So what is this site?
Well it’s broadly a place for me to roughly document whatever small personal projects I’m working on. There might be some build write-ups, some simple news updates, film or book reviews, or even a look back at old content in ‘retro’. Essentially, this is a collection of non-sequiturs.
Wait, what? So in addition to this site, which I refer to by the old-fashioned term of ‘homepage’, I’ve long been running an almost as old-fashioned sounding ‘blog’ in tandem with it. Initally it was because I would update the blog more frequently, which indeed was what you were supposed to do with them, but for reasons left to tea and time, the blog ended up being about, shall we say, outdoor activities, and this one stayed on the indoor and technical side. Sure I could merge them, but I could also take up playing the bassoon. ...
In The Beginning When was a wee lad I had a personal stereo. That’s a tape cassette player running on AA batteries. I loved it. It was great, though it would be many years before I could afford a real WalkMan. Then I had a minidisc player (I missed portable CD players), and a while later, a few iPods. Then, like a lot of other people, I just put a few albums on my phone, and then, well, let’s just stream! ...
Today, the name Tesla is synonymous with cars and Elon Musk’s company. Older readers may remember all the Tesla coils from video games and cheap sci-fi and horror films. For me, the name Tesla came to me via a rock band from the late 80s of the same name. It’s a long story. I’m old. Recently I wanted to find out a bit more about the real man, so I picked up this work by Marc J. Seifer, on Audible. It refers to itself as a ’life and times’ work so it’s not quite a biography as such, but it does give a decent amount of detail about the man, from humble beginnings in Serbia, through his inquiring mind and work in Europe, to his move to New York, and becoming an American citizen. ...
I’ve always been a bit of a fan of short stories ever since I read Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood” in my teens. It’s an underrated form of fictional literature in my humble opinion. If it was good enough for Hemmingway… I was looking through a few lists of great short story collections and one which regularly came up was this “Labyrinths” by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of him, and now in retrospect I’m a little embarressed as everything I’ve read about him shows how well regarded and influential he’d been. Indeed one version of this collection has a foreword by the great William Gibson. ...
This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. Time since last update: 6 months. What’s New? I upgraded my ‘always on’ GMKtec box from Debian 12 to 13. I also cross-graded (?) my Archive Server from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to Debian 13. No huge reason for that latter move, but I wanted to have my two servers on the same OS for simplicity and Debian is a fairly relaxed, slower moving distro. ...
That was a lot of Freddy for sure. It’s tempting to try to rank the films, but ultimately I think that’s kind of unfair, but I think we can group them. I will say that the first one was, and still is, the best if I had to choose. Also, none of them are awful films, they’re all still watchable for sure. The issue, as I’ll show with the grouping, is that some of them kind of blend in to one another. ...
So three films down, and technically four to go on this page - three from the main continuity, then a soft reboot of sorts. Some of these, as their titles suggest, get a bit formulaic, similar names, and similar themes as they develop Freddy’s backstory. There’s a little retconning, but for the most part it fits in, though who would marry even pre-Freddy Freddy is a mystery. That said, in the last 3 main films, that’s 3 in four years, so they were cranking them out and perhaps hence some similarities. Still, they all work. ...
Another BluRay film collection! I don’t remember how long it is since I’ve seen any of the Nightmare films, and I’m quite sure I’d only seen up to number 4 anyway, so here was a chance to rewatch what I had seen, and then see what the remaining were like. These were films I remember watching with friends on rental VHS tapes from the cheaper genre shelf of the local video rental shop (for me that was Tates or Spar). We’d be watching them on an old school CRT TV in 4:3 format around someone’s family TV when their parents were out, or on tiny screens in our bedrooms. ...
I don’t pay much attention to the phone market unless I’m actually in the market for a new phone. I see the odd new model pop up on the usual news and social media feeds, but there just doesn’t seem to be much beyond the annual and incremental updates from major players. Or maybe it’s just me. One company I did take notice of ‘out of cycle’ was Nothing in 2023. They’re a relatively young design company founded in 2021 and based out of London and who contract out their manufacturing to China; also they don’t just do phones, but also earbuds (which was their first product) and now smart watches. ...
This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. Time since last update: 6 months. What’s New? After the relatively large reshuffle of the last update, there’s only a few changes this time but one is quite telling, albeit service related. After over 15 years with Pair Networks hosting, I’ve moved to Kualo.com. Pair have been great, no issues with their services. However, this month they restructured their product offerings, meaning that for my usage case, my monthly bill would have tripled. Everyone needs to make a profit but this is a small hobby for me and the increased fees would have pushed the ROI a bit over budget. I looked around and decided on two things: I wanted a greener, eco friendly host and if possible I wanted something European based. ...