Brickfrog

Kind of seems like an ad, every link to their site has a referral in it ( /?ref=news.itsfoss.com ), guessing itsfoss gets paid for those clicks.

Eh, sure OP could do that. Does seem a bit over the top for OP to pursue the most complicated backup solution possible :D Maybe as a strange experiment to see how it goes, not as a trusted backup solution. (like you said not for critical data)

IPFS would also require more bandwidth vs just about any other solution since it has to constantly talk to other IPFS nodes. And more finicky, last I used IPFS the client would run into memory leaks and other weirdness requiring restarts every now and then (hopefully it’s more stable for long-term runs nowadays).

Similar but no, Syncthing does not use bittorrent or the bittorrent protocol.

Though if you’re curious Resilo Sync (formerly Bittorrent Sync) is similar to Syncthing and does use bittorrent.

Wouldn’t be a good solution, you’re hoping that other users are going to volunteer to pin (aka store and seed) your personal backup data for you.

Using IPFS for personal backups is exactly the same as creating a torrent with your backup data - With both it would be unlikely that your personal backup data will actually exist anywhere beyond your own data storage, no one’s going to freely volunteer to store your backups for you.

Not sure which country you’re in but in the U.S. I haven’t seen many gift cards that are contactless tap-to-pay so you would want to double-check. Without tap-to-pay those type of cards would need to be added into a phone app (Google Wallet / Apple Pay) to be able to tap-to-pay using it.

It’s possible outside the U.S. it’s more common for gift cards to be able to tap-to-pay.

Or if you’re talking about store gift cards then the same applies, most of those aren’t tap-to-pay either so you’d want to double-check.

Core 2 Duos are slow, yeah. I’ve got an Asus F8SP-X1 laptop from ~ 2008 with a Core 2 Duo T9500, 4 GB RAM, and a SSD SATA drive in it. It was originally a mid-range Windows Vista system. Over its years I managed to upgrade it as far as it could go. It does run standard Ubuntu and Windows 10 - Certainly not fast but it does run. Performance would lean towards unbearable without the SSD. I suspect Gnome isn’t doing it any favors and switching to a lighter DE or distro would help (or maybe just ditching the DE altogether) but since it’s just a spare laptop it’s no big deal.

One of the takeaways from your experiment is if it the system was already crap at running Windows 10 it’s not necessarily going to fare better with Linux, at least if you’re expecting a nice desktop environment. I don’t know if in 2025 we need to equate the “will this run Linux?” challenge on old Windows XP/7 hardware aside from the geek/techie users that want to do something with that old hardware. Anyone else non-technical stuck with that type of hardware isn’t thinking about Windows 10 being retired.

Sort of. Orbot is fine but for it to work it does have to modify the system’s networking. It installs itself as a VPN so if I try to use it it’ll kick me off the VPN my Android was already using. So yes Orbot can sort of let me pick apps to run over Tor but to do so it forces me off-VPN for all my other apps. Maybe that’s an Android limitation or an Orbot quirk, not really sure.

The nice thing about this new Oniux is that it works more like a container for applications rather than have to modify the system’s network.

Would be cool if this could work on Android and essentially be able to pick and choose which apps to run over Tor.

Agreed - I’ll also add that a lot of internet gateways/routers/firewalls also have a built-in feature to update a domain with your current public IP address. It definitely makes it easy, I haven’t thought about needing to update my dynamic IP in years since it just happens on the router.

Not everyone can do it but it’s definitely worth a look especially for those planning to do any real self hosting.

I’d say it’s worth it. Another bonus with your own domain is that you basically have an infinite amount of receiving email addresses you can use for no extra charge e.g. you can just keep making up new email addresses @ yourdomain whenever you need to register to a new website or whatever.

Drastically cuts down on the amount of spam you get at your main/personal address(es). Also helps whenever a website or whatever has a data breach, just means your random made up email address was leaked and it’s easy enough to mark that as spam going forward.