Articles. About Stuff.

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. ...

After over 15 years, I’ve moved my three websites and all of my email away from Pair Networks. Their new home is over at Kualo Hosting! Why move? Well, Pair was purchased about 8 months ago and earlier this month they announced a restructuring of their product range and the change which impacted me was that they seperated out the email portion of the shared hosting package and would begin to charge for that seperately, whilst keeping the hosting portion at the same rates, just sans email. ...

Desktop Linux This is going to be a bit of an odd post. If you go back through brightblack.net for a while, there’d be a lot of hits on the term ‘Linux’. I’ve been a keen Linux and other open source user since the mid-1990s due to the rather unsexy reason that I couldn’t afford Windows and other pay-for software at the time. I’m actually writing another post on my history with Linux, so I’m not going to rehash that here. I’m sure I’ll post that in the next decade or two. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. Time since last update: 9 months. What’s New? Honestly, after almost a year, not much new stuff is the answer! I just don’t have much need for new things, so most of this is replacing aging parts, and adding capacity. After almost 13 years, I replaced the old Ivy Bridge era Intel i5 3470 in the Linux archive server. The upgrade was to a 65W Ryzen 5 5500GT - that’s minus 12W from the Intel i5 predecessor. The 5500GT also has a built in GPU - something of a rarity in the 5000 series. Went for the ASRock Steel Legend mobo as it has decent capacitors, decent power phasing and 2 x PCI x16 slots. Put in 16GB of Team DDR4 RAM. Added in an Intel I225-V (B3 Stepping) based NIC from Kuroutoshikou for better throughput and WoL support. Upgraded the archive server from Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS. Added yet another drive to the desktop PC - a Crucial T500 M.2 - so it’s back to being a dual boot Windows / Linux machine - but mainly Linux. Replaced the battery in the Dell XPS 13 after over 6 years. Bought a Meta Quest 3 VR headset. Hardware Desktop PC My Frankenstein’s monster of a desktop box is mainly for audio and video editing, encoding, gaming and some work. It generally gets updated piecemeal. ...

The Archive Server Ah, the unsung hero of my home setup yet I’m not sure I’ve not posted on it in over a decade. For a long time I’ve had a machine for storing backups and files I just don’t need on my laptop or main desktop and so I called it an ‘archive server’. That means its main job is being storage really. For a long time it’s been made from retired desktop parts, but it came to the point where the the current incarnation was using up to 13 year old parts, and I have no real need for new desktop parts, so there was nothing new coming down the line. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? Time since last update: 6 months. Honestly, not much has changed! I installed a new power supply into the archive server, removing an 11 year old 450W Antec unit, and replacing it with a new Fractal Design 550W unit, so slightly more capable. I’d still recommend Antec units. Upgraded the Windows desktop machine to Windows 11. Windows 10 still has a year till EOL, but I may as well cut over now since you can move the Start menu from the middle to the left of the taskbar again, which I found a bit cluttered and distracting last time I tried it. Hardware Windows Desktop PC My Frankenstein’s monster of a Windows box is mainly for audio and video editing, encoding, gaming and some work. It generally gets updated piecemeal. ...

My Password Managers I’m not going to waste much time debating if you should have a password manager, there’s plenty of sites which have done a much better job than I ever could over the last decade plus. Nope, I’m just going to review my history with these systems, and why I recently made a change. Password managers, then, are a single application or site which requires one master password for itself and then you put all of your passwords and other information in to it. You just need to remember one difficult secret. But all of your information in one place?? ...

Current Situation One of my self built boxes is my (currently) Ubuntu Linux based archive server. It’s used essentially as a NAS (though it does do some other things) using an old CPU and motherboard, 6 HDDs and an SSD for OS. The non-drive components are getting old, so I have a plan to swap them out in 2024 and I’m being extra vigilent around them of late. ...

For a couple of years, some of my in-house functionality was being handled by a couple of Raspberry Pi’s - my old 1B was doing Pi-hole duty, and a 2 was my always-on Syncthing hub. I’d actually had no problem at all with either of these doing these roles, perhaps with the exception that the 1B, whilst fine for DNS sinkhole duties, when doing any work via the web UI, especially searches and analysis and such, was as slow as you’d expect. Syncthing on the Pi2 was fine; the only issue was a concern on these things running from SD cards for the long term. ...