Tag: Tech

Tags

More site potterings; I have now implemented blog post tagging with jekyll-archives and some hacked together template pages. A list of all tags can be found here and each post will have links to it’s own peer group at the bottom of the post in question.

My Space

whois chrisrcook.com  
    
Domain Name: CHRISRCOOK.COM  
Registry Domain ID: 2351378318_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.google.com
Registrar URL: http://domains.google.com
Updated Date: 2020-01-10T23:13:50Z
Creation Date: 2019-01-10T21:43:23Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-01-10T21:43:23Z
Registrar: Google LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 895
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: registrar-abuse@google.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.8772376466
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Name Server: NS-CLOUD-C1.GOOGLEDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS-CLOUD-C2.GOOGLEDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS-CLOUD-C3.GOOGLEDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS-CLOUD-C4.GOOGLEDOMAINS.COM

It’s a little over a year since I registered Chrisrcook.com and wrote my first post. With that, I think it’s time to look back at the original goals for this site and to share a few thoughts.

The Hardware

I originally decided to use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ as a host. The Pi has performed well and, after a year, I remain happy with that decision and do not plan on moving to another solution. The single caveat to this is that I plan on moving away from using a Micro SD card for permanent storage to a full blown SSD.

In the future I aim to explore PeerTube (or similar) and, at this point, I may have to move to a more powerful board than my now superseded 3B+.

The Software

The Raspbian/Nginx/Jekyll stack has worked well and I plan to continue with this configuration – albeit with a little more automation. My move to SSL via Let’s Encrypt was easy to set up but seemed to upset Google for a month or so. In hindsight, I should have implemented SSL from day one.

The Connection

I continue to use Google as a domain registrar thanks it it’s support for IPv4 Dynamic DNS however I am considering moving to Mythic Beasts both to reduce my dependency on Google and due to their support for Dynamic DNS for both IPv4 and IPv6. As Virgin Media does not yet support a native IPv6 connection this will be a low priority move.

The Virgin Media connection continues to be reliable enough to self host. While the April bounce to upload was nice, I’m not certain that there would have been any material difference if the previous 20Mb/s speed had been maintained. Should I start to self host video (rather than use Youtube) then I suspect additional upload will be required.

The Content

Jekyll has worked well for me; I produce a reasonably modern site without the hassles of maintaining a WordPress (or otherwise) stack. Personal and professional commitments mean that I have not been able to update as often as I would like; there are a number of projects and a number of images I would like to have uploaded that I have not yet had chance too. In spite of this lack of content, I remain happy that I have control of content availability and location.

Roundup

All in all, I believe this has been a good first year and, barring any unforeseen circumstances, I plan on continuing to run chrisrcook.com into the 2020s.

The Apple Memory Hole

The (Unofficial) Apple Archive is a newly launched collection of historic Apple media and video.

It must have been a tremendous amount of work collect and catalogue and, for me, the most interesting years are 2004 and 2005 – the years that lead me to purchase my first Mac (and yes, I did buy into PPC after the intel transition was announced!). I doubt it’ll last – Apple’s lawyers must be itching to write takedown notices – but while it’s there it’s an interesting place to poke around.

I still have that old first machine somewhere and I should dig it out; last time I checked (perhaps 5 years ago) it seemed to run ok. I do hope it’s still in something of a functional state.

Cleaning Up

A Deep Space Nine sizzle reel, remastered using machine learning. The linked version without the Youtube compression artefacts is really rather impressive.

There’s lots of media out there that, either due to cost or just that HD elements never existed, will never be remastered for modern displays. Blackadder, Red Dwarf, early Doctor Who; all of these could be rejuvenated for the 21st century.

The Power of Telemetry

The online backup company Backblaze – of which I am a reasonably satisfied long-term customer – makes statistics about the hard drives they use public. A chap called Ryan Smith took this telemetry and, with a little data wrangling and some educated guesses, worked out large parts of their business model – including important elements of their asset replacement cycle.

Telemetry is creepy. Turn it off.