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. ...
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. ...