Have you considered a torrent based solution?

Setup a torrenting server hosted online somewhere with fast speeds (e.g. Netherlands), sync it with gdrive, create a torrent for your books, and “download” your books to the toreenting machine.

This approach won’t help with upload speed, but it should help with reliability/continuity. As long as you seed from your home computer, your books will eventually make it into your gdrive.

Although with this setup it might be easier to just torrent the ebooks to the online server from sources other than yourself.

Not really, under an area blackout the fiberoptic transmitters will stop working, so you won’t be able to reach other areas/nodes even if your equipment has UPS power.

But, in general, the idea of a UPS is to provide enough supply to allow for an orderly shutdown, preventing equipment damage or data loss. Its not meant for long term operations.

For infrastructure and other critical applications, the UPS is designed to give you enough time to go start the diesel generator, and continue the operations.

As a bonus, some UPS have filters to ensure that delicate electronics get a nice, clean power wave. This is usually the case in UPS for data centres.

Btw, how are you liking down under’s “revolutionary” idea of Fibre + Copper? Is it as bad as it sounds?

TLDR; Use poker decks to clone 3 sets of Love Letter

I’ll recommend some boardgames.

Once you go over 7-8 players, the options are greatly reduced. The available genres become (mostly) limited to social deduction

Social deduction, all about trying to figure out other peoples cards. And lying, lots of lying.

• Love letter, 6 players, 20 cards, ~13 tokens, for points
• Avalon, 7-10 players, ~30cards, tracking mat/paper
• Secret Hitler, 7-10 players, ~30 cards, tracking mat/paper, has a print-at-home version.
• Ultimate werewolf/vampire/etc, ~10-12 players, ~13-15 cards, phone app (for narration, free)

*None of the above are very good for playing as teams (i.e. two ppl taking a single player spot)

Group Games games that do well with teams

• Codenames, various versions.
• Forbidden Island/Dessert/Sky - co-op game for various number of players

As a special mention, Challengers is a board game that allows you to create simple yet fun card drafting tournaments. There are two editions, each allows you up to 8 players, and if you have both they can be combined into 16ppl tournaments

For your numbers, you’d need to buy 2-3 copies of the same game. Not ideal, even if you have the budget.

I’d say, print yourself three copies of Love Letters, you can find the cards online, or just play with 2-3 poker decks. Its the best game in my library, simple yet deep. We’ve been playing it at least once a week for 3 years now. I’ve even managed to play once with a mob of disinterested teens ;)

When I encountered a similar situation I tried with the ikea speakers (Sonos Based) and I couldn’t get them to work without the sonos app, so I returned them.

I figured that a solution could be having, in each room, a mini-pc (RPi or similar) running RuneAudio and a set of speakers connected via audiojack.

I tried with 1 room and the proof of concept seemed to work, but didn’t invest on getting the rest of the house work.

In the end went for a couple of portable Bluetooth speakers to have floating around the place. Cheap and simple