It happened. I updated one of my last machines, running Windows 8.1, to Windows 10. That means all my Windows OS machines, physical at least, are on the latest version of Microsoft’s ubiquitous OS. But, even as I was doing it, I was wondering to myself if it was even necessary. Also I was wondering if Windows 8 got way too much of a bad rep, perhaps unfairly. It certainly didn’t get off to a good start, and it never recovered from that. But the story of the successor to the much-loved Windows 7 is a catalogue of errors causing it to be much maligned, as Vista was.
The other morning I was setting up the Raspberry Pi 3 to run through the steps I’d wrote in a tutorial, in order to check it made sense. I had the initial set up stages done and dusted the previous day, or so I thought…
I’ve been using Windows, as my main OS, since pretty much the turn of the century. I’ve never hidden my disdain for the 9x (95/98/Me) codebase. It was a horrid experience, full of badly made drivers, plug and play that never worked, and guaranteed crashes/freezes more than once a day. Fortunately, I hardly had to deal with it, as my Amiga happily carried on being my main machine, whilst I fired up the PC (an AMD Duron @ 700mhz running Windows 98 and, later, Me. Ewww) for secondary tasks. However, this changed when x86 CPUs started reaching gigahertz speeds, and Windows 2000, built on the NT codebase, was launched. Out of the box it was so much more stable than it’s 9x siblings. Plus it offered excellent networking technology meaning I could finally share files across my home network, and control who could access them. I also built a new system based on an AMD Athlon processor, at this time, and the shift to the Windows environment begun. Of course, every Microsoft OS since has been an evolution of that (2000, itself, an evolution of NT 4), so there’s always been an air of familiarity to it. In hindsight, I probably should have gone with Linux all the way back then. But most of the software I wanted to use was Windows only, at that time. But things have moved on, and with MS baking in lovely telemetry data in to Windows 10, it’s time to ditch and switch.
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.
