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This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? A minor update - a new motherboard in the Windows machine. Also, I got a PS5, admittedly 2 years afer its launch, but I think it was two years before I got the PS4 too. Also, I moved from SpiderOak to iDrive for backups. I was happy with SpiderOak, but the product has been in maintenance mode for 3 years, and is no longer on the front page of the company’s website, so that’s likely a hint to move on, and so far iDrive has worked well for both Linux and Windows. ...

For a while I’ve needed to get together a ~10 page website for a charity event I’m involved with – something for those people not on Facebook but with very similar content – dates, guidelines, FAQs in English and Japanese, some galleries of previous events. That kind of thing. Many years ago I’d made a simple hand coded HTML and CSS site for it, and that was fine, but then there were issues with the domain name and hosting (neither of which I controlled) so I needed to find another similar domain name, and sort a site out on my own space. ...

“You have 20 seconds to comply” Such a famous line, and yet it’s not even said by the titular character, but we’ll come to that. Robocop was from an era in the 1980s when violence in films was controversial and directors like Paul Verhoeven were famous for their sheer amount of gun violence, or perhaps it was the love of squibs for entry / exit wounds? I was in my teens when I first saw Robocop in the late 1980s, on a rental VHS tape hooked up to a small 21" 4:3 CRT, with a bunch of friends who would get together to watch horror, sci-fi and generally low quality B Movies from local rental shops. The film played beautifully into the 80s obsessions of the Cold War, drug wars and fears of a Corporate led future. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? It’s been 9 months since my last ‘Currently Using’ update and this one is largely incremental. I just haven’t really needed to buy anything or make any major changes - though I’m expecting to have to make a few hardware replacements in 2023 as some of my kit hits the decade mark! The only real hardware change was to the SSD on my archive server. The old one was a 9.5 year old Samsung 840, only 120GB, and in itself was fine, but I was increasingly using it for a few different things on the machine itself, aside from OS, with some extra logging and config backups and just the age was beginning to make me nervous - even for an SSD. The new drive is another Samsung, but it’s gone from an 840 to an 870 EVO. I also updated the OS from Ubuntu Server 20.04.03 to 22.04.01. ...

A new PC build? It’s been a long, long time since I did a from-scratch PC build, but for this Xmas I’ll be doing two for the family. Yes, it has come to this time. These are for people used to a Switch/PS4 console gaming environment, and have only really used Raspberry Pis and general laptops for computing or PC styl;e gaming. Expected usage will be: 1080p gaming (Minecraft, Apex Legends/Fortnite etc.), some desktop homework, browsing, programming with Scratch, some image editing and for one, some introductory 3D modelling and rendering with Blender. ...

Moving from SpiderOak to Syncthing for local Sync Firstly, I know there are simpler ways to deal with the following problem, but just bear with me! At home I regularly work between 3 machines - my desktop workhorse Windows 10 box, my Linux laptop (an 8 yr old ThinkPad E440), and sometimes the family Dell XPS Windows 11 laptop. I need to have my ‘current projects’ folder sync’d between these machines, which comes to about 300MB of mainly text and small image files. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? I don’t often do these colophon / ‘what am I using’ pages more than a couple of times a year since I don’t often change much these days. However, I’m putting one in only three months after the last one to capture a few quick changes. I replaced the second (and final) 4TB WD Red drive in my archive server, and replaced it with another 6TB Seagate IronWolf drive. This means I now have 2 newer drives in that machine (I swapped the first Red for Ironwolf in July 2021), so I now have a larger 6TB ZFS mirror, and even replace the old 4TB Red drive in my desktop PC which has recently been giving off a few SMART errors. ...

Since my ‘youth’ I’ve listened to the music, spoken word and read books written by ‘punk’ vocalist Henry Rollins. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. For his Black Flag days, I’d go and listen to their ‘Damaged’ album if you just want to sample one. For his spoken word, I’d say ‘Boxed Life (1992)’ is best, but him reading his own book ‘Get in the Van’ is also excellent. The book itself is very well written, with some excellent illustrations by punk artist ‘Raymond Pettibon’. Notably the book contains some of the gorier things he saw on tour with Black Flag which are missing from the double-CD spoken edition. ...

Whilst sorting through some files on my archive server following a recent drive swap, I was cleaning out a few duplicate files and directories from the 2005-2010 era, when I stumbled upon a folder called ‘rtcw-saves’. Yes, it was a folder of saved games from the 2001 game ‘Return to Castle Wolfenstein’. This game is so old they even open sourced the code back in 2010. ...

I recently got a standing desk for home - the Flexispot EQ5 ‘Pro’ courtesy of a sale on Amazon. For years I just had an old basic IKEA desk at home - a piece of cheap board on a metal frame, and that was fine, even for the majority of the COVID-induced work from home. As the surface got more worn from day-to-day usage and random electronics and craft projects, I covered it with craft cutting boards to hide the rougher areas. ...