Technology

Desktop Linux This is going to be a bit of an odd post. If you go back through brightblack.net for a while, there’d be a lot of hits on the term ‘Linux’. I’ve been a keen Linux and other open source user since the mid-1990s due to the rather unsexy reason that I couldn’t afford Windows and other pay-for software at the time. I’m actually writing another post on my history with Linux, so I’m not going to rehash that here. I’m sure I’ll post that in the next decade or two. ...

The Archive Server Ah, the unsung hero of my home setup yet I’m not sure I’ve not posted on it in over a decade. For a long time I’ve had a machine for storing backups and files I just don’t need on my laptop or main desktop and so I called it an ‘archive server’. That means its main job is being storage really. For a long time it’s been made from retired desktop parts, but it came to the point where the the current incarnation was using up to 13 year old parts, and I have no real need for new desktop parts, so there was nothing new coming down the line. ...

My Password Managers I’m not going to waste much time debating if you should have a password manager, there’s plenty of sites which have done a much better job than I ever could over the last decade plus. Nope, I’m just going to review my history with these systems, and why I recently made a change. Password managers, then, are a single application or site which requires one master password for itself and then you put all of your passwords and other information in to it. You just need to remember one difficult secret. But all of your information in one place?? ...

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. ...

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. Syncthing on the Pi2 was fine; the only issue was a concern on these things running from SD cards for the long term. ...

For a while I’ve needed to get together a ~10 page website for a charity event I’m involved with – something for those people not on Facebook but with very similar content – dates, guidelines, FAQs in English and Japanese, some galleries of previous events. That kind of thing. Many years ago I’d made a simple hand coded HTML and CSS site for it, and that was fine, but then there were issues with the domain name and hosting (neither of which I controlled) so I needed to find another similar domain name, and sort a site out on my own space. ...

February 2004 I bought a couple of new pieces of software this month for my Palm, just to reinforce a couple of areas for a bit more functionality and safety. Firstly I bought a copy of BackupBuddyVFS, which as it’s name implies backs up the Palm. Where this is useful is that you can back your Palm up to the SD card, and if your Palm runs out of power, you can restore directly from there when you get it to the charger - much faster and cleaner than Palm’s backup. The other app I bought has been gathering in popularity for the last couple of years, but I think it’ll really take off now that Palm have announced that it’s effectively killing Mac support with Palm OS 6. Missing Link is a pretty cool app which enabled you to connect the Palm to the Mac; the reason I wanted it for were two fold: One I wanted to be able to mount my SD card on my desktop and move files to and from it directly, rather than the clumsy installer Palm forces you to use, and secondly, it comes with a license for SplashPhoto image viewing. ...