Author Archives: gurahamu

Home Server and Storage

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I need to address my home storage capacity problem. For a while I’ve been using a single disk 2TB Buffalo home NAS with an old 1TB drive attached over USB to back the more important folders up as a local archive. (I should say that all my important family data is on my Mac, which is Time Machine’d locally and has offsite backups via CrashPlan.)

That NAS has filled up with family video and photo backups, my enthusiastic GoPro footage, sound recordings, rips of my DVD and music collection (as FLAC), and so space has run out.

I decided I wanted to spec something that would last for a few more years and decided that:

  • It had to be reliable and quiet, even if it was going in a cupboard.
  • If the system failed, I needed a decent chance of getting my data back.
  • I needed 4TB of space, with a local 1:1 copy of that – that’s 8TB of space total.
  • I needed to be able to Crashplan/other internet backup it offsite.
  • It was going to be on a budget!

There are lots of ways to approach this issue. For example – a simple way is to buy a big drive or drive array and attach via USB to a current machine. I like the idea, but it means I need that machine to be on, or in sleep mode, all the time, which is something I wanted to avoid.

Another solution is a home NAS like my existing one. These go from single drive units up to 5 drive and above RAID systems. They are relatively cost effective, but when they die, you’re often stuck trying to find the same model to use to get data back, and since many are embedded Linux, if it dies, your only real chance is to hook up what’s left to another unit and hope.

Another option: an old style home server. Essentially it’s a PC, with a lot of drives and that’s it. After spending time reading reviews, especially at Silent PC Review for quieter parts and considerations, and kakaku.com for pricing (I live near Tokyo so I’m spoiled for PC parts at retail) I came up with the following:

Case: I looked through SPCR’s recommended cases, and saw the Fractal Design Refine R3 – the R4 had recently been released. I looked at one, and some of the competition, and decided to give it a try. One minor note, I got the ‘Arctic’ white one so it wouldn’t stand out as much where I was going to place it, and since this thing is heavy, I bought it from Amazon Japan for pretty much what I would have paid in Akiba, but without having to carry it home on the train.  Mounting components is simple, and it comes with plenty of brackets and rubber washers to help isolate vibration from hard drives.

Motherboard and CPU: In my price range AMD have some good chips, but so do Intel.  I was looking at the AMD A6-5400K APU, and the Pentium G2020 – yes, a Pentium, but based on the new Ivy Bridge core – this part is lobotomised though, and only has Intel HD graphics, but for what I wanted, it would do. Then I looked at the mobos – either Intel’s 1155 socket based, or AMD’s FM2. In nearly all cases, the AMD chipsets had 5-6 SATA3 connectors, whilst the Intel ones had only 2. That was the deal breaker for me – I wanted to make sure the machine would have as much SATA 6Gb capacity as possible for the future, so I went with the AMD combo.  I chose an ATX board from ASRock, which have always treated me well, and between the two I’d have everything built in.

Drives: For the OS I picked up a Samsung 840 SSD in 120GB – I wanted a fast OS disc to get the machine up from whatever sleep / reboots it had to do. Also, it would mean a cooler, quieter machine.  For storage I went for 4 * 2TB discs – Western Digital Green – these are the only thing that I wonder about, as there are some stories about the Green drives not withstanding this kind of role. That said, I’ve been using them aggressively for years and not had an issue. We’ll see.

Memory: Corsair XMS3 in 2 * 8GB – nothing special, but a decent brand.

Power Supply: I like the Antec units, and thanks to a sale, I got an Antec EarthWatts platinum 450W power supply for a good price.
So that’s the hardware

For Operating System, I was actually planning to go with Linux, but since I have an MS Technet account, I decided to give Microsoft Server 2012 a run and it’d give me an excuse to spend some time with it. One thing I liked about a Windows solution was that I could use Storage Spaces, which allows Windows to group physical discs as virtual discs, meaning I could buy cheaper smaller disks and let the system see them as a single larger disc. This doesn’t buy safety against drive failure, so the other discs made an identical space, and used Windows Backup Service to do a nightly copy. The benefit here is that if the OS dies, or the machine is unusable, as all meta data is in the Space, you can hook the same two discs (in my case) up to a Windows 8 box, or a rebuilt Server 2012 box, and still use the discs. I decided to to try this, and built the system up on Server 2012 Essentials (the old home server plus small business server) but then rebuilt it on Server 2012 base, and it saw the Storage Spaces no problem, so I’m relatively happy that’ll work in a disaster scenario.

Finally, as it’s Windows, I can run Crashplan on it as normal and have that extra offsite backup mode.

For scale, 2 * 4TB Buffalo NAS cost around 66,000yen (~420GBP/~640USD). This machine came in  a bit more expensive, around 74,000yen (with 32,000en of that being the 4 WD drives!).

In practice, after a month of usage, it’s been a great success – it’s fast and reliable, sleeps well and even when on generates very little noise, so I think I managed to hit all of my goals.

Leaving Product: Google (?)

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I use e-mail a lot. I know it’s not as cool to talk about in these social website times, but the truth is, I do like to correspond with friends and groups of friends, via good old e-mail.

I have two types of account – I have my ‘web company’ accounts – Gmail, MS Outlook, Yahoo for those company’s services, and for dumping signups into. Then I have a couple of accounts for myself and family members based on my own domain names where we communicate with friends and family.

I started using these domain named accounts about 8 years ago, settling on IMAP, and moving away from ISP based addresses and even from the above mentioned webmail apps.

For a while, they were based on Pair.com’s SquirrelMail implementation, and that was fine, but we’d sometimes see odd issues now and then. I looked around, and at the end of 2009, as I blogged, I moved to Google Apps. In those days, Google Apps was pretty much free for everyone, and you could even use Gmail as a web front end.

Over the years, they reduced the number of mailboxes each domain could have and originally at least, it wasn’t simple having multiple domains under one account. I could understand that – this was still a free service.

Last December, they killed the free option, and now it’s pay only, and I’m fine with that, I just wanted to put some back story in there as I’m grandfathered in with the 5 mailboxes per domain for free.

For a while now, I’ve not liked the ads on the web interface, or that theoretically my mail was analyzed for that mail targeting / profiling. Again, this is free, and when it’s free *you* are the product, as the old saying goes. I’m not a tinfoil hat fanatic, but I do like privacy, and decided it was time to pay for my email hosting again.

I looked at the Google (Apps) paid option – 5 USD a month for my 5 users. I then looked around and had a look at what MS is doing with Outlook on custom domains, and also at other hosting companies like Pair, and finally Rackspace.

It was tempting to stay with Google and Apps, but I don’t use the other Apps, just the email, and the way Google does things with it’s ‘AllMail’ philosophy irks some people, and there’s a whole post’s worth there on configs I’ve tried from app setup, to subscriptions and quite a few other things to improve that – but basically, I’m a simple Inbox n folder person. There are definitely upsides to the AllMail approach, but in my situation, people are preferring things in folders.

I decided to pitch a move to Rackspace on Twitter with a #rackspace hashtag, and quickly received several positive responses from users (and former employees) and a couple of contact people, who I followed up with, and who answered a few of my queries on quirks of my setup.

A couple of months ago, I signed up with Rackspace for a trial two weeks. Their product seems to be what I need – I can hold my two domains under a single Rackspace account, and each mailbox will cost me 2USD / month with a minimum of 5 (10USD / month). This actually works as I have 5 main mailboxes to move!

They support migration of data from various services via a migration assistant including GMail. I should note that this did not work for me from Google Apps using a preset, as my actual mail server was googlemail.com, not gmail.com. Not a problem – the manual setup worked fine. Having uploaded my from & to details in a provided spreadsheet, the script went to work, effectively logging in to Google as me, and copying the data across, and being reformatted by Rackspace.

Moving email hosts, like moving houses/apartments also gives you the opportunity to get to those things you’d been meaning to do, but never did. For me, it meant killing a few mailboxes, and rolling them in as aliases to my core addresses, meaning I have an ‘address’ for each of my two twitter accounts and a few other things, and they route into my core account, which means fewer accounts to own/check, no forwarding, and I can see where addresses have somehow attracted spam. Keeps it simple.

The web interface is very clean, very simple, and though I did need to set up some contacts, it wasn’t arduous at all. As far as my usual window onto my email – Thunderbird – it was all fine, and it pulled all my email down and let me re-sync it, so I’ve been tidying that all up as well, and slowly removing the AllMail. All in all, it’s been painless for me, and transparent to family members using their accounts, once we’d gone through phones and setup draft, sent and trash folders correctly!

It’s odd that in parallel, I’ve been moving my RSS reading habits from the soon to be retired Google Reader, to Newsblur. On my iPhone4, I used to use a syncd Reeder app with my Google account, but now just use that as a local RSS / OPML reader, as well as playing with the Newsblur app.

So, a few months on, I use Google products to very little extent – an email drop, and the odd G+ post. No more ‘core mail’ or RSS involvement, and I rarely even use the search any more (Twitter & Pocket pretty much take up my link following time). It seems a bit odd, but yes, I’m very happy with the move, and that I’ve actually managed to make it simpler.

New Header Image: Wooden Posts

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It’s been a long time since I updated the header image – about 9 months in fact, so I decided it was time for a change. Nothing amazing, as usual, but I thought I’d keep with images from out and about the local area. This one was from a local children’s play park, where they have a trellis on supports over a seating area. The steel supports have these wooden sections bolted to them for cosmetic reasons, and you can see here, they don’t touch the ground any more, meaning there’s a quirky look and a nice texture.

Wooden Posts

The image was taken on my Nikon D3200 on the 35mm lens at the slightly silly 24MP, but cropped all the way down – that’s a benefit of lots of pixels – cropping becomes a lot simpler.

woodpost1.jpg

Rusutsu Snow Trip 2013

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In January,  we took the family up to Rusutsu in Hokkaido for a bit of snowboarding and skiing. Yes, this post is a little late.

The resort feels very much like a bubble place, but essentially is a collection of hotels and a few chalets around three main mountain ski areas. We stayed in the Resort Hotel North, which is at the base of one of the ski areas. Is it really a bubble era hotel? Well, it has an animatronic talking tree, some animatronic bears (or dogs, perhaps), and a full double decker carousel in the foyer which you could ride for free every evening, so yes, it’s very much a bubble hotel, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you aren’t paying bubble fees.

We went for an all in package with breakfast and dinner, especially as the food at the in-house restaurants was good – believe me, we’ve stayed at places where the breakfasts were awful, and yes, I’m looking at you, Yamada Onsen in Niseko! As I’ve learned, with kids, having a buffet with a decent selection is vital to keep the complaints down.

Rentals weren’t too expensive, and the kit was very good, as is pretty much standard here nowadays, and the staff were fairly multi-lingual given the decent number of Chinese and Australian guests – also pretty much standard here nowadays.  The instructors were good too, and our eldest got some lessons in when she wasn’t skiing with me. For once I wasn’t renting ski boots, having picked up a cheap pair of Head ski boots in Jimbochou for Xmas last year, and it was nice to have a consistent setup for a whole trip.

Rusutsu’s got a good selection of courses too, and on clear weather days, some great views. I’m not sure whether I prefer it to Niseko, but it’s still got a decent selection of runs, and some hilarious tree routes. There’s a snow park, where I spent a morning. I’ve never been much into jumps and such, but I did actually have a good time in there, so next season I might invest a bit more time in the snow parks and see how it goes.

I also took my GoPro out, and got some great shots of the kids skiing, and us out on our snowboards. As I’m a much better boarder than skier, it was interesting to shift from trepidation on even easier intermediate slopes on skies, to double diamond slopes through the trees on my board, and just feeling challenged, rather than concerned I was going to break something.

I tried the camera both mounted to the board, and a headcam, and actually, I think it works as both, but obviously you get a lot of snow blowing up onto the camera on it’s board mount. One note though, unless you have the anti-fog inserts, you’ll want to regularly open the casing to lot the condensation dissipate after about 20mins.!

All in all, we had a great trip, and even the flights and travel went fairly smoothly, so no complaints there.

Arduino and Raspberry Pi

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Like many, it seems over the last few years, I’ve been getting more interested in some simple home brew hardware hacking. Thus, I’ve recently taken delivery of an Arduino Starter Kit, and a Raspberry Pi model B.

If you’ve somehow missed these, then a quick summary on both.

The Arduino group are an open source team, bringing that philosophy to hardware. The upshot is a collection simple circuit boards, bread boards, and simple electronic components – in the fact the whole thing makes me think of school electronics classes when I was 17. I got the starter kit, which contains all the important things you’ll need to do the 15 projects contained in the guide, from a Spaceship Interface to Touchy Feely Lamp. The book is well put together, and a great introduction to the system, but a brief search around the place shows people are doing some great things with their systems. (Starter Kit costs around 100USD / 9000JPY)

arduino starter kit

arduino starter kit

The Raspberry Pi is a little different – it still has an open source basis, but is essentially a basic computer – CPU, memory, the whole thing. You just add USB power, a case, an SD card for storage, and on a simple level, install a special Debian Linux release called Raspbian. From this you have a computer which can run media at 1080p over HMDI, to simple tasks and desktop over the RCA video connector. the base board costs from 20GBP for the Model A, to 26GBP for the Model B, which is the one I bought. So far it:s been a lot of fun, and impressive something so cheap and simple can be used to stream video off my  home NAS, and on a different install be a normal desktop for learning a bit of Python on.

raspberry_pie

raspberry_pie

 

Icon Patrol Glove

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I’m one of those people who likes to get out on his motorbike most days of the year. Since I don’t pack it away from September till April, I’ve found it’s useful to have a nice, warm pair of winter gloves, ones which are preferably waterproof to an extent too, even though here in central Japan, the  winters aren’t even so wet.

So, when my old gloves were declared worn out, I went looking for a new pair. I don’t have any electrically heated kit, so I needed something basic, relying on the material only. I’ve always heard good things about Icon kit, but never actually tried any, so I looked through their glove selection, and bought some of their Patrol Gloves courtesy of local distributor, AFGMotosports. The local bike groups over at JapanRider and Gaijinriders seem to rate them too. Reseller Revzilla did a video review.

icon patrol glove

I’ve had them for a few weeks now, and I have to say I’m quite impressed. Firstly, the sizing – I went for the size above that which their website suggested – getting XL over L:  when you measure, go in three dimensions, and not flat across the palm, and opt for the larger size if you’re on a boundary.

The glove fits very well, nowhere is it tight, though the fingers do feel a little short, but fine for me. The thumb has plenty of freedom, so indicators aren’t an issue, and so far, no embarrassing misses and catching the horn.

The construction looks good and you feel protected – the large knuckle protector adds to that sense, and so far, nothing is coming unstitched. That gauntlet long wrist cover section fitted well over my jacket too, meaning there were no irritating breezes coming up the jacket arm. I also like the reflective section – I’ve made the mistake of having too much black in my gear over the years, so I’m always looking to improve my visibility level. The main materials are goatskin and the waterproof textile, with some synthetic suede on the wear points.

I’ve worn them around town, and over a 200Km run, where it was ~5-10deg.C and they kept me sufficiently warm for the most part, and still felt comfortable on the handlebars, despite the wind, and you don’t sweat in them either, a problem with some (cheaper) gloves. In the rain, they do indeed keep your hands dry, but as the waterproof layer is beneath, the outer layer will appear wet at times, but that’s fine.

They’re worth the 75USD in my opinion, and again, I bought through the distributors here in Japan – AFGMoto – who are keen to sell kit in either Japanese or English and seem to offer decent pricing on a lot of their kit, so no arguments there. I have to say, if like me, you tend to do these things over e-mail, their response time is usually excellent.

Bookshelf: Outliers

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What makes people successful? Is there anything to the nature vs. nurture? What other factors impact success?

These are the kind of questions Malcolm Gladwell asks in his book ‘Outliers‘, drawing on anecdotes of people, both well known and no so well known about what had to happen for those people to become famous.

He runs through cases such as Bill Gates, and the factor of being born at the right time and with parents able to afford to buy his school a very expensive computer. Certainly, he had skill and acumen, but he was also in the right time at the right time – other equally ‘smart’ people perhaps were not. Some of the anecdotes are interesting, and follow quite long explanations of historical social rules. Some others, such as the opening chapter, illustrate how arbitrary rules like deciding the cut off dates for being in an ice hockey team can enforce an artificial limitation on some due simply to being born at the ‘wrong’ time of year, rules which are likely actually reducing the overall number of high quality professional players.

Though again he extrapolates from individual cases to show a theory or trend, some are educational; whilst I was aware many Jewish people in Europe became shop owners due to land ownership laws, I didn’t realise that in the early twentieth century, many Jewish immigrants became lawyers when the job paid little and many were pushed into merger and acquisition work as the dirty end of the profession – a part which would stand them in good stead in later years as the area took off.

Of course, this is anecdotal, and some of his ideas begin to stretch theories, such as ‘Asians’ being good at maths due to the kanji system and rice growing. For me personally, his assertion that Japanese are good at math due to long school hours, may or may not be true. Having worked in Japanese schools, I doubt it – it’s likely more that the schools here teach to a test, and little else, and it’s rote learning. That said, the idea that a small generation sandwiched between two larger ones has he benefit of more lower class sizes and so on, is intriguing.

Gladwell also has a decent theory that it takes 10,000 hours to get great at something, and many also fall by the way side by the sheer amount of work it can require in going from good to great. It also seems to equate to about years. In all he sees most of the successful as a crossroad of nurture, nature, timing and endurance.

Quirks aside, it’s a readable and personable book, and the telling of individuals’ stories makes it flow nicely, and will at least leave you asking some questions about the infamous ‘conventional wisdom’.

New PC Build

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For over 15 years, I’ve built my own PCs. The first was a 486/DX2-66 based machine just before Windows 95 came out. I’ve done it out of interest, but also to give me control over what I buy, and make replacements and upgrades cheaper.

My build was getting a bit old, the parts being between 2 and 3.5 years old and was missing some current technologies, so I decided to replace the main components, and sell the parts on to cover some of the cost of the new build:

Old build: AMD Athlon II 645 4 Core CPU, AMD 5750 graphics, ASRock motherboard, 430W Antec PSU, Lian Li case, DVD-R drive, 12GB RAM.

It was a good build, and still had some legs, but was deficient in some areas. The CPU was capable, but for the increasing amount of virtualisation and editing/encoding/rendering I’m doing, something faster was definitely going to be better. Moreover, though the ASRock was a great motherboard, it lacks PCIe 3 and USB3. The 5750 is a good card, but after nearly three years, is showing it’s age, and though I don’t game like I used to, I decided it was time to get a PCIe3 1GB card and play older games with more detail, and get a bit more out of newer games. The Antec PSU has been great – so much better than the Enermax I had previously, but I felt I needed something with a bit more capacity, to handle the extra GPU load, but potentially more from CPU and other components. The DVD-R drive had survived a few rebuilds, but I’ve wanted a BluRay drive for a while since I actually have some BDs now. The RAM is actually one set of 2*2GB from an older build, and 2*4GB I bought a couple of years ago – I’m going to re-use the latter only – they’re all fine, but I expect to add a further 2*4GB kit later this year.

So what’s new?

For the first time since the very early 2000s, I’ve gone with a retail Intel CPU. That last one was a Celeron 333 I think, and I used to overclock the hell out of it. Since then, it’s been AMD all the way, but now I’m back with Intel and the i5 3470, based on the Ivy Bridge architecture. Interestingly, this model has HD2500 graphics built in, rather than the more common 4000 part, but since I have a discrete graphics card, it doesn’t make much difference, and I think results in a lower power wattage rating. Perhaps for the next upgrade, the Bulldozer/Piledriver cores from AMD will have evolved a little more.

For a motherboard, I chose to stay with ASRock, and got one of their H77 based boards, the H77 Pro4/MVP. It’s an ATX sized board, and though there is a Micro ATX version, that was more expensive, so I stuck with this one. I find the ASRock board to be reliable and well laid out. I used to swear by Abit, but again, I had some bad run-ins, and moved on. The board has PCIe3 for graphics, SATA3/6Gb, and USB3, as well as some of the tweak utils they use, and for the first time for me on a PC, UEFI instead of the old BIOS. Also, it has enough monitored fan connectors to match my case for a change.

For graphics card, I basically trawled Tom’s Hardware, and went with the AMD HD7770, which sports an acceptable price, but also a good power efficiency. I went with the Gigabyte model, which is moderately quiet, and was a little cheaper, instead of having a pile of cables and bundled games I didn’t need.

I bought a new power supply – essentially the 650W version of the previous one. I’ve always had good results from Antec and SeaSonic PSUs in all the builds I’ve done for myself and for friends, and when I’ve tried something different, I’ve been disappointed. It’s not a sexy part of a build, but it’s the one part which has the capability to blow the rest of the machine, so choose wisely.

Lastly, I picked up a cheap, bulk, LG BluRay player, so I can watch some discs on my PC, which will be convenient.

I’ve kept the memory, and my aluminium Lian Li case, which I really like, all the peripherals, and drives, and my X-Fi audio card.

I bought pretty much all the parts in Akihabara, from Dos Paradise (DosPara), which is a great set of shops, and they always seem to have decent prices. Pricing was mainly done on kakaku.com, with research from Tom’s Hardware, PCper.com and Anandtech.

明けましておめでとうございます２０１３

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Another New Year comes crashing around, and I’m hoping for another good one. No retrospectives, or lists or anything by the way; I tend to want to look forwards at this time of year.

As far as our New Year celebrations went, we had a quiet one at home for the midnight tick over, but then we were up just after 5am this morning to get the family ready and down to the beach to watch the sunrise with a few thousand other people. I did this last year, and though it was busy, it was fairly quiet. This year it seemed to be a complete circus, not just with the thousands come to see the sunrise on the Pacific beaches, but the roads were busy, especially with young guys in heavily modded cars. If anything, it added an extra flavour to the morning, and in the cold and with a few clouds, we watched the sun rise for the first time on 2013.

Given the shape of the bay, we could also see the sun’s rays hit Mt. Fuji for the first time, as surfers got their first waves of the New Year in. It was all quite relaxing given the hour and the temperature. Potentially the kids may not share my opinion of that.

As soon as the sun was fully up, people began bustling away, and we got some breakfast at one of the cafes which was open on the beach road, and then made our way home. I have to say, I do quite like this ‘first sunrise’ event, called ‘Hatsuhinode‘ (初日の出), and even if we left Japan, it’s something I’d probably still do.

Soon after lunch though we were out again at the local jinja (that’s a Shinto shrine, not an o-tera, which is a Buddhist temple, and they’re usually attended at midnight on New Years Eve) to pray to the local deities and made a small donation. I’ve been to a few shrine events, so I just had to help the kids get through throwing the coin, two bows, two claps and a prayer and move on. It went went well apart from my youngest, when seeing us close our eyes shouted, “Don’t go to sleep!” which got a ripple of laughter from those behind us in the queue.

There’s always a queue on January 1st., and for most of the o-shogatsu period, as people pray for good luck for the year, and pick up various objects to bring good luck for the year, such as a hamaya, which is a small wooden arrow to bring luck, given it’s origin is that of a weapon to slay demons. We picked one of these up for a small fee, as my wife had never had one when she was a child, so she was keen to get one with our kids.

We also got an ‘omikuji‘ (お神籤), which is a printed fortune selected by which piece of wood you get at random from a drum. Some people tie them on frames of string, or trees and such near the shrines. (For what it’s worth, ours was a pretty good one – dai-kichi).

After that, it was late afternoon and time for a break, so we’ve concluded New Years Day with a lamb stew I’d been cooking for a few hours, a glass of red wine, and having an evening in with the family. I should say that there is some traditional food for this period, called ‘osechi ryouri‘, but we don’t have them (my wife really doesn’t like them, and I’m not keen), and instead take the time to cook a few more winter based meals.

All in all a great start to 2013!

Re-Hosted

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I used to host this blog in my own WordPress(.org) installation on my own hosting account, along with an older sister homepage called brightblack.net in flat HTML/CSS. For several years (2003 to 2009 specifically), I used a hosting service called Pair.net. I only stopped using them as I really wasn’t doing much with it, so I decided to move the blog to WordPress.com, and retire that space.

As we head into 2013 though, I’ve gotten involved a few projects I want to work on, and I’m quite keen to get back to working with HTML5, JQuery, and CMSs such as WordPress and Drupal again. I’m also looking to try one or two bits in conjunction with some of the Amazon Web Services.

Thus, I went looking for hosting space, and between recommendations from friends, LifeHacker and a few other places, I’d got a short list together, but ultimately ended up going with Pair again, and their PairLite package. They’re competitive, and they treated me well before, and this new package pretty much summed up what I needed: a hobbyist setup of 10 databases, 10GB of space, and some suitable bandwidth. I’m sure many of these other hosting companies are excellent (certainly DreamHost has a lot of fans), but the whole unlimited everything some offer just never sounds right. So, for 75USD (plus 25 USD setup), I’ve taken a year with Pair again, and we’ll see how it goes.

Ironically perhaps, this blog will stay on WordPress.com at least for a decent while – this host space is for new projects and experimenting, though it’s safe to say the old stalwart brightblack.net will be back somehow. I’ll also keep doing my e-mail via Google Apps, which has itself changed it’s business model – you can no longer get a small scale free account – all Google Apps account are now pay for, though those of us grandfathered in will still have our ‘free’ accounts, though for how long I have no idea.