This might be overkill but I run an xrdp and just remote into it from any device. Tablet phone laptop etc with an rdp app. If you need it on the go you would also want something like tailscale or WireGuard as a vpn to access the computer while away from home

Thanks for the heads up!

Assuming the drive writes normally a simple command like

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdX

Where sdX is the location of the drive should do the trick. Depending on drive time this may take a bit.

I haven’t heard of the pfas lawsuit, man I’m glad the first time I heard about these things was when the caffeine lawsuit started. Apparently the lawsuit is alleging high levels of 8 different pfas compounds.

This was a few drives ago but there was a point in time when most places were giving me digital copies of tax documents which I could upload to tax prep software but things like TurboTax didn’t have an auto import. So you’d need to download them then re-upload them to the correct service. Now they do it automatically so the only thing that would match that now now is receipts for expenses/donations and what not that I need to keep track of for manual entry.

I started encrypting once I moved to having a decent number of solid state drives as the tech can theoretically leave blocks unerased once they go bad. Before that my primary risk factor was at end of life recycling which I usually did early so I wasn’t overly concerned about tax documents/passwords etc being left as I’d use dd to write over the platters prior to recycling.

I really miss Ubuntu from around that era, was by far the easiest thing to get up and running!

Vista was what pushed me to Linux originally, and I still haven’t gone back!

Because every time I’m reminded the underlying OS exists it’s always something negative.

On windows: Forced restarts and updates that take over 5x as long as my Linux (or FreeBSD build), ui that constantly undoes what I customized, ads and preinstalled malware essentially like candy crush even on builds from Microsoft directly, worse performance with a much higher number of crashes under load on my current box, and no auto login/name any simple customization without screwing around with registry editor to name just the simple things. More advanced problems include no hypervisor built in to the home version, everything is pay to unlock features my Linux install does for free, no zfs software raid for storage safekeeping, most fixes when I do have errors involve googleing cryptic hex codes and being told to run fsck/chdsk as the only solution for often times hours of searching before finally finding the actual answer - not to mention most other fixes being to download a library/binary of the sketchiest sounding website ever that i can’t verify isn’t a virus.

On linux or even FreeBSD which took a bit to get installed to my liking i may have put work in up front but its like 3 hours at most of my time for 6+ years of stability and proper functioning to avoid all of the above plus no microsoft telemetry etc. I switched when i first tried Vista and even today every time i have to use Microsoft’s horrific excuse for an OS it is heartburn inducing.