I'm always fashionably late to the party. So forgive me for being the last to get all excited about Restic. Encryption by default, snapshots, deduplication, support for various storage types—Restic checks all the boxes. Not only that, it is also a supremely easy to use backup tool.
While learning how to use Restic, I took notes for future reference. I'm sharing my trivial findings here on the off-chance that someone might find them useful. The notes cover a simple scenario, where Restic backs up data to an external USB storage device.
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Nothing lasts forever, including laptop batteries. But how do you know when your laptop's battery is ripe for a replacement? Easy: install the acpi package (sudo apt install acpi on Ubuntu and Linux Mint), run the acpi -V command, and check the line that looks something like this:
Battery 0: design capacity 4867 mAh, last full capacity 4584 mAh = 94%
In this case, the battery is at 94% of its designed capacity, so there is no cause for concern. If the value is nearing 50%, you should probably start saving for a new battery.
Since it makes sense to run battery checks regularly, you can create an alias for that. Open the .bashrc file for editing using the nano ~/.bashrc command and add the following alias:
alias chkbat="acpi -V | grep Battery"
Save the changes, reopen the terminal, and run the chkbat command.
I love VU meters. Then again, who doesn't? There is something mesmerizing about the needle or LED segments dancing to the rhythm of the music. So when I stumbled upon PeppyMeter, I knew right away that I must have it running on my machine. Making it work turned out to be a non-trivial matter, but I managed to get it up and running after much experimenting. And I've documented all the steps for your convenience. The following procedure assumes that you're using Ubuntu or Linux Mint.
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