brightblack dot net

Currently using - June 2025

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 looking around I quite liked Krystal.io, except they can’t deal with billing people in Japan currently. I looked at a few others, and it seems everything is cPanel based (which Pair isn’t so there’s learning there) and eventually I found Kualo which filled all of my criteria and had decent reviews. It has rsync over SSL, WordPress and old school SFTP so all my workflow scenarios are all covered with minimum disruption. They also have an easy email forward import format which likely saved me a lot of time. See my full migration post.

  • Swapped out my 5.5 year old AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU for a Ryzen 7 5700X. I wanted to extend the life of this current desktop by a few years, and this CPU is pretty much the last of the affordable AM4 platform CPUs, released in mid 2022. The 3600 served me well but was a bottleneck a little with the RX4060 in some games, but also in video editing. The 5700X sticks to 65W, but has 8 cores vs. 6 and in multicore situations is often 50%+ faster apparently. I’ll resell the 3600.

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.

Archive Server

Another self built machine mainly used for file serving and media storage.

Dell XPS 13

This is a 9360 model from mid 2018. Battery replaced in 2024/10.

GMKtec NucBox 5

A small form factor mini PC purchased in 2023/09. This runs my home ‘always on’ services such as Pihole, Syncthing and Tailscale. Almost silent and very small, but much quicker than the old Raspberry Pi’s it replaces, especially on the web UIs.

  • CPU: Intel Celeron N5105 CPU & chipset
  • RAM: 8GB
  • Storage: 256GB M2 SATA SSD.
  • OS: Debian 12.

Software

Backups are handled via iDrive, using a private key for a little more security, since living in a wooden house in an earthquake zone does make me think about off-site backups quite a lot. For folder sync between machines I use Syncthing, and that’s only on LAN.

Most of the things I do are text based, so I try to keep it simple, using editors like Obsidian for most general stuff, as it helps organise things too. Photo management is mainly via digiKam and sometimes DarkTable.

I keep passwords in a Bitwarden vault and sensitive documents in VeraCrypt files.

Video editing

BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve 20.x is great for video editing, if a little overpowered for me, and I use both YouTube and Vimeo for video availability when I do put something online, though most is family videos. I use LosslessCut for hacking away unneeded footage from my video excursions.

The Audio and the Visual

I have a FujiFilm X-T200 mirrorless camera (2020/05) with the 15-45mm kit lens, a 23mm weather sealed prime, a 16-80mm travel zoom and a cheap 60mm Macro lens from 7artisans.

For an action cam, I have a DJI Osmo Action 4 along with the DJI Mic 2. I like to use action cameras on the snowboard, bicycles, motorbikes and at beaches.

In mid-2019 I indulged a long time interest in audio recording, and invested in a Rode NT1 microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interface. Still loving them both.

Audio Editing

Since buying a proper microphone and audio interface, I went for Reaper 6 as a cheap but easy to understand DAW. For the small fee it’s difficult to say how much nicer, fast and easier Reaper is than other options.

Gadgets

  • Google Pixel 6a smartphone (2023/10).
  • Kindle PaperWhite 2015 (2015/09).
  • Raspberry Pi’s of various generations (1-4) doing various things.
  • Arduino Uno and other electronics kit (2013 onwards).
  • Zoom H1 audio recorder (2012/03).
  • Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones (2020/02).
  • Flexispot EQ5 Pro standing desk (2021/12).
  • Sony Playstation 5 for gaming (2023/02).
  • Meta Quest 3 VR Headset (2024/12)

Hosting

This site and my email is housed on some space at Kualo.com.