Health, Wealth, Relationships, Wisdom
Fax machines should have died years ago, but some businesses, government offices, and institutions still require faxed documents. If you need to send or receive a fax and don’t have a fax machine (like most people in 2026), online fax services solve the problem cheaply or for free.
In recent years, the second-hand market in Spain has grown significantly, providing a more sustainable and cost-effective alternative to buying brand-new items. Whether you’re looking for furniture, clothing, electronics, or even cars, these top websites will help you find the perfect second-hand item at a fraction of the cost. In this article, we’ll introduce you to the best websites for finding second-hand items in Spain, so you can save money while shopping responsibly.
Top Second-Hand Websites in Spain:
If you want to save money but buy new instead, check out my favorite online shops in Spain.
Have I missed out on your favourite second-hand items site? Let me know in the comments section.
Backups are essential both on a personal level and perhaps even more within a business context. My work and play are fairly intertwined, so for the purposes of backups I can’t really distinguish the two. What I will explain in this post can be used by someone to backup personal data but will also be useful to freelancers and small business owners.
There are some basic principles with regard to backups, and you should be aware of them.
I used to have an Apple Time Capsule where I backed up all my Apple laptops and iMac automatically (including attached drives). I’ve since gotten rid of the Time Capsule and purchased a Synology DiskStation DS916+ which gives me more flexibility. The Time Capsule had really become too small for my needs at 2TB. The new Time Capsules have a max of 3TB hard drive space, which is still quite tight for my needs.
The Time Capsule also functioned very well as a wifi router, so I had to get another router instead, but that’s a minor inconvenience as they are quite cheap anyway.
The other benefit of having the Diskstation is that I use it for streaming video via the Plex app and then accessing media from any device around the apartment. It’s like having my own private Netflix. I also set up other things like Gmail and Trello backups as well as video surveillance in my apartment. You can read about all this in my dedicated post about backing up with a Synology Diskstation.
I had also considered the Drobo 5n, but after watching the video below and asking some friends for their experiences, I decided on the Synology system.
Another important benefit of using a Diskstation over the Time Capsule is that you can use RAID for better peace of mind. If a drive fails, the files are not lost, you just have to buy another similar drive and replace the dead one. The Diskstation will then take care of setting up the new drive and adding it to your storage.
Of course, if I would be still traveling frequently and changing apartments, the Synology setup would not be practical as it involves more hardware. Traveling with the Time Capsule is manageable, at least with the older version (A1409) that I had.
For off-site backups I used to use Backblaze but I’ve stopped using that as it was quite slow backing up from Europe and consumed resources on my devices. Plus I was never 100% convinced that at any point in time the backups would work.
I also have two external drives which I use for photos. I don’t keep any photos on the Macbook; instead, I transfer them all to one of these external drives, then mirror that drive to the second one. So in the case of photos, I have two copies of them on my external drives, another copy in the on the DiskStation, and another manual copy that I keep in another country (I move between two countries quite frequently).
Photos and videos are very important to me and hence why I have 4 copies at any point in time. The drive that is kept in another country is an absolute last resort and is only updated a few times a year, so in that scenario, I would still lose a few months’ worth of photos and videos, which is not ideal. All copies are encrypted.
You will have noticed that this system is not completely automated. It is, unfortunately, impossible to automate it completely because some devices such as my cameras (Sony RX100, GoPro, Mavic Air) don’t have the functionality to connect to the internet and take backups on their own. That means that I have to manually connect them to my laptop and transfer the photos to my external drive. When I’m on holiday I try to do that every day. During the rest of the year, I do this once a week and only if I used those cameras during that week.
Apart from files on my computers and external drives, I use Evernote and Day One extensively. Time machine backup of Mac includes both local and synced notebooks (at the time when the backup was made). If you would like to generate a manual backup of your notes, what I can recommend you is to back up your notes as .ENEX file instead. You can read the help article about How to Backup and Restore Notes.
Day One keeps in sync across all devices using Day One Sync, and so that creates an automatic backup in the cloud of your notes. The Day One app on the Mac also keeps a local backup, which is itself included in the Time Machine backup.
If anyone has set up something similar, I’d love to have your thoughts.
A few years ago I watched the documentary produced by Leonardo di Caprio: Before the Flood.
I was fully convinced by the movie that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity today and saw it as a perfect showcase of the extent to which politics and greed have destroyed this planet.
Here’s what I had written back then.
So what can we do about climate change? We can, of course, support politicians and groups that are working to stop this wanton destruction of our environment. Moreover, we can vote with our money. What I mean is that the purchases we make help influence the supply chain of products.
If we continue buying meat, for example, we will encourage the big industrial agriculture companies to continue to rear the animals that give us this meat.
Did you know that the global livestock industry produces more greenhouse gas emissions than all cars, planes, trains and ships combined?
It might sound strange because we tend to think of pollution and climate change as being caused by machinery and means of transport. While those are certainly causes of pollution, the livestock industry is a bigger cause of concern.
Appetite for meat is rocketing as the global population swells and becomes more able to afford meat. Meat consumption is on track to rise 75% by 2050, and dairy 65%, compared with 40% for cereals. By 2020, China alone is expected to be eating 20m tonnes more of meat and dairy a year.
These are crazy and unsustainable figures. To put things into perspective, take a look at the chart below showing land use, freshwater consumption and emissions from agriculture and production for plant-based vs animal-based foods.
Diet shifts could have large benefits in terms of global warming, apart from being good for you.
I’ve always tried to stick to a healthy diet and lifestyle, but knowing the above I will now make further tweaks to my diet.
Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are also working on the climate change problem. In this documentary, Di Caprio visits Musk’s Gigafactory in the Nevadan desert. The Gigafactory is the latest project of Tesla founder Elon Musk. Once at full operation by 2020, the vast factory aims to be producing annually 500,000 electric vehicles and batteries/cells equal to 85 GWh/yr. A hundred of these factories would produce enough sustainable energy to power the entire world.
Bravo Elon Musk, I love what he is doing and we need more entrepreneurs with grand visions like his.
Coming back to the topic of food, which I believe is where our choices can have most impact, here’s what action I’m taking.
I have decreased my consumption of beef; eating it at most once a week. I’ve also eliminated dairy completely apart from the occasional yoghurt.
I’ll also be trying to eat locally-sourced foods as much as possible. In this global economy of ours, food is transported over thousands of miles to reach us. This causes pollution from the means of transport, and of course, also means that that food is not as fresh as locally sourced food.
It’s good to see that change is happening, and I’m excited to be part of this change myself. If you love the documentary and want more material to dig into, I can suggest a great book that I’ve just finished reading myself: This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein.
I like to look back at how my beliefs change over time. I’ve been growing more and more skeptical about hyped public opinions over the years, and the COVID mask and vaccine-mandate bullshit really illustrated beyond any doubt that most people are sheep and most politicians have perverse objectives, so one needs to be very careful when examining big ideas like climate change.
While my consumption of beef has always remained fairly moderate, and my lack of dairy consumption these days has more to do with optimizing my diet than saving the planet, I’ve come to revisit my opinions on climate change, and honestly, I’m not that sure of things anymore.
There’s one thing that stands out to me as being full of shit, and that’s climate policies. Here’s a podcast that addresses the issue. Another key things that springs to mind is that while there is a lot of talk about renewal energy, we are still ignoring our cleanest source of energy – nuclear. All this because people are scared of it and therefore politicians don’t want to touch the subject because they know they will lose votes.
It seems evident to me that the subject of climate change is a deep and nuanced issue so you need to spend a lot of time researching to have a strong opinion on the topic. I look forward to reading more myself, so if anyone has any good links to books or other materials feel free to drop them here. I think everyone should be interested in the topic both from an investment angle and as a more general future of humanity one (in our lifetime and those of our children).
I’m also old enough to have been through several climate change scares and narratives. This post is basically what I would have written myself about the topic so I won’t be repeating it. But as a reminder to myself, as a child we were indoctrinated to believe that:
While all points had some element of truth, there was an alarmist attitude that I’ve grown to despise over the years. I love going into the weeds with any topic that I feel is relevant to my life (and the survival of our species would definitely count as one) but I don’t like being preached at with exaggerated claims just to be coaxed into whatever action governments wants me to take. And that’s my big issue with the climate change movement.
On the other hand, there is no question that the investment landscape has been affected by climate change policies, as highlighted in the podcast I mentioned earlier. On that front, I think one could find some juicy investment opportunities based on the policies that have been or will be implemented to prop up some industries and sectors. One could also be rightly incensed at the misinformed opinions about topics like Bitcoin mining, where climate change is unjustly used as a weapon to attack Bitcoin to further another agenda.
From a lifestyle and future perspective, it could inform our decision on where to live, also planning for our children’s future life. We’ve already seen some climatic changes over our lifetime that have made some areas more dangerous/troublesome to live in, so it makes sense to think about that. And on a more long-term vision, I think we could also spend time thinking and researching about our transition to an inter-planetary species. Climate change or not, I think humankind is destined for this move and I hugely respect Elon Musk’s thinking and vision in that area.
People who are very vocal about climate change will immediately point out that people like Mr Peiser in this podcast are climate change deniers. This is typical nonsense that you also hear as soon as someone expresses any concern about topics like vaccines. They are immediately labeled an anti-vaxxer. Peiser doesn’t come across as a climate denier to me, although it is also true that he is not a scientist and therefore that’s a valid perspective to keep in mind. He says as much in the podcast, but I also fished out an excerpt from a previous interview of his: “there is a general agreement on CO2 and greenhouse gas: that we are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and that this will have a warming effect. This is agreed by everyone so that is not the real issue. Even the skeptics agree to that. So, this is a red herring, because no one denies the basic physics, no one denies the basic facts.”
We are living in an increasingly polarised and short-sighted political environment where popular opinions trump skeptical and more nuanced views, and there is absolutely silencing of non-popular opinions as well as the extreme pushing of certain agendas that might not be wrong in themselves, but become problematic when politicians take control and start the brainwashing engines. So it pays to be an independent thinker and move towards being self-sovereign in as many ways as possible.
To reiterate, on this particular topic of climate change, I’m keen on learning more about all the relevant angles, so I welcome suggestions on how I can deepen my knowledge on the subject.
We all know that once a certain level of basic income is reached, time starts to become the major constraint as everyone has the same 24 hours a day.
While our waking hours are more or less fixed, we can definitely optimize things to make the most of them. Do you think you don’t have time for some things you want to do? Think about the following:
Children aged 2-11 watch over 24 hours of TV per week, while adults aged 35-49 watch more than 33 hours, according to data from Nielsen that suggests TV time increases the older we get. The average American watches more than five hours of live television every day.
When I first read that I was shocked. While this study was done in the USA, I’m sure people in other nations are not doing a much better job at using their time wisely.
I recently interviewed Curtis McHale on the Mastermind.fm podcast, and one of the key takeaways for me was the importance that Curtis gives to his time. In fact, he books time slots for the whole week in advance. I’m not just talking about his work day, but also time spent with his family, personal time etc. Absolutely everything must be planned for in advance.
This might sound like a rigid approach, but I like it a lot and am trying to implement it myself. Of course unexpected things will always crop up but then you can shift things around that. Most of our days are pretty regular and for most of us the unexpected big things will be few and far between.
Curtis’ method is especially useful for self-employed people and entrepreneurs who usually have almost total liberty on how to spend their days. Many times I struggle with seemingly stupid decisions that waste my time and use up energy that can be better employed elsewhere. For example, when I wake up in the morning, many times I have to decide whether to train in the morning or the afternoon, and what kind of exercise to do. This might sound silly to you but I’m sure you can find other areas in your life where you have a similar problem with deciding on how to best use your time.
