This is probably not true. The concept of this phrase but referring to family is probably a modern confusion. There is no clear evidence it means it was really referencing ties to friends. Although I wish it did. Here’s some further reading from others also looking for a clearer reference.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147902/is-the-alleged-original-meaning-of-the-phrase-blood-is-thicker-than-water-real

I use backblaze B2. I use duplicity to create a local encrypted backup of daily and then monthly incremental backups that are stored on a separate hard drive as a local backup. I then sync that with backblaze every night. It’s worked like a treat. Gives me my primary data, a local backup on a separate drive and then an off-site backup. And actually my primary data and my local backups are both on ZFS raidz2 drives, so I can even have drives fail and be okay.

I used to use glacier, but the backblaze interface and uploading scripts were just so much easier to use, and the price was comparable if not maybe just slightly cheaper, I can’t remember exact. I think duplicity also has a front end, duplicati that some people use, but I’ve never used it.

Just finished shadow of Mordor yesterday and it was fun, and worked perfect on the deck. Today I started Darkwood, seems to be working reasonably well so far, although the run versus walk controls are a little clunky, but overall no big issues just an hour in to it

Out of curiosity, how are you connecting your phone to home when you’re out? Are you exposing HA, vpn? What sensors do you have enabled in the companion app? Do you have high accuracy enabled? How’s your battery drain?

I have the ecobee 3 lite and I try to keep it off the cloud and connect through home kit to home assistant. It is exceptionally unreliable and disconnects all the time. It’s the only home kit device I have, everything else is zigbee. I don’t know if it’s an ecobee issue or a home assistant issue or maybe a router issue. The only thing that’s helped some is occasionally letting it have access to the cloud and then it will reconnect to home kit and then I can disconnect it from the cloud and it will be good for any more from a few days to a month. I cannot recommend it because it has been so unreliable, and looking through online forums I’ve seen a lot of other people have similar issues with HomeKit and the ecobee. Eventually I want to switch to a purely zigbee device, as this is the only thing I have that even has Wi-Fi on my automation network.

I then control temperatures through a combination of home assistant, node red, and sensors through zigbee2mqtt.