Build

Current Situation One of my self built boxes is my (currently) Ubuntu Linux based archive server. It’s used essentially as a NAS (though it does do some other things) using an old CPU and motherboard, 6 HDDs and an SSD for OS. The non-drive components are getting old, so I have a plan to swap them out in 2024 and I’m being extra vigilent around them of late. One item which doesn’t generate much alert data for me at the moment is the power supply and lets be honest, power supplies are the kinds of things which we just don’t think about much, are they?...

(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....

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....

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....

I seem to be running out of Raspberry Pis compared to the number of small projects I’m using them in. As it is, my Pi3 is torn between Kodi/LibreELEC and some animatronic duty and the Pi2 is being used in my wi-fi car which is currently a live project. That’s why at some point I need to buy a Pi4! I also wanted to bring back my Pi-Hole, which used to be on the Pi2....