht Time-Capsule-Unterstützung ab
Lange gibt es keine WLAN-Router mit Festplatte von Apple mehr. Das endgültige Supportende für Backups ist aber noch nicht erreicht.
https://www.

A salutary reminder from work Slack: important backups (including recovery codes) should be stored in more than one location.
#Infosec #security #backups

I ended up backing out of the distro update due to a fear of low disk space, and lack of backups. I didn't want to hose the whole OS.
But I had already managed to restart the server as part of that process.
Restarting the server of course restarted the mastodon processes. Meaning they were now trying to load the half installed new version.
In particular they errored on... an incompatible libvips version being installed. So I had to go downgrade the Mastodon version to l…

Notes on Degeneracy and Robustness
Indrakshi Dey, Nicola Marchetti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19974 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19974

Notes on Degeneracy and Robustness
Degeneracy is the ability of structurally different elements to perform the same function or yield the same output under certain constraints. In contrast to redundancy, which implies identical backups, degeneracy allows diverse components to step in and perform the same or similar role. Mathematically, it is about mapping multiple distinct elements into the same function. In a degenerate system, failure in one part can be compensated by others not structurally linked. System functions are distr…

I am increasingly seeing websites that style their scroll bars out of existence.
To those sites, I say: I hope your server catches fire and you don't have backups. It will make the world a better place.

Toch wel knap om de dag nadat je backups voor je documenten in orde gemaakt voor een toekomst zonder cloud te merken dat de gewone documentenmap van je foon verdwenen is.
Ja ... T systeem werkt feilloos!
😅😇
/2

Falls hier wer #Veeam B&R nutzen sollte: Testet eure Backups. Vollständig. Immer. Hab hier nen Bug getroffen, dass erstellte Tape-Backups als Vollständig und OK angezeigt wurden, aber in Realität nie vollständig geschrieben wurden. Da guckt man beim Restore eher blöd aus der Wäsche. #IAmTheEdgeCase

Thanking my own self for backups... I accidentally deleted my Jellyfin media library yesterday!
Luckily the machine it lives on backs up to an external disk and there's also a backup that runs to a NAS in the house so it was an easy restore.

How you like them #hugops
https://infosec.exchange/@technotenshi/114863846781201965

I honestly don’t get how this is possible in 2025.
There’s no excuse for not having protected backups of everything critical. That was true 30 years ago, it is true today. Back then a bigger piece of the risk was hardware, less malware. Today it is unlikely for a disk failure to take your data because we all learned that RAID was worthwhile. But RAID is not a backup and backups today need to be resistant to intentional malicious deletion.

Good code release at work and zero issues! People don't see all the work done in the background weeks before.
Multiple walkthroughs with some of the clients, testers, developers, and the support team. The full set of instructions, modules, db changes, job changes, and schedule changes are reviewed. The day of the release, the support team and release coordinator (me) walk through every job that implements the release, special jobs, backups, and checkpoints.
When done, we d…

I'm paranoid about the cloud, OneDrive etc
I have a policy that most stuff I put on the cloud is encrypted (esp backups). Not always practical tho.
I was happy to discover rclone https://rclone.org/ a while ago, & to find out it can set up encrypted containers on OneDrive etc. Readable on both ends, e…

If you wonder how much disk space you need to run your own Mastodon instance, here are our stats of a server with a handful of active accounts:
Attachments: 8.51 GB (462 MB local)
Custom emoji: 477 MB (74.8 KB local)
Preview cards: 457 MB
Avatars: 4.29 GB (1.89 MB local)
Headers: 7.57 GB (3.58 MB local)
Backups: 0 Bytes
Imports: 0 Bytes
Settings: 34.4 KB
Disk usage is pretty stable after a while. We do backups with our own mechanism, so YMMV.

Are you running open-source databases on Kubernetes? At Berlin Buzzwords 2025, Peter Zaitsev discussed best practices for high availability, security, backups, and disaster recovery. Discover key pitfalls to avoid and learn how Operators can simplify database management for MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL in Kubernetes environments.
Watch the full session:

It never hurts to have current backups on hand for all my devices, right? That's just, you know, being prepared…

Who has two thumbs and almost just broke his mastodon server mid upgrade? This guy!
I have now enabled weekly backups to avoid tempting fate in the future.

I figured out how to use a Windows Server 2022 machine as an endpoint for time machine backups. :)
(Don't worry. I'll document this at some point.)

Why is #postgresql so anal about backup versions?
Did the devs forget that backups are only helpful if you can restore them?

Immer wenn ich lese "Kein Backup, kein Mitleid." muss ich mit dem Kopf schütteln. Hier ist nicht nur das "ob" (also warum man Backups machen muss) etwas das IMMER WIEDER erklärt werden muss, Auch das "wie", gerade das "wie", omg ist das "wie" wichtig!
aber abgesehen davon, nur weil man Jahrzehnte in einem Bereich tätig ist, geht ein Thema nicht weg, denn es haben mit der Zeit eben nicht alle verstanden. Muss mich da auch an eigene Nase…

Digital sovereignty cuts both ways. If I ever lose all of my posts from the past ~3 years, it's on me alone. There will be nobody to cry help to.
I have backups now, maybe I'll look at adding some database redundancy this weekend.

If you are like me, then you might have installed the #GoogleAuthenticator app, back in the days when it was the only solution out there for #TOTP #2FA.
But that is long ago. Since …

Today, I boosted a post about breakups. When I boosted, I had misread it as "backups". In case anyone's confused about the boost. Hope everyone has a great and amazing day. (I'm not unboosting, I think that'd just increase confusion)

Never too many walkthroughs for a release. It may be a bit of overkill, but it works for us...
1. Pre-release the day before to go over the schedule of activities and assignments.
2. Schedule release and related backups.
3. Day of release and after schedule created for run another walkthrough to verify that the backups are where they need to be, checkpoints are there, start of the process is on manual hold.
4. Schedule an open teams call for the leads, devs and supp…

Reinforcement Learning with Action Chunking
Qiyang Li, Zhiyuan Zhou, Sergey Levine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07969 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07969 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.07969
arXiv:2507.07969v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present Q-chunking, a simple yet effective recipe for improving reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks. Our recipe is designed for the offline-to-online RL setting, where the goal is to leverage an offline prior dataset to maximize the sample-efficiency of online learning. Effective exploration and sample-efficient learning remain central challenges in this setting, as it is not obvious how the offline data should be utilized to acquire a good exploratory policy. Our key insight is that action chunking, a technique popularized in imitation learning where sequences of future actions are predicted rather than a single action at each timestep, can be applied to temporal difference (TD)-based RL methods to mitigate the exploration challenge. Q-chunking adopts action chunking by directly running RL in a 'chunked' action space, enabling the agent to (1) leverage temporally consistent behaviors from offline data for more effective online exploration and (2) use unbiased $n$-step backups for more stable and efficient TD learning. Our experimental results demonstrate that Q-chunking exhibits strong offline performance and online sample efficiency, outperforming prior best offline-to-online methods on a range of long-horizon, sparse-reward manipulation tasks.
toXiv_bot_toot

One call made my day...
Can we move the implementation from Friday to Thursday? Answer, yes.
Can we arrange for a special set of backups before and after? Answer, yes... after I pick up my jaw when it hit the floor. (Normally we ask for just one before we start).