Technology, marketing, networking and the odd gadget review.
Plus all the other random stuff that crosses my mind: Hypervisors, VLANs, storage and backups, GPUs, Monitors, Keyboards. Twenty years of digital marketing leaks in from time to time, and so does football (LFC related). Read on at your own peril.
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Latest Posts
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Three Years Without Buying a Drive
A year ago, running out of disk space was a shopping problem. You waited for a sale, bought a bigger drive, and moved on.
That’s over for now. AI data centres are buying up the world’s memory and flash, and it’s spread to hard drives too. RAM, SSDs and hard drives all cost two to five times what they did twelve months ago, depending on the part. I already skipped buying a second offsite drive in my backup post because a 16 TB disk had become absurd.
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The Detector Was Never Looking
A neural network running at 5.8 milliseconds an inference, pointed at a room with cats in it, that had never once detected a cat.
I have an NVR. It runs in a container on one of the cluster nodes, it does object detection on that node’s integrated GPU, and it is fast: 5.84 milliseconds per inference, sitting at about 6% of what the detector can do. Person events come in with confidence scores between 0.73 and 0.93, which is healthy.
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The UPS Was a Battery, Not a Shutdown Controller
systemctl is-activesaid active. The daemon had never once logged in.I went to look at a UPS status page expecting to be bored. The server it protects sits on an 850 VA unit over USB, the monitoring daemon has been running for as long as the machine has, and the whole thing had never asked me for anything.
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You Cannot Audit a Migration From the Destination
A December migration silently dropped six published posts. The audit I ran eight months later couldn’t see it, because an audit only examines what arrived.
In August I ran a full audit of this blog. It was thorough in the way audits are thorough. It probed 87 URLs, checked every outbound link, read the database, and produced a list of real problems:
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The 2026 Software List: 110 Applications I Actually Run
Four years ago I published a list of twenty. Nine of them are still here — and the other ninety-odd arrived to keep them company.
In September 2022 I wrote 20 Must Have Software Applications for Every PC. Dashlane, Chrome, Microsoft Office, Kaspersky, PuTTY, TeamViewer. It was a list of things you install on a laptop or desktop.
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