Random thoughts

 My wife's beloved Fitbit Versa smartwatch decided to shutdown one day (before our holiday). The screen wouldn't turn on, and when charging, the device would get very hot. I left it to discharge and tried to charge it again, but it would get hot and the screen wouldn't start. The proximity sensor on the back would flash, but that's about it. The watch was 3-4 years old, so I knew the battery must have expanded and probably failed. Also, warranty was out, no chance of replacing it. So, I did what I know best - I took it apart, to see if I could replace the battery (I'm not a fan of throwing something out just because a part failed, or it's old). I followed this tear-down guide, and using a razor blade to take out the screen is a must: My variant was a bit different inside, so here is a picture guide: https://imgur.com/a/mPtzhyf You will need a trox 3 screwdriver to take out the 4 main screws, and a very small (don't know the size) Philips screwdriver to take ...

 The school where my kids learn have some old (10 year old) projectors and they are starting to fail. I took down one of them (a BENQ MX518 model) and tried to fix it. Its lamp didn't start and it showed two red leds: Lamp and Temp: I replaced the lamp with a new one, but when I tried to start it it would still show both leds on and wouldn't power on the lamp.  So, I took it down and tore it apart (in addition to the screws, there were some plastic clips that need opening). Inside, as expected, was a thick layer of dust: The radiators were full of dust, but the fans still worked. The dust worked as an insulator, preventing components from cooling. This is not a fan, but a speaker! Thankfully, the capacitors on board looked fine, without leaks The components below seem to have been fixed in place with hot glue, so that they don't vibrate: After a thorough cleanup (with a vacuum, alcohol and cotton swab) most of the dust was removed and I could test the lamp once more. Take c...

Usually, the time for backups is right after a critical system failure or after a ransomware attack! So, let's avoid that and make backups simple. Well, somewhat simple...  Borg backup ( https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ ) is a great backup tool. It does compression and de-duplication on its own and is perfect for automatic backups.  I've had to deploy a large backup policy at work, so I prefer not to have to run manual commands on each system - that's why I invested time in polishing an ansible role and some playbooks that can help anyone deploy a borg backup server (or several) with automatic scripts that push backups from distributed systems to a centralized server. The way backups will work is the following:  client systems will run borg via cron to backup certain directories (or the full filesystem)  they connect to a central server and push the differences via ssh in a borg repository on the server. Each client will have a dedicated user on the backu...