Not sure what motherboard you have: Most consumer boards only support "FakeRAID", which requires a kernel driver to actually function. Good luck finding a vendor who wrote a driver for Linux.
I'd definitely recommend software RAID instead, as you'll have better support. I like btrfs, so I'd recommend you set up your new drives to use a btrfs RAID configuration. mdadm is another option, if you really like ext4.
On Linux, I run fwupdmgr to periodically check for firmware updates. Not every manufacturer supports it yet, but I've had good results with a few laptops. Not sure if it supports BIOS.
Also though, I generally try to leave my BIOS alone if everything is working fine. Unless I hear of a reason to update, I'd rather stay on a stable version.
I don't actually like those big recliners they have in movie theaters. They're too plush to be comfortable (if that makes sense) and the droning whine of the electric motor is annoying when someone adjusts their seat during a screening.
Try org-roam. It's a similar system to obsidian, but fully open source. You have all the note taking techniques of org-mode, and all the scripting power of emacs.
I'd recommend BTRFS in RAID1 over hardware or mdadm raid. You get FS snapshotting as a feature, which would be nice before running a system update.
For disk drives, I'd recommend new if you can afford them. You should look into shucking: It's where you buy an external drive and then remove (shuck) the HDD from inside. You can get enterprise grade disks for cheaper than buying that same disk on its own. The website https://shucks.top tracks the price of various disk drives, letting you know when there are good deals.
I live in a progressive urban area far from the Southern US. I can think of at least 2 different stores near me that sell groceries and ammunition. From my experience, groceries + ammo is pretty common for many big-box stores in the suburbs.
Our vacation days generally consist of stalking the area for good food and doing tourist-y things to fill the time between meals. My partner's favorite thing to do during vacation downtime is to find more restaurants and cafes in the area for the next day, so hotel food is never a factor.
What you're looking for is a revocation key. You can generate one in GPG at the same time that you generate your identity key. The method of securing it is up to you. In your example, a simple way would be to encrypt it with the 5 sequential keys. Or you could break the revocation key up into K parts with Shamir's secret sharing algorithm.
Hmm, I can't grow peppermint in the recess, but maybe around the dome would work?
Good point about the escape route possibly making things worse. There's plenty of evidence that previous owners have dealt with rodent issues, so I wouldn't want to reintroduce that possibility.
Oh, judicial duels have always been bad, tending to favor the wealthy who can afford training. The pistol duel was once considered egalitarian because you were just as likely to miss your opponent regardless of how much you trained. For most of the 20th century (until the 90s) Uruguay had legalized dueling. It was mostly used by politicians and the powerful to muder journalists and lawyers who "defamed" them.
But if we are already living in a period where the rich act with impunity anyway, I want a world where there's a nonzero chance that we get to watch Elon Musk take an estoc to the face because of a twitter argument.
Grand journeys to far off lands. The kind of journey where someone who is "exotic" and personable can make a life for themselves by being the court foreigner.
Also: Judicial duels. They are unjust, unethical, and unproductive, but damn if I don't want to see white collar criminals have to fight the selected champion of all the folks they ripped off. Of course, being a billionaire would probably buy you a pretty good champion yourself, so we'd also have to bring back old concepts of honor to compel them to represent themselves.
BTRFS should be stable in the case of power loss. That is to say, it ought to recover to a valid state. I believe the only unstable modes are RAID 5/6.
I'd recommend BTRFS in RAID1 mode over mdadm RAID1 + ext4. You get checksumming and scrubs to detect drive failures and data corruptions. You also have snapshotting, in case you're prone to the occasional fat-fingered rm -rf.
For backup, maybe a blu-ray drive? I think you would want something that can withstand the salty environment, and maybe resist water. Thing is, even with BDXL discs, you only get a capacity of 100GiB each, so that's a lot of disks.
What about an offsite backup? Your media library could live ashore (in a server at a friend's house). You issue commands from your boat to download media, and then sync those files to your boat when it's done. If you really need to recover from the backup, have your friend clone a disk and mail it to you.
Do you even need a backup? Would data redundancy be enough? Sure if your boat catches fire and sinks, your movies are gone, but that's probably the least of your problems. If you just want to make sure that the salt and water doesn't destroy your data, how about:
A multi-disk filesystem which can tolerate at least 1 failure
Regular utilities scanning for failure. BTRFS scrubs, for example.
Backup fresh disks kept in a salt and water resistant container (original sealed packaging), to swap any failing disk, and replicate data from any good drives remaining.
Documentation/practice to perform the aforementioned disk replacement, so you're not googling manpages at sea.
This would probably be cheapest and have the least complexity.
Not sure what motherboard you have: Most consumer boards only support "FakeRAID", which requires a kernel driver to actually function. Good luck finding a vendor who wrote a driver for Linux.
I'd definitely recommend software RAID instead, as you'll have better support. I like btrfs, so I'd recommend you set up your new drives to use a btrfs RAID configuration. mdadm is another option, if you really like ext4.