The last time I wrote about these chromebooks was in 2022 but its certainly not the last time I've used them! These old devices have been in constant rotation since then however recently I've tired of the Arch / EndeavourOS rolling-release upgrade mill and it was time to make a change. It seem...
Mandolin Surgery, Samhain 2017
This history was written to accompany the instrument when it was donated for the youths prize table at an event the following week.
I got this mandolin in around 1990 from Cedric's wife Lara and played it a great deal. I'm not that great, but it was always fu...
Someone posted this link to a story on facebook about Aethelmaer (Eilmer), a very interesting monk who lived at Malmesbury Abbey before the Norman Conquest who performed a very singular exercise in crafting a set of wings to put forth in flight from the tower at the Abbey. The remarkable thing...
I've been using Mastodon for some years now and I can't praise it enough. I believe mainstream social media has become a cancer on our society, but not because being social is inherently bad, but because people have allowed themselves to be herded into social spaces controlled by for-profit comp...
I've been listening to the 1968 BBC radio dramatization of The Hobbit and wow is it a bit jarring. Having grown up with the music from the animated 1977 Rankin and Bass production, hearing the poems and songs performed with different melodies and cadence is an "uncanny valley" level of weird.
G...
The Discovery Age
Western historians refer to the period from the late 15th century through the 17th century as "The Age of Exploration" or "The Age of Discovery". These terms are obviously ethnocentric as they refer to the discoveries made by western Europeans primarily on the seas during the "A...
I started using Discord in early 2019 mainly because most of my gaming friends were already using it and quickly recognized it as a fantastic platform for collaboration. I started to write about using it for organizing a project and never finished that post. I ended up creating and maintaining a...
Some years ago I was gifted a used Synology DS713+ NAS (Network Attached Storage) device with dual 3TB Western Digital Red WD30EFRX NAS drives. The friend I got it from had upgraded because this setup was "too slow" but its worked well for me for many years. Mostly I use it as just a backup serv...
For 30 years I have been generating digital computer files and storing them in various ways. Over time I created heirarchies of related information, much of it overlapping and without any formal naming convention. Methods evolved over time as did my interests and eventually I found myself search...