I moved from the city I grew up in and gave away my car on the way out. That was in 2017, and I haven’t owned a car since. I drive extremely rarely — used to rent a car for a few hours every couple of months to run this or that errand in the Pacific Northwest US. I’ve since moved to a larger city with better transit on the US east coast. I live in the center city and can’t imagine any reason I would need to drive at this point. It’s been a few years since I’ve driven a car.

How practical it is will depend heavily on your lifestyle and where you live. If you’re in most parts of the US, the default assumption is that you will drive a car, and you will be excluded from many things if you don’t. If you already live in a place that is conducive, are willing to move to a place that is, or can otherwise structure your life in such a way that doesn’t require it, you can absolutely do it. There are certainly trade-offs, but you couldn’t pay me enough money to go back to a car-centric life.

I emailed support about this, and they replied telling me they had adjusted some configuration to try to fix the problem. Seems like it was an unintended result of some other change.

Awesome! Subscribed!

Sure thing! What’s your static site generator?

Great site!

Would you ever consider adding RSS? I’d love to subscribe to a feed.

These are the dongles that came with the keyboards, so they’re paired out-of-the-box (although I have also used the process for re-pairing them). They are just connected to a USB port on the computer, so not really permanent, but I do leave them connected. Not both at the same time, but each in turn. Hope that answers your question, but I’m not 100% sure I understood it.

Since posting this, I've also tried installing powertop and checking the tunables. According to lsof -t, the dongle is connected directly to the root hub (under only xHCI host controller). I noticed in powertop that those controllers were still under power management, so I disabled them. That didn't seem to help. The keyboard still lost connection.

Thanks for taking a look. Nothing in dmesg. I'm using the keyboard wired at the moment. That top entry happened when I disconnected USB. I flipped to 2.4GHz and tested the OS key which worked. Tested it periodically until it didn't work but there were no additional log entries. The rest of the log entries happened when I reconnected USB.

 undefined

    
[Mon May 26 11:07:31 2025] usb 1-12: USB disconnect, device number 8
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: new full-speed USB device number 10 using xhci_hcd
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: New USB device found, idVendor=fffe, idProduct=0082, bcdDevice= 1.07
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: Product: M67
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: Manufacturer:  
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.0/0003:FFFE:0082.0017/input/input46
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] hid-generic 0003:FFFE:0082.0017: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Keyboard [  M67] on usb-0000:00:14.0-12/input0
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] hid-generic 0003:FFFE:0082.0018: hiddev96,hidraw1: USB HID v1.11 Device [  M67] on usb-0000:00:14.0-12/input1
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input47
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 System Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input48
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 Consumer Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input49
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input50
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] hid-generic 0003:FFFE:0082.0019: input,hidraw2: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [  M67] on usb-0000:00:14.0-12/input2
[Mon May 26 11:14:02 2025] input: input-remapper   M67 Keyboard forwarded as /devices/virtual/input/input51

  

Are there other logs that would be good to check?

Check out Natsu-Mon: 21st Century Summer Kid. It’s not Deck verified, but it’s platinum on ProtonDB, so it should work. I played it on Linux (albeit not on Deck) with no issue.

You just get to be a kid in the summer in a small Japanese town. I grieved when it was over because I wouldn’t get to see all the friends I had made anymore or go fishing or hunt treasure or catch bugs…

So wholesome!

Just remember any backup is better than nothing.

This is comforting.

There are several reasons to backup data only and not the full system. First you may be unable to find a computer exactly/enough like the one that broke, and so the old system backup won’t even run. Second, even if you can find an identical enough system, do you want to, or maybe it is time to upgrade anyway - there are pros and cons of arm (raspberry pi) vs x86 servers (there are other obscure options you might want but those are the main ones), and you may want to switch anyway since you have. Third, odds are some of the services need to be upgraded and so you may as well use this forced computer time to apply the upgrade. Last, you may change how many servers you have, should you split services to different computers, or maybe consolidate the services on the system that died to some other server you already have.

Some good things to consider here. Whether or not I'll want to upgrade will depend on how far this theoretical failure is. If storage fails, I might just replace that and restore the backup. If it's something more significant than that and we're 2-3 years down the line, I'll probably look at an upgrade. If it's less than that, I might just replace with the same to keep things simple.

I guess one other upside of the full system backup is that I could restore just the data out of it if I decide to upgrade when some hardware fails, but I don't have the reverse flexibility (to do a full system restore) if I opt for a data-only backup.

If you don’t have the budget for on-premises backup, you almost certainly can’t afford to restore the cloud backup if anything goes wrong.

I believe egress is free on Backblaze B2.

Just make sure to test the restore procedure once in a while.

Good call on this. Curious if you have a procedure for actually doing this. I could just wipe out my system and rebuild it from the backup, but then I'm in trouble if it fails. What does a proper test of a backup actually look like?

Check out Borgbase, it’s very cheap and it’s an actual backup solution, so it offers some features you won’t get from Google drive or whatever you were considering using e.g. deduplication, recover data at different points in time and have the data be encrypted so there’s no way for them to access it.

I looked at Borgbase, but I think it will be a bit more pricey than Restic + Backblaze B2. Looks like Borgbase is $80/year for 1TB, which would be $72/year on B2 and less if I don't use all of 1TB.

The vast majority of your system is the same as it would be if you install fresh, so you’re wasting backup space in storing data you can easily recover in other ways.

I get this, but it would be faster to restore, right? And the storage I'm going to use to store these files is relatively little compared to the overall volume of data I'm backing up. For example, I'm backing up 100GB of personal photos and home movies. Backing up the system, even though strictly not necessary, will be something like 5% of this, I think, and I'd lean toward paying another few cents every month for a faster restore.

Thanks for your thoughts on the database backups. It's a helpful perspective!

Much simpler than my solution. I'll look into this. Thank you!

Is your script something you can share? I'd love to see your approach. I can definitely live with a few minutes of down time in the early morning.

Had considered a device with some storage at a family member's house, but then I'd have to maintain that, fix it if it goes down, replace it if it breaks, etc. I think I'd prefer a small monthly fee for now, even if it may work out more expensive in the long run.

Good call on the cost calculation. I'll take another look at those factors...

If that's the main downside to a full-system backup, I might go ahead and try it. I'll check out Backrest too. Looks great!

Much easier than what I was trying to do. Thank you!

OK, cool. That’s helpful. Thank you!

I know in general you can just grab a docker volume and then point at it with a new container later, but I was under the impression that backing up a database in particular in this way could leave you with a database in a bad state after restoring. Fingers crossed that was just bad info. 😅

You’re right, but part of the draw of Linux is that you have more control over your OS. An immutable distro makes that a lot harder to get at as compared to non-immutable.

Yep! Like I said, freedom is more than one thing. The way this questions is framed tries to put the blinders on and obscure that fact, creating a false equivalency between the freedom to sideload software and some abstract notion of “absolute freedom” which doesn’t actually exist. We’re rarely choosing between absolute freedom and zero freedom, certainly not in this case.