Getting back to fundamentals here in my micro-man cave. With the nation outside my window completely incapable of handling this pandemic, I’ve taken refuge in rediscovering the early days of personal home computing. Specifically the BBC Micro, and other similar boards from the early to mid eighties. This was slightly before my entry into personal […]
For the last several months, in addition to my continuing disengagement in Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook (the current big three in terms of damage to the human soul), I have been actively avoiding the news. It’s not a total unawareness of current events, but a general decrease in the sources of information about those events. […]
Basically 90% of the media I consume comes from podcasts. I listen to them from the early morning on, and I am always looking out for interesting audio to fill my earbuds as I attempt to zone out on my morning and afternoon commutes. I mix it up quite a bit, sometimes educational, sometimes a […]
Well, it’s been a while. A three week trip back to the US put a monkey wrench in my writing. But I have stayed clear of nearly all social media in that span, which has been a welcome addition to my lifestyle. Basically my Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts have been completely canceled after the […]
I’ve gone back in forth on my relationship with social media. I went cold turkey off all of it a few years back only to have that experiment fail spectacularly. That led me to my most recent period of social media addiction, where I made accounts with countless platforms and allowed several hours per day […]
Well, not quite. But it just got a lot closer. A few weeks ago I took some space from my ridiculously large Windows partition (200 Gb of 600 Gb free space) on my daily driver Toshiba Dynabook laptop and installed Peppermint OS, a semi-lightweight Ubuntu based Linux distro. It was a bit worrying. I had […]
I’d been struggling to put one of my old Raspberry Pis to good use. For the better part of the last several months it’s been just idle, waiting to be tinkered with. I have all kinds of components to build a variety of wicked projects. But in the past, most of my attempts to make […]
My old Linux powered Toshiba netbook, the NB205-N210, finally breathed its last spark of electricity on September 3rd, 2018. She put up a noble fight, but her small internal fan had given out and something was causing consistently random reboots / screen lockups. (probably from a failing internal power supply) It all just got to […]
Self-hosting a WordPress blog on a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B has its share of challenges. Setting up your LAMP stack from scratch, updating the OS regularly, and a variety of other issues force you to learn the nuances of web server administration, sometimes on the fly. One of those necessary duties is regularly backing […]
In recent months I have really streamlined my phone, but there are some apps that I use regularly that make the humid summer days of no-aircon Sapporo pass a little more smoothly. First, the phone: the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. I know it’s not the latest model, but until NTT docomo or a competitor offers […]