When I was starting climbing back in the day the general idea for training was "keep climbing until you can't move anymore". We would do pull ups, pushups, crunches and traversing for warm up, climb for hours and then do more pull ups, pushups and campus. Repeat couple of times a week. There was progress at the beginning but people plateaued fast and injuries were common.

Since then a lot of research was done on climbing training and we have books like

After reading this book and applying what I learned, my first trainings look silly. So here's a short summary of what I learned from it and what I wish I knew 10 years ago:

1. Best way to improve climbing and avoid injury is to get strong. The stronger you are the bigger the safety margin you have. If you climb well below your max strength you will have less chances of getting injured.
2. To get stronger you should train close but below your max level. Strength training recipe is basically 1-3 reps and 90-95% of your 1RM (1 Rep Max, the max weight you can lift one time).
3. To work at 90-95% of your 1RM you have to be rested. Instead of working out until you can't move you should focus on doing the work you have planned for the day. Then you should make sure you're rested before your next training.

That's pretty much it. The rest is training periodization and planning which is a more complicate story. So what my typical training looks like now?

1. Good warmup (joints, rubber bands, roller, light pullups, cardio, traverses). Nowhere near pump levels.
2. Focuses strength training: for example 3 pullups at 60% 1RM, 3x at 75%, 3x at 90% (with 3 min rest between). Then same for finger strength (3 series of weighted hangs on 20mm ledge, at 60%, 75%, 90% 1RM).
3. Light-medium bouldering for maybe 30 minutes

Stretch, go home. Half of the work but noticeable results.

So what does your training look like?

The discovery of a small drone carrying explosives at Leipzig airport, a leading shipping and military hub, set off alarm and caused flight diversions on Wednesday morning. German police deployed a bomb disposal robot to defuse and destroy the explosive device.

Investigators said “a drone carrying an unknown explosive device was spotted by an airport employee in the security area of the cargo operations zone near the south runway” of Leipzig airport, a facility classified as “critical infrastructure”.

“A suspected second unidentified flying object collided with a cargo aircraft after it had taken off again following the previous closure of the runway. Minor damage was detected on the aircraft after it landed in Hanover,” the investigators said.

A Nato official said: “We are aware of the incident, which the German authorities continue to investigate.”

Investigators treating incident as part of ‘professional hybrid threat scenario’, says Alexander Dobrindt

Just something everyone should read.

(When I was planning some of the longer hikes I often struggled to find the most important info for me. You can easily find GPS tracks but those don't really tell you what type of a route is it: How remote it is? Is there water? Can you find food? Where can you camp? So here are some of the routes I did and some basic info about them)

Starting with a bit more exotic option: GR 131 on La Palma island. Also called "El Baston" because it kind of looks like a walking stick.

General info: The route follows a natural ridge of the volcano that formed the island. It passes through national park, astronomical observatory and many volcanoes.

The route can be done in 3 days. It's 63km but 3.794m of total ascent. Can be done throughout the year.

Getting there: The island is small and there are plenty of bus routes. You can easily get to both ends of the route from Santa Cruz de La Palma and back.

Remoteness: The route passes through "Roque de los Muchachos", highest point of the island and astronomical observatory. This point can be reached by car and is a popular tourist destination. Other than that I don't remember seeing anyone during the 3 days of hiking. The first/last town you pass through is Los Canarios, few kilometres from the start/end of the route.

Water: No water. You pass through Punta de Los Roques shelter in about the middle of the hike. There is a water deposit there that is re-filled periodically but you cant really count on it. You have to carry water for the whole hike.

Camping: As I mentioned there's a refuge that you could probably use when starting in Fuencaliente and going north. Walking the other way I passed next to it in the afternoon so I didn't sleep there. You can camp pretty much anywhere. It's legal to sleep anywhere in the mountains but you can only camp in designated areas during the day. Obviously don't start any fires.

Dangers: Other then the remoteness itself - none. The route is well marked and safe.

Overall: Highly recommended. It's a remote but well maintained route. Short but definitely on the difficult side. Climbing from a see level to the highest point of the island is a nice challenge. Great views from the top and volcanic scenery along the way make it all worth it.

What else to do: La Palma prides itself in the quality of it's hikes and you will find plenty of other quality routes there. Short flight/ferry trip away is also Tenerife with Teide, highest peak of Spain.

Wanted to share my setup so far, in part to get some feedback, in part to share results of my own research.

Hardware

The base is an old Dell laptop with 8GB of RAM, nothing special.

For network I got cheap (~30 euro) Cudy router compatible with OpenWRT. I looked at MikroTik but it was more expensive and the setup looked more complex. OpenWRT was very easy to install and fairly easy to set up. I really appreciate the firewall, I was able to easily cut off my smart TV form the internet for example. Setting up port forwarding was also easy.

For storage I got Icy Box USB RAID, set it up to RAID 1. It was the cheapest solution I found and it works fine after a bit of fiddling (issues with the fan but it's a long story, can give more details if someone's interested because otherwise I'm happy with it). I use it for backups for now and plan on using it for slow storage in the future. I also got 5TB USB drive for media (arr). I don't care if I lose it so no backup or RAID here.

No UPS so far. I'm planning on installing solar planes with battery which should protect me from power cuts.

Software

Proxmox as a base. I hesitated if I really need it as I was planning to setup 3 VMs only but in the end the ease of backups and storage management convinced me to use it. Works great, no issues here.

VMs based on Debian.

I'm using cosmos cloud to manage my apps (https://cosmos-cloud.io/). I compared couple of different solutions and this one had the biggest library of supported apps and uses docker (I like the additional security provided by containers). It works great so far and has all the features I needed.

I chose netbird for VPN and I'm not happy with it. The Android app has serious issue with battery usage. It was reported long time ago and it's still not fixed. That's really sad because otherwise the app is great. I'm trying to switch to netmaker now. Why not tailscale? I don't want to tie myself to a closed source app like that.

Backups

VMs backed up by Proxmox daily, stored on the RAID and synced to external server (VPS with NFS drive).

Network and VMs

One internal server accessible only thorough VPN. It hosts *arr stack and bitwarden.

One external server accessible through port forwarding in OpenWRT and nginx with fail2ban. It will host forgejo, my webiste and so on.

One exit node VM running nord VPN.

Phone with always connected VPN routing everything through the exit node.

Bitwarden with self-signed cert imported on phone.

Monitoring

Simple monit scripts pinging individual servers, checking VPN status and status of hard drives.

I've been running it for couple of months and so far everything is working great. I want to setup the external server next, test the backups and switch to self-hosted netmaker for VPN.

Anything else I should do or anything I should stop doing?

Signal agencies in Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada sound alarm after Trump blocks foreign nationals from Anthropic’s Fable AI model

Signal agencies in Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada sound alarm after Trump blocks foreign nationals from Anthropic’s Fable AI model

It offers a set of bold policy proposals, including hefty wealth taxes on billionaires, sharp reductions in working hours, a change in diets and a shift of investment from materially intense sectors like industry and mining to education and health.

If these and other measures are taken, the report says 89% of the world population would see their incomes double by 2100 and global heating would be kept below 2C above the preindustrial average.

Spain takes lead: Spain claimed first place in ILGA-Europe’s 2026 Rainbow Map after new legal protections and anti-discrimination measures.

Violence still rising: Despite legal gains, assaults on LGBTQ+ people in Spain rose from 7% to 22% in two years amid increased hate speech.

Sharp continental divide: Russia and Azerbaijan scored just 2%, while Malta, Iceland, Belgium, and Denmark joined Spain in the top five.

I couldn't find a better source. Here's the full ranking: https://rainbowmap.ilga-europe.org/

Kaja Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, said proposals for a part suspension of the EU-Israel association agreement remained on the table but required states to shift their positions to come into force.

Speaking after a meeting between EU foreign ministers on Tuesday, she told reporters: “We didn’t see that today, but these discussions will continue.”

The seven-metre (23-foot) figure, packed with 14 kilograms (31 lb) of gunpowder, was part of a decades-old ceremony held on 5 April in El Burgo, a small town near the southern city of Malaga.

I'm trying to setup my VPN and I'm a bit confused here.

I have a commercial VPN subscription that I'm using on my phone and laptop. Now I've set up WireGuard on my OpenWRT router to access my home network remotely. I can connect to it from my phone but from what I see there's no way to have both commercial VPN and my local network WG active at the same time (both are using WG so I'm trying to create WG config with two peers but I don't think it's possible).

So what do people actually do? From what I see I have 3 options:

1. Don't use commercial VPN on my phone, only use WG to access my network
2. Switch between VPNs manually whenever I want to access my network
3. Setup commercial VPN on my router, move all my networks traffic through this VPN and move all traffic from my phone through my home network.

Am I missing something? What's the typical approach here? I thought that what I'm trying to do is basic scenario but it looks like it's not that simple if at all possible.

That's a real blast from the past. If you can tell where this is from I will buy you a beer.

If I were to watch one show from your country, what would you recommend?

We can obviously skip English language shows as those are all well known. I'm sure other countries also have great shows that are not that popular. Ideally, something original and specific to this country, not some big Netflix show that's the same a shows from any other country.

To start, from Spain I would recommend "Riot Police": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10883660/

Great story, great characters, great acting. It covers universal problems like police brutality and corruption so it's accessible to anyone but it also shows them though a Spanish prism that makes it unique.

Another one of my favorites. Polish apple pie, or 'Szarlotka". No idea how it differs from other apple pies but it's easy, fast and tasty.

Ingredients:

dough

• Flour - 320g
• Butter - 250g
• Baking powder - 1.5 spoons
• Sugar - 5 spoons
• Vanilla sugar - 1 spoon
• Egg - 1

apples

• Apples - 1.5kg
• Sugar - 5 spoons
• Cinnamon - 0.5 tea spoon

Steps

1. Peel the apples and either dice them or grate them, depending on what you prefer (I grate them). Drop them on a frying pan.
2. Fry apples for ~20 minutes or until they are soft, add sugar and cinnamon as you go. Stir repeatedly.
3. Mix flour, cold, diced butter, baking powder, sugar and vanilla sugar. Work it until you get unified mass. At the end add the egg. The dough will become quite soft at this point. Work it a bit more and divide it into two equal parts. Put them in the freezer for about 15 minutes so they can harden.
4. Get the baking pan you will use. Cut one half of the dough into slices and plaster the entire pan with them. The dough should cover the entire pan with layer. I usually use a spoon to help me spread it around.
5. Put fried apples into the baking pan.
6. Optionally you can put meringue on top of the apples. To make meringue just beat egg whites and then keep mixing while adding sugar slowly. I just keep adding sugar until I get a nice, thick cream.
7. Now cover it all with second half of the dough. You can either grate it (it will be hard enough after some time in the freezer) or cut it into slices.
8. Bake for 50 minutes at 180° C

Tips

Apples are a bit tricky. Depending on the variety you will need more or less sugar. I usually try to buy the sour kind and just add sugar as I go until I'm satisfied with the taste.

I don't add a lot sugar because I like the apples in the pie to still taste fairly sour. It pairs perfectly with some ice cream. Just put the pie into microwave for a moment so it's worm and serve with nice scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Or add more sugar so the entire pie is sweet. Try out different things, find what you favorite version.

Any Dinosaur Comics fans here?

First post!

Let's start with something simple. There are many way to make a cheesecake but this one is my favourite. Very light, not too sweet, goes perfectly with a bit of jam and some tea/coffee.

Ingredients:

• eggs: 3

• creme cheese ('Philadephia' type): 250g

• natural yogurt (without sugar): 250g

• cream (35%): 1 yogurt cup

• flour: 70g

• sugar: 120g

• baking powder: 1 tea spoon

• vanilla essence: 1 spoon

For the base:

• biscuits (Maria type): 125g

• butter: 60g

Steps:

Using a mixer, mix eggs and sugar until they are white and creamy.

Sieve flour and baking powder. Add them to the egg mixture together with vanilla essence, cheese, yogurt and cream. Mix everything together until it's smooth and uniform.

Cover the baking pan (about 22cm in diameter) with butter.

Mix crumbled biscuits with melted butter (60g) and put them at the base of the baking pan.

Pour the mix on the biscuits.

Bake for 35-50 minutes at 175. You can stick a knife in it to check if it's ready. If it comes out dry and clean - it's done.

Serve with jam.

Tips

You can add less sugar if you prefer your cake less sweet. Just add 100 or 80g instead of 120 while keeping everything else the same.

The amount of biscuits and butter for the base is approximate. Make sure all the biscuits are moist. I mix all of them with butter until all of it is slightly moist. then spread them to cover the entire pan and compact them with a spoon. You can use more or less biscuits depending on how thick base you like.