A while ago, I mentioned how I back up my valuable data to my NAS. In the mean time, I added one more thing to it: a UPS¹ so even if the power goes out, it still says up and more im­por­tant­ly, it can shut down safely. This is important because if the power cuts out while hard drives are spinning, the head can damage the disk and you lose the data. The UPC can tell the NAS when it's on low power, so the NAS enters standby safely.

But I said that there is another component to backups, which is …continue.

One of the games that we recently played a lot is Splendor (Amazon link), a game with some really neat tokens, rep­re­sent­ing precious stones, and where the rich get richer (almost like in real life xD).

The objective of the game is to get 15 prestige points. You get prestige points from some cards and from visits from nobles. You buy cards with precious stones. But cards also represent mines, traders or jewelers, which give you more precious stones. So the more cards you have, the easier it is to buy other cards.

There are some con­straints on how many precious stones you can have and …continue.

Inspired by many of the posts I saw on the bl­o­gos­phere about how people did in their reading challenge in 2018, I decided to do a short recap as well.

I started 12 books in 2018 and I finished 10 of them. This is unusual for me, because I'm quite picky about what books I start reading and I like to finish what I start. But I couldn't stand the author's style in one the books, even though the topic sounded really in­ter­est­ing (The Sov­er­eign­ty of God by A.W. Pinker), and I found the other one to be too slow (The Progress of Doctrine in the New …continue.

This year I caught the bug of boardgames. I bought a lot of them, I tried a lot of them and I played some a loooot of times. My lovely wife also enjoys this hobby very much, so we often have friends over to play various boardgames. Almost all of our friends enjoy playing boardgames, I even managed to convince my parents to play once, but my dad confessed that he just... doesn't see the point in playing any kinds of games.

I want to start reviewing some of the boardgames in my collection. Today I will start with Sushi Go (Amazon link), a very simple and quick …continue.

I have almost 60000 pictures (about 195 GB), going back to about 2007 and I like to keep things organized. Of course, I also don't want to manually tag 60000 pictures. Until last year, the only option to avoid that was Google Photos, which would au­to­mat­i­cal­ly recognize objects, locations and faces in pictures and give you the option to search by them. But Google Photos has the downside that you have to upload all your pictures to a 3rd party and that you have to pay a monthly fee for that storage.

Well, at the end of last year, Synology (the company that makes my NAS) launched …continue.

After a year, prompted by a question Catalin asked me, I finally made time to write about a couple more great writers I follow.

Seth Godin

Seth does many things, but he is mainly a marketing person. However, he doesn't do marketing in the annoying, in your face spammy way, but in a thoughtful, creative way. Instead of trying to go for the masses, to appeal to everyone, to bring the product to the lowest common de­nom­i­na­tor, he tries to broaden the market, to find new people, to win people over by quality, not by the lowest price and by having an eye on the long term. I have …continue.