Articles. About Stuff.

For the last few months, my 5 year old Asus RT-AC68U wi-fi router has been dropping connections. I tried adjusting management channel, checked for local interference in the house or with other wi-fi networks, and eventually did some signal checks with NetSpot running on the Windows 10 laptop. From looking at the NetSpot graphs above for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, it looks like that the whole signal was dropping off a cliff increasingly often, leaving pages not loading and in some cases devices being disconnected....

January 2013. That seems like quite a long time ago. In fact, that was pretty much 7 years ago. Certainly life was very different back then. That was the time I’d just built a new PC based around an Intel i5 3470 CPU and an AMD 5750 graphics card. Heady times for sure. Here I am, seven years later looking to do another build, so yes, I feel like I got my moneys worth out of those parts, and as you read this, they are on an auction site, looking for a low end buyer....

I documented a few months ago how we’d been keeping our family photos and short videos in Apple iPhotos and then Photos for years. My issue was that when I actually went to look in the library bundle at the folder structure it was all over the place - different folder structures and naming conventions, whole libraries and their sub directories imported into a single date directory and so on. Basically it seems like they stored photos based on import to library date, rather than the date the photo was taken, and that might be fine for some, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for....

After a few years on the rather excellent Grav system, I’ve moved brightblack into the Jekyll static site generator. Why so? I like Grav, I really do, but I didn’t use or need most of the functionality, as this site is very simple in layout, it’s just me doing it. As an example, eventually I was putting things together in local text editors - which is more my workflow for most things - and pasting into the Grav editor....

I seem to be running out of Raspberry Pis compared to the number of small projects I’m using them in. As it is, my Pi3 is torn between Kodi/LibreELEC and some animatronic duty and the Pi2 is being used in my wi-fi car which is currently a live project. That’s why at some point I need to buy a Pi4! I also wanted to bring back my Pi-Hole, which used to be on the Pi2....