A Month with the NucBox5

For a couple of years, some of my in-house functionality was being handled by a couple of Raspberry Pi’s - my old 1B was doing Pi-hole duty, and a 2 was my always-on Syncthing hub. I’d actually had no problem at all with either of these doing these roles, perhaps with the exception that the 1B, whilst fine for DNS sinkhole duties, when doing any work via the web UI, especially searches and analysis and such, was as slow as you’d expect....

2023-11-14

All of that Battlestar Galactica

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....

2023-10-10

Razer Review - Robocop (1987)

“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....

2023-01-03

The Bill and Ted Trilogy

“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!...

2021-08-15

Razor Review - It Follows

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....

2021-04-25