Using

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? It’s been 9 months since my last ‘Currently Using’ update and this one is largely incremental. I just haven’t really needed to buy anything or make any major changes - though I’m expecting to have to make a few hardware replacements in 2023 as some of my kit hits the decade mark! The only real hardware change was to the SSD on my archive server. The old one was a 9.5 year old Samsung 840, only 120GB, and in itself was fine, but I was increasingly using it for a few different things on the machine itself, aside from OS, with some extra logging and config backups and just the age was beginning to make me nervous - even for an SSD. The new drive is another Samsung, but it’s gone from an 840 to an 870 EVO. I also updated the OS from Ubuntu Server 20.04.03 to 22.04.01. ...

Moving from SpiderOak to Syncthing for local Sync Firstly, I know there are simpler ways to deal with the following problem, but just bear with me! At home I regularly work between 3 machines - my desktop workhorse Windows 10 box, my Linux laptop (an 8 yr old ThinkPad E440), and sometimes the family Dell XPS Windows 11 laptop. I need to have my ‘current projects’ folder sync’d between these machines, which comes to about 300MB of mainly text and small image files. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? I don’t often do these colophon / ‘what am I using’ pages more than a couple of times a year since I don’t often change much these days. However, I’m putting one in only three months after the last one to capture a few quick changes. I replaced the second (and final) 4TB WD Red drive in my archive server, and replaced it with another 6TB Seagate IronWolf drive. This means I now have 2 newer drives in that machine (I swapped the first Red for Ironwolf in July 2021), so I now have a larger 6TB ZFS mirror, and even replace the old 4TB Red drive in my desktop PC which has recently been giving off a few SMART errors. ...

I recently got a standing desk for home - the Flexispot EQ5 ‘Pro’ courtesy of a sale on Amazon. For years I just had an old basic IKEA desk at home - a piece of cheap board on a metal frame, and that was fine, even for the majority of the COVID-induced work from home. As the surface got more worn from day-to-day usage and random electronics and craft projects, I covered it with craft cutting boards to hide the rougher areas. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? Not too much in the way of new kit to be honest in the last six months, though there is some minor additional storage and some configuration changes to mention. I removed a 5 year old WD Red 4TB drive from the Linux archive server, and replaced it with a 6TB Seagate IronWolf drive. I also took the opportunity to change my storage setup. ...

This page covers what electronic devices, equipment and software I’m running right now. What’s New? After a year with the Fujifilm X mount camera system, I bought a used 16-80mm f4 lens for it. It’s a good, versatile range for travel, and isn’t too large either, even on the X-T200. My Mac mini from 2011 finally stopped working but I think I got my money’s worth out of it with over a decade of use and I’ve replaced it with an entry level Apple Macbook Air M1. At least I had time to save for it. ...

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. ...

I’m still happily dragging my 2014 Thinkpad Edge E440 around, and since I’ve had it nigh on four years, and coincidentally have re-installed the OS over the last couple of weeks, I thought I’d put together a long term review the machine, and the changes which have come (and gone) on the software side and why. Usage Most of what I do on the laptop now is still in a text editor of one description or another, the odd venture into LibreOffice Calc for some spreadsheet work, or RedNoteBook for journalling, and still now and then Scrivener for longer form prose, but as I’ll note later, this is now the Windows version in WINE, not the ’native’ version I used to use. ...