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This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? I don’t often do these colophon / ‘what am I using’ pages more than a couple of times a year since I don’t often change much these days. However, I’m putting one in only three months after the last one to capture a few quick changes. I replaced the second (and final) 4TB WD Red drive in my archive server, and replaced it with another 6TB Seagate IronWolf drive. This means I now have 2 newer drives in that machine (I swapped the first Red for Ironwolf in July 2021), so I now have a larger 6TB ZFS mirror, and even replace the old 4TB Red drive in my desktop PC which has recently been giving off a few SMART errors. ...

Since my ‘youth’ I’ve listened to the music, spoken word and read books written by ‘punk’ vocalist Henry Rollins. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. For his Black Flag days, I’d go and listen to their ‘Damaged’ album if you just want to sample one. For his spoken word, I’d say ‘Boxed Life (1992)’ is best, but him reading his own book ‘Get in the Van’ is also excellent. The book itself is very well written, with some excellent illustrations by punk artist ‘Raymond Pettibon’. Notably the book contains some of the gorier things he saw on tour with Black Flag which are missing from the double-CD spoken edition. ...

Whilst sorting through some files on my archive server following a recent drive swap, I was cleaning out a few duplicate files and directories from the 2005-2010 era, when I stumbled upon a folder called ‘rtcw-saves’. Yes, it was a folder of saved games from the 2001 game ‘Return to Castle Wolfenstein’. This game is so old they even open sourced the code back in 2010. I then had a look through my CD spindle (remember those?) where I keep old install discs (anyone need Mac System 8 disc?) and there it was, the original install CD from 20+ years ago. ...

I recently got a standing desk for home - the Flexispot EQ5 ‘Pro’ courtesy of a sale on Amazon. For years I just had an old basic IKEA desk at home - a piece of cheap board on a metal frame, and that was fine, even for the majority of the COVID-induced work from home. As the surface got more worn from day-to-day usage and random electronics and craft projects, I covered it with craft cutting boards to hide the rougher areas. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? Not too much in the way of new kit to be honest in the last six months, though there is some minor additional storage and some configuration changes to mention. I removed a 5 year old WD Red 4TB drive from the Linux archive server, and replaced it with a 6TB Seagate IronWolf drive. I also took the opportunity to change my storage setup. ...

Hello Hugo. Hello, and this time, if you’re reading this in November 2021 or thereabouts, you’re reading brightblack as generated by the Hugo static site generator. If you were reading for the near two years before this date, it was likely generated by Jekyll. Yes, I switched. For the reader, I hope this change will be transparent, though my URL redirect for anyone with old links might be a bit sketchy, and so apologies for any 404s. I don’t like it myself, but it is what it is. ...

“Be excellent to each other.” I first saw Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure after its 1989 release on VHS rental. This means it was in 4:3 aspect ratio with pan and scan (aka full screen) on my ~17" CRT TV in glorious mono sound. I watched it quite a few times, but I haven’t seen it since then. This time around I was watching the now trilogy of Bill and Ted films on my old 47" LCD TV, with real stereo sound from a real sound system, and presented in the correct ‘widescreen’ aspect ratio, all from Bluray! Truly I am living in the future. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? After a year with the Fujifilm X mount camera system, I bought a used 16-80mm f4 lens for it. It’s a good, versatile range for travel, and isn’t too large either, even on the X-T200. My Mac mini from 2011 finally stopped working but I think I got my money’s worth out of it with over a decade of use and I’ve replaced it with an entry level Apple Macbook Air M1. At least I had time to save for it. ...

2014, Directed by David Robert Mitchell, 1hr 41 mins. The basic plot of ‘It Follows’ goes like this - a malevolent entity is killing people who have a sort of curse they received by having sex with someone else who has that curse, and the only way to stop this thing stalking and killing them, is having sex with someone else, then it goes after the other person first. Once it kills them though, it goes back to the previous person, so it’s in a persons interest to pass it on. Simple, right? ...

EFF Membership It’s been a while since I’ve been an EFF member, but I finally donated again, enough to make me a member for 2021. They do good work, so there’s little reason not to toss a few coins into the jar. No I’m not going to mention The Witcher there - that has passed. Also… There’s a few fewer blog posts at the moment as I’ve upgraded a couple of them to full pages - the one around my new wifi access points, and another about my Pi Hole server. ...