Articles. About Stuff.

Just over a year ago, whilst browsing Amazon.com, I saw a BluRay box set of Battlestar Galactica - and that’s all of the Battlestar Galactica - from the original series, the 1980 series through to the 2005 reboot all its spin-off films and the somewhat ill-fated prequel series. Of course, I bought it! How could I not? I really liked the reboot in the mid-naughties but could only see it again via a friend’s BD collection since streaming availability here in Japan has been a bit hit and miss over the years, and I’d never seen any of the other content (save for a few of the web episodes and films) and I hadn’t seen any of the Caprica prequel series. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? Time since last update: 6 months I added a new camera lens - a 7artisans 60mm MK. II manual focus macro lens. I wanted to play with a macro lens for a while as I’ve never had a dedicated macro lens before. It’s been a lot of fun. On the archive server, converted the single remaining ZFS mirror pool of disks to a btrfs mirror. Functionality-wise for my use case there’s very little difference between the two systems, but it’s easier to just remember one set of maintenance tools than two! I actually upgraded my Windows desktop GPU! After 7 years with the a Zotac GTX 1060, I went for the new RTX 4060 from nVidia via ASUS. It’s mainly to play a few older games better at 1440p (as most gaming is done on the PS5) and to add a little more pep to video editing and some other grunt work the machine is often used for - and it’s been a huge improvement there. After 5 valiant years, my GoPro 7 finally died - a combination of a small water leak and a broken on/off button, meaning it powers up and down as it wants. Sad to see it go. I get a lot out of my action cams, so the replacement is the DJI Osmo Action 4 since I felt like a change from GoPro, and it has a bigger sensor for low light with front and back touch screens, magnetic mounting blah blah. I picked up a GMKtec NucBox 5 on sale (it’s an older model) to replace the Pi 1 and 2 for Syncthing and Pi-Hole duties. I need the Pis for some other projects. Hardware Windows Desktop PC My Frankenstein’s monster of a Windows box is mainly for audio and video editing, encoding, gaming and some work, and generally gets updated piecemeal. ...

I thought I’d just list five, since I move around podcasts as they ebb or end, and I like to listen to a variety of things, so these aren’t really related to each other for the most part. Cautionary Tales by Tim Harford is sort of what its name implies - Tim reviews different events and scenarios and shows what we can learn from them, and often what unexpected causes and effects go on. It’s well produced but there are ‘guest’ episodes which are usually good too, but are essentially trailers for other podcasts. ...

Making notes I actually made a few spreadsheets with lines and lines for each role, but with different emphasis, and then kept the ones in which seemed best. I also had a massive list of skills on a tab, as some online forms want a list of skills. I also have a spreadsheet for interview questions to ask, and questions I’ve been asked. I then choose some, and write them on postcards. LOL, at one point, at my wife’s suggestion, I put a post-it note next to the camera for the company I was talking to as sometimes I’d forget who it was! ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? A minor update - a new motherboard in the Windows machine. Also, I got a PS5, admittedly 2 years afer its launch, but I think it was two years before I got the PS4 too. Also, I moved from SpiderOak to iDrive for backups. I was happy with SpiderOak, but the product has been in maintenance mode for 3 years, and is no longer on the front page of the company’s website, so that’s likely a hint to move on, and so far iDrive has worked well for both Linux and Windows. ...

For a while I’ve needed to get together a ~10 page website for a charity event I’m involved with – something for those people not on Facebook but with very similar content – dates, guidelines, FAQs in English and Japanese, some galleries of previous events. That kind of thing. Many years ago I’d made a simple hand coded HTML and CSS site for it, and that was fine, but then there were issues with the domain name and hosting (neither of which I controlled) so I needed to find another similar domain name, and sort a site out on my own space. ...

“You have 20 seconds to comply” Such a famous line, and yet it’s not even said by the titular character, but we’ll come to that. Robocop was from an era in the 1980s when violence in films was controversial and directors like Paul Verhoeven were famous for their sheer amount of gun violence, or perhaps it was the love of squibs for entry / exit wounds? I was in my teens when I first saw Robocop in the late 1980s, on a rental VHS tape hooked up to a small 21" 4:3 CRT, with a bunch of friends who would get together to watch horror, sci-fi and generally low quality B Movies from local rental shops. The film played beautifully into the 80s obsessions of the Cold War, drug wars and fears of a Corporate led future. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? It’s been 9 months since my last ‘Currently Using’ update and this one is largely incremental. I just haven’t really needed to buy anything or make any major changes - though I’m expecting to have to make a few hardware replacements in 2023 as some of my kit hits the decade mark! The only real hardware change was to the SSD on my archive server. The old one was a 9.5 year old Samsung 840, only 120GB, and in itself was fine, but I was increasingly using it for a few different things on the machine itself, aside from OS, with some extra logging and config backups and just the age was beginning to make me nervous - even for an SSD. The new drive is another Samsung, but it’s gone from an 840 to an 870 EVO. I also updated the OS from Ubuntu Server 20.04.03 to 22.04.01. ...

A new PC build? It’s been a long, long time since I did a from-scratch PC build, but for this Xmas I’ll be doing two for the family. Yes, it has come to this time. These are for people used to a Switch/PS4 console gaming environment, and have only really used Raspberry Pis and general laptops for computing or PC styl;e gaming. Expected usage will be: 1080p gaming (Minecraft, Apex Legends/Fortnite etc.), some desktop homework, browsing, programming with Scratch, some image editing and for one, some introductory 3D modelling and rendering with Blender. ...

Moving from SpiderOak to Syncthing for local Sync Firstly, I know there are simpler ways to deal with the following problem, but just bear with me! At home I regularly work between 3 machines - my desktop workhorse Windows 10 box, my Linux laptop (an 8 yr old ThinkPad E440), and sometimes the family Dell XPS Windows 11 laptop. I need to have my ‘current projects’ folder sync’d between these machines, which comes to about 300MB of mainly text and small image files. ...