Me, up a mountain in Jordan with the Dead Sea and Israel in the background.
X1 Carbon Gen5 Running Sequoia With 4k
Running Sequoia on a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen5
My daily workhorse is a trusty Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen5 picked up off Ebay earlier in the year for £130. With the i7, 16GB memory and 512GB NVMe it’s a pretty sweet deal and runs everything I need at speed. I figured I game rarely, and with my taste in games ending around Half-Life 2 era I’m unlikely to stress the HD 620 graphics much. If push really did come to shove I could get an external GPU and go from there.
Musings over the first quarter of 2025
So as my quarterly review reminded me, Q1 2025 is already over and it’s been now 6 months (to the day it turns out) since I added anything here!
The good news
- Oracle Cloud free tier continues to deliver. I’ve seen zero downtime since deploying here for all sites on the server. Absolutely solid as a rock.
- Looking to deploy a new site for a new convention. Running again on Bolt but this time a spring Anime convention. Watch this space!
- Work is going great. Big interesting challenges but for the first time in a long time I’m convinced I’m in the right place at the right time and able to make change.
- We’re building a fibre exchange in Basingstoke, just over a mile from my door. So I’ll get to see the whole process start-to-end. I may well document it here as it should be of interest to g33k’s out there. Nothing that isn’t public domain I hasten to add.
Travels
- Skiied Zell am See staying at Cella Central and first black run complete.
- Booked on my first cruise exploring the Norwegian Fjords. This has been a life long dream for me and on my bucket list.
- Camping in Cheddar Gorge soon with the hiking group. Somehow this part of the UK has been missed off my adventures so far.
- The old Volvo (a trusty 2007 V50 which has been everywhere) has been treated to a new cambelt and glowplugs with thanks to David Slade to keep her going for another 120k miles.
- Booked to visit the Dolomites next year for more ski!
Tech
On the tech front I am currently learning about Ansible, AWX, HTMX and putting these together (along with k8s and n8n) to build a brand new network automation platform.
Move over Digital Ocean!
Introduction
I build web-sites and provide hosting for a few small companies, and a few larger ventures. Including my anime convention. Nope, I have no interest in anime either…. a long story for another day.
Current Solution
I’ve used DigitalOcean for many, many years. Their smallest droplet with a dual-core CPU, 1GB memory and a 64GB SSD is enough for Ubuntu, Apache and PHP for a few sites without issue. Add on excellent customer support, great documentation, point-in-time backups, UK geolocation and for ~$8/month you’ve got a pretty good offering.