Me, up a mountain in Jordan with the Dead Sea and Israel in the background

Me, up a mountain in Jordan with the Dead Sea and Israel in the background.

Q1 '25 Already Finished

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.

Web Hosting... for Free?

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.

Smart Roadster Indicator Stalks on the Cheap

Well, slightly cheaper courtesy of the Smart ForTwo

Introduction One of my cars is a lovely little Smart Roadster. The most fun you can have with a .7 litre engine, turbocharger and a lightweight chassis and body! The Problem I had an MOT failure with the rear fog light switch not working. After ruling out the fuses and the bulb itself it was found to be the switch itself. It’s a rotating switch on the indicator stalk and whilst the sidelights and headlights were working just fine the final switch for the fogs most definitely was not.