This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? Not too much in the way of new kit to be honest in the last six months, though there is some minor additional storage and some configuration changes to mention. I removed a 5 year old WD Red 4TB drive from the Linux archive server, and replaced it with a 6TB Seagate IronWolf drive. I also took the opportunity to change my storage setup. ...
Hello Hugo. Hello, and this time, if you’re reading this in November 2021 or thereabouts, you’re reading brightblack as generated by the Hugo static site generator. If you were reading for the near two years before this date, it was likely generated by Jekyll. Yes, I switched. For the reader, I hope this change will be transparent, though my URL redirect for anyone with old links might be a bit sketchy, and so apologies for any 404s. I don’t like it myself, but it is what it is. ...
“Be excellent to each other.” I first saw Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure after its 1989 release on VHS rental. This means it was in 4:3 aspect ratio with pan and scan (aka full screen) on my ~17" CRT TV in glorious mono sound. I watched it quite a few times, but I haven’t seen it since then. This time around I was watching the now trilogy of Bill and Ted films on my old 47" LCD TV, with real stereo sound from a real sound system, and presented in the correct ‘widescreen’ aspect ratio, all from Bluray! Truly I am living in the future. ...
This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? After a year with the Fujifilm X mount camera system, I bought a used 16-80mm f4 lens for it. It’s a good, versatile range for travel, and isn’t too large either, even on the X-T200. My Mac mini from 2011 finally stopped working but I think I got my money’s worth out of it with over a decade of use and I’ve replaced it with an entry level Apple Macbook Air M1. At least I had time to save for it. ...
2014, Directed by David Robert Mitchell, 1hr 41 mins. The basic plot of ‘It Follows’ goes like this - a malevolent entity is killing people who have a sort of curse they received by having sex with someone else who has that curse, and the only way to stop this thing stalking and killing them, is having sex with someone else, then it goes after the other person first. Once it kills them though, it goes back to the previous person, so it’s in a persons interest to pass it on. Simple, right? ...
EFF Membership It’s been a while since I’ve been an EFF member, but I finally donated again, enough to make me a member for 2021. They do good work, so there’s little reason not to toss a few coins into the jar. No I’m not going to mention The Witcher there - that has passed. Also… There’s a few fewer blog posts at the moment as I’ve upgraded a couple of them to full pages - the one around my new wifi access points, and another about my Pi Hole server. ...
Why the Cloud Practitioner Certification? I’d used some Amazon Web Services (AWS) products personally, such as their simple storage service (Amazon S3), years ago as part of a backup solution called JungleDisk, but that and a passing experience in a previous job role was about it. I wanted to get a clearer overview of the massive array of products now available through AWS and what they can do for my own edification and that it’s got so much mindshare in business these days. ...
To get straight to the point, I passed my PMI CAPM exam in December 2020. It wasn’t a simple process for me, but I thought I could write a quick page passing on some the tips and tricks I learned which worked for me during the preparation. I’ve put links to some resources I used and some I created on here, but I cannot put some up since they may include PMI copyrighted material, so I’ll just describe them. ...
As sort-of promised, I’ve started putting some of my old old content up from the 90s and 2000s in the Retro section with some context added in a With Hindsight part preceding them. Just a bit of whimsical retro lip-service and reminding myself just how much more time I used to have, and just how many things have gone by the wayside in nigh on two decades. Also updated my Currently Using page for a few minor changes over the last few months. ...
On this page there’s just a bit on what electronic devices / equipment / software I’m running right now. It’s all to meet requirements and geared towards value for money. What’s New in December 2020? I’ve updated my Archive Server to Ubuntu Server 20.04 from Xubuntu 18.04. I like to stay on the more current LTS, and I wanted to dump the official UI weight on top since it really is just a server, so Xubuntu went. I also swapped out the CPU and motherboard for my old desktop PC Intel i5 though this was also from ~2013, and put in a new Scythe Choten CPU fan cooler to quieten things down a little. The old Scythe Shuriken B cooler was over 5 years old but I couldn’t find a low profile fan to replace the original one which had begun grinding a little. ...