Articles. About Stuff.

Why the Cloud Practitioner Certification? I’d used some Amazon Web Services (AWS) products personally, such as their simple storage service (Amazon S3), years ago as part of a backup solution called JungleDisk, but that and a passing experience in a previous job role was about it. I wanted to get a clearer overview of the massive array of products now available through AWS and what they can do for my own edification and that it’s got so much mindshare in business these days. ...

To get straight to the point, I passed my PMI CAPM exam in December 2020. It wasn’t a simple process for me, but I thought I could write a quick page passing on some the tips and tricks I learned which worked for me during the preparation. I’ve put links to some resources I used and some I created on here, but I cannot put some up since they may include PMI copyrighted material, so I’ll just describe them. ...

As sort-of promised, I’ve started putting some of my old old content up from the 90s and 2000s in the Retro section with some context added in a With Hindsight part preceding them. Just a bit of whimsical retro lip-service and reminding myself just how much more time I used to have, and just how many things have gone by the wayside in nigh on two decades. Also updated my Currently Using page for a few minor changes over the last few months.

On this page there’s just a bit on what electronic devices / equipment / software I’m running right now. It’s all to meet requirements and geared towards value for money. What’s New in December 2020? I’ve updated my Archive Server to Ubuntu Server 20.04 from Xubuntu 18.04. I like to stay on the more current LTS, and I wanted to dump the official UI weight on top since it really is just a server, so Xubuntu went. I also swapped out the CPU and motherboard for my old desktop PC Intel i5 though this was also from ~2013, and put in a new Scythe Choten CPU fan cooler to quieten things down a little. The old Scythe Shuriken B cooler was over 5 years old but I couldn’t find a low profile fan to replace the original one which had begun grinding a little. ...

(Late Summer 2019) I wrote previously about my successful animatronic eyes build using some ping pong balls as ’eyes’, which moved around on a rig, each powered by 2 servos, for 2 axes of movement and controlled by an Adafruit Crickit and the Circuit Playground Express [CPE]. It worked well enough and the effect was quite interesting, but for what I wanted - eyes moving in a hood as party of a creepy monster animatronic for Hallowe’en - there were a few drawbacks. I could put the Cricket/CPE behind the eyes and use the onboard LEDs to shine a creepy red light behind them which looked good, but it was difficult to see them under most hood ideas. Also, I could program the ’eyes’ to move in a nice creepy way, but the servo noise was a bit distracting. ...

MiniDV tapes aren’t old in the grand scheme of things, but they’re getting up there. I owned and used a Sony Handycam HC-48 from roughly 2007 to 2010 give or take, getting only about 14 hours of video. I think this is when I found out that as a family, we’re more photo than video oriented. It also dovetailed into smartphone video capabilities ramping up, and for me, action cams. ...

For the last few months, my 5 year old Asus RT-AC68U wi-fi router has been dropping connections. I tried adjusting management channel, checked for local interference in the house or with other wi-fi networks, and eventually did some signal checks with NetSpot running on the Windows 10 laptop. From looking at the NetSpot graphs above for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, it looks like that the whole signal was dropping off a cliff increasingly often, leaving pages not loading and in some cases devices being disconnected. I tried aerial adjustments and other things on the unit, rolling back firmware, doing factory resets, but to no avail. Also the small satellite range extender didn’t seem to help at all. ...

January 2013. That seems like quite a long time ago. In fact, that was pretty much 7 years ago. Certainly life was very different back then. That was the time I’d just built a new PC based around an Intel i5 3470 CPU and an AMD 5750 graphics card. Heady times for sure. Here I am, seven years later looking to do another build, so yes, I feel like I got my moneys worth out of those parts, and as you read this, they are on an auction site, looking for a low end buyer. I did upgrade some parts in the mean time - I added a USB Asus U7 sound card in 2014 to address some bad audio interference I was hearing from the motherboard audio chipset, a new nVidia 1060 6GB graphics card in late 2016, and a new Samsung SSD in 2018. So what we’re really talking about is a new CPU, mobo, memory and boot drive; and a new monitor; and a new cooling fan. ...

I documented a few months ago how we’d been keeping our family photos and short videos in Apple iPhotos and then Photos for years. My issue was that when I actually went to look in the library bundle at the folder structure it was all over the place - different folder structures and naming conventions, whole libraries and their sub directories imported into a single date directory and so on. Basically it seems like they stored photos based on import to library date, rather than the date the photo was taken, and that might be fine for some, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for. There was also that phase where folders were named by event. ...

After a few years on the rather excellent Grav system, I’ve moved brightblack into the Jekyll static site generator. Why so? I like Grav, I really do, but I didn’t use or need most of the functionality, as this site is very simple in layout, it’s just me doing it. As an example, eventually I was putting things together in local text editors - which is more my workflow for most things - and pasting into the Grav editor. That’s not making the most of Grav, and points to a potentially faster method for me. ...