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This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. Time since last update: 6 months. What’s New? I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on DAPs - Digital Audio Players - earlier in the year. I’d been looking for a straight music player to lessen reasons to have my phone out, and I ended up with two lower end players, and they’ve turned out to be even more useful than I expected. I even converted the HifiWalker H2 to the open source Rockbox firmware, which was a great decision, especially with the minimalist theme I chose. I have migrated the nanikore.net blog from WordPress to Hugo. I’ve done a write up which goes into the reasoning, and the effort required, some of which might simply have been me mucking about. Upgraded the desktop GPU to a Sapphire AMD Pulse 9060 XT 16GB. This was due to an upgrade on someone else’s machine with the old RTX 4060 I bought 3 years ago. The AMD plays nicer with Linux apparently, but getting some tools to work like OpenCL and ROCm for compute / LLM functions is a bit more fiddly on Linux, compared to CUDA which ironically just seemed to work. Replaced the 13 year old 650W Antec power supply with a newer 850W unit from Corsair. The old unit was still functional, but I had a few warning posts with the new GPU, the fan had a subtle grind to it and I think 13 years is a decent return on investment. This also brings the desktop PSU up to modular cabling! Also, ATX 3.1 compliance, so a little future proofing in there. Hardware Desktop PC My Frankenstein’s monster of a desktop box is mainly for gaming, audio and video editing, encoding and some work. It generally gets updated piecemeal. ...

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. Initially 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 I were 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 out portable CD players completely - and a while later I owned a few iPods. Then, like a lot of other people, I just put a few albums on my phone, and then, well, thought ’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. ...