February 2019 – Simonpreston.net

An Ode to the Greatest Computer Ever*

Most software developers, DBAs and sys admins will have a favourite computer (and many people who aren’t in those 3 categories, such as artist and musicians). A machine they grew up with, cut their teeth on, allowed them to get creative, and had them poking about the innards trying to learn how everything worked. For me, that machine was the Amiga. A machine that revolutionised the home computing world and seemed poised for world domination. Instead a series of poor decisions led to it’s demise…

Setting up a Rasberry Pi with Rasbian

The Raspberry Pi was, and still is, a neat little device. I got one of the first of the v1 Model B boards off the production line, with the full intention of doing so much cool stuff with it. Even though, at the time, I was poor undergraduate the allure of a PC, capable of running Linux, for about £30 (more like £50 once you factor in a case, and power supply) was too great. The initial lead times for quite high, so it was a bit of a wait between purchasing and actually receiving it. And, truth be told, it essentially found life as a media server, running RasbBMC, as I imagine a lot of them did.

2019: All change, please! All change!

Well hello there.

Thought it was about time I finally got a proper personal blog on the go. I’ve been meaning to do it for quite a few years now, but the plan was to create my own CMS software, and use that as the base for the site. Howevvvvver, as is the norm with most developers, the project was sort of half started but I either a) got more interested in doing other projects or b) work got in the way.So, scratch that. Let’s just go with some premade package that I can tweak to my hearts content, should I wish to. And, with that, comes a new Github identity. Now Github allows free private repos, as well as public, it makes it nice and easy to keep everything in one place, and collaborate on work projects (sorry, BitBucket!)

And, now I have some new found time, to actually work on it I might actually get some content on here. Knowing me, it’ll probably fall by the wayside, as life goes on, and other things take precedence; as is per the norm, with me. But it’s there for anything I want to throw out in to the world.