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Sawyer filter inline with a camelback is awesome. I'd just fill up my camelback in a stream using a (clean) handkerchief to get the large debris out and then let the filter do the rest.

Yep, you're right

I was just responding to parent's comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

That's...not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum

light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they're just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don't call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don't use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that "physics bandwidth" tends to care about fractional bandwidth ("delta frequency divided by frequency"), whereas "information bandwidth" cares about absolute bandwidth ("delta frequency"), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz

so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban "fiberization" is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it's probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

So the irony is

I see what you did there...

I think you mean more scrupulous, not less.

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal

if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

Most of the time that leads to them dying.

Well, squishing has a 100% chance of them dying. With a toddler and a baby, having them run loose sadly isn't an option.

We live in a very mild climate, and there's under-deck and fence space around our house, in addition to bushes, trees, and underbrush

fairly suitable for a variety of arachnids. It's not the same as indoors, and survival rate certainly isn't 100%, but it's not the death sentence of going from a climate controlled house to below-freezing outdoors.

Because I can trap mine in a jar and take it outside instead.

I think large planes "look" like they can't work because their "relative speed" is really low

that is, their speed relative to their length. We're used to seeing birds cover tens of lengths per second, whereas a large airliner covers ~1ish per second at takeoff.

Or not, but this always seemed like a plausible explanation as to why planes look impossible. (Though given that hovering birds don't look funny, maybe this is a silly observation...).

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it's nice to have computers seem "fun" again.

At least, that's my perspective.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I'm a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you're trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).