New job, new laptop; this time it’s a Macbook M1 Pro 2021 model.
Switching to a Mac for daily use takes some getting used to, so my hope at least was to preserve my 3x 1080p monitor setup with the laptop in clamshell mode (lid closed). I’d been accustomed to for many years so was hoping this would aid the transition to a whole new Mac ecosystem.
The specifications and online hear-say suggest that the maximum supported outputs are two monitors plus the Mac’s display. But there is a way to get 3 screens running on an M1 Macbook Pro…
Unexpectedly and to much excitement, my home internet is now provided via FTTP.
For background, I was previously in a FTTC environment getting average speeds due to my distance from the cab, however good enough to assumably be overlooked for the next phase of the Openreach Ultrafast rollout. Not that I’m complaining, 2020 is the year my speed gets a much-needed boost.
2020 also turns out to be the inaugural international work from home year, so had the opportunity to have a front seat view from my home office on the activity and timeline that brought FTTP home.
I’d like to share my observations and timeline as an example of what you can expect should you get the inkling of fibre coming to your street soon.
Before we get started, as my expectations rose, I found this post by Andy’s World invaluable for identifying activity and helping me confirm that FTTP was on its way.
It’s April and this is the first post of the year, so what’s happened? Well since being made redundant from my retail job last August I took the first opportunity of a job and ended up in a call centre for an energy company, and quickly discovered it was a terrible job.
It’s not often that I post a review about a product on this blog, but on this occasion I want to showcase an item that does not have a lot of exposure on the web, nor the reviews do it justice.
I’m talking about the Asus X205TA, essentially a low cost, low weight, basic Windows laptop that does the basics. At a retail price of £179 (less with the offers it seems to attract) its price point puts it among lower end Android tablets and Chromebooks. But here the big attraction is its ability to run full versions of Windows, making it a contender as an ultra-portable daily driver.
I just got my first hands on look at Windows 10, before I even start I must note that this is not going to be an in depth review of the system as I am just hopeless at writing reviews, so instead here are a quick few pointers of what I noticed.
The time came when my 1TB drives were full, having a data clearout reclaimed a bit of free space but it was time to upgrade.
The HP Microserver I am running has four HDD bays all populated with 1TB drives in RAID 1 configuration, so to increase capacity I had to replace two of the disks. I went for two Western Digital Green 2TB disks as the 1TB variants I currently had proved reliable.
Moving the data over to a new disk would be tricky, the simplest solution would be to put the old drives into a USB caddy and plug into the server, but I had previously found that USB drives don’t like RAID. But since RAID1 means redundancy, I could tackle this another way…
Just a quick one, I think I have just worked out why I have a fascination with the Raspberry Pi.
When studying GCSE IT at school, the first chance for me to use a computer at school, the first programming centric software used was Winlogo. A simple drawing application that used code to manipulate a turtle (yes, I kid you not) to create vector shapes on a screen. Basically an overly complicated version of paint.
Screenshot of Winlogo on my first PC, I take full responsibility for the Windows theme and choice of music.
From the last post, the idea of having UPS in my home may put me off forever, but to put it into context the unit had been installed before I was employed over 12 years ago, and over the past 2 years it was beeping intermittently to indicate a fault that a convenient press on any button would silence.
The post before that however had more gravitas, with my server being offline for close to a month all due to a one second power cut made me feel vulnerable to another downtime incident over something I couldn’t control. It was time to look into a Uninterruptable Power Supply to protect my server from power cuts that could knock my RAID out of sync.
It’s simple, instead of the process of installing PHP, MySQL, assigning permissions and all the debugging that many of us have gone through, Microsoft has come up with WPI, or Web Platform Installer.
WPI makes installing WordPress easy.
Amongst other web applications, WordPress is the most popular and it makes the install on Windows as simple as a few clicks.
All done!
So far I’ve tried it on Server 2003 R2 and Server 2012 R2, both with instant success.
Call me cynical, but I’ve always hated “the cloud”, maybe it was due to my love of personal servers that a person (me) would have complete control over. Or maybe that it was the fact that you have to essentially hand over all your data, user base, posts, comments etcetera over to a third party company that unless you comb through the terms and conditions, can do what they like with it.
My first venture into this came about before it was even called “the cloud”, I was setting up a guestbook system to work on my otherwise static only website, this meant signing up to one of those “guestbook websites” such as Html Gear, which later became part of Lycos. In those days of 2001+ my biggest bugbear was the adverts that always accompanied a free guestbook setup.
Even though the static web pages I created with links to guestbook sites have long past, I have enjoyed reminiscing the past posts on the guestbook of my creations, made possible only by looking through the backups of old websites and extracting the obscure URL from the HTML.
Alas, on my recent nostalgic trip of past websites I was met by this handy message:
So my data has gone?
Thanks I thought, my piece of data that I thought would carry me till my twilight years has been suddenly ripped from my heart. A bit dramatic, but that’s what I thought.
Travelling back to early 2001, I simply didn’t have the resource to host a guestbook locally, whether it be with hosted solutions that did not allow dynamic code (remember Geocities), or my own first home server that did not have the power to process code without time-outs.
Since then I quickly learnt to try my best at hosting forums (the then next step after guestbooks) locally on my own server, free to dispose of the data as I wish. In the years that follow I realise it may be a pain to find/write the code to display the data as it was, but I will always have that data close to me, free to read the raw database and exercise my nostalgia.
Furthermore, this event takes me back to when me and my peers used a service called MSN Groups, those of you that remember the acronym MSN assume that it is now doomed. It is, with all of our social commentary and all photos since deleted “cos it’s on MSN so we don’t need to keep our own local copy”.
Be warned, the cloud may be a quick, cheap and easy alternative to learning things properly, but rest assured the data you create WILL NOT be around forever, or even long enough for you to get bored of it.
If you run a website where you are dealing with data, guestbook, forums etc. Get your own server! Or least a service that allows you to pull all the data to a local copy.
