I recently converted my old server case, motherboard RAM and CPU into a Linux workstation, that I’ve installed Kali Linux on, and will help me up-skill in computer security. I put in a new Nvidia 710 graphics card with 2GB ram. It is entirely passively cooled and has low power usage. It is enough to do work-related stuff on my 1440p monitor. It required installed the legacy 470 graphics drivers to stop it crashing regularly, but it seems to be working fine now. ...

The year of 2024 comes to an end, and what a year it has been! As I usually do, I post (at least) yearly retrospectives, covering my life in the past year. This is one I posted mid-year 2024 , and this is 2023s . It is meant to inform people outside my inner social circle how my life has been going - to give an overview that people who talk to me every day may not have, for example. ...

I had a problem recently with the server where the server was constantly having to boot into ‘rescue mode’ due to a problem with the fstab. I didn’t understand at first why this kept happening. Then I realised that somehow, the sata disk order was occasionally being rearranged. This meant that the correct sata disk order was not being maintained, which meant that Kali Linux was kicking the server into rescue mode, as it was not finding the files it expected to at the correct mount points. /sda1 was becoming /sdc1, for example. ...

I got into a bit of a situation where I broke the main server. Instead of replacing it, I decided to wait a few weeks until I had access to a new case, mobo, CPU and PSU so that I could move it into that case, and take advantage of my Nvidea 970 graphics card. Previously the card WAS in the server, but there was one main problem, the graphics card wouldn’t fit in the case, see here: ...

I have been taking some extended time off work for the past month, to deal with my mum’s illness and unfortunate passing away, and because my work situation is so bad it’s borderline horrific. One thing that has cheered me up a bit is what my wife C. and I have been able to do to the house and to work towards our personal goals in this time. ...

“vWorkbench” is my own personal Vim9-based development environment and writing environment that I’m trying to ‘spin out’ into an open source project that is stable enough, reusable enough and well-documented enough to be used by others. https://github.com/wordswords/vWorkbench.git - this is the current version of my development environment that I use as much as possible, both in personal and work situations. https://github.com/wordswords/vWorkbench/blob/master/README.md - this is the documentation on my development environment, which I absolutely try and keep up to date. ...

I think that there is a very real problem around the definition of the purpose of a ‘QA’ or ‘Quality Engineering’ department and what it is expected to do in an organisation. I have been hired for many ‘QA/QE’ roles which had vastly different ideas about what the purpose of that role was, what my responsibilities were, how I should communicate with other people, and what I should do day-to-day. ...

To send a secure message to me: Use my Signal username: granddesigns.79 I am currently familiarising myself with tools to implement cyber security solutions. This is in preparation for my research project as part of the MSc Cyber Security masters I’m taking from the University of London via distance learning. This research is strictly for informational purposes and I don’t do anything criminal with it. I realise some of this information may be seen as ‘over-sharing’ and is a security risk in itself, but I believe that the benefits of sharing this information outweigh the risks, and that there is no ‘security via obscurity’. ...

Every year I’ve been doing these ‘retrospectives’, usually once per year but sometimes a couple of times per year. Things have changed quite significantly since the last retrospective , and I was in a pensive mood, so I thought I would write a retrospective for half the year. I finally found a job, with CGI, early in the year, and started in March 2023. Unfortunately, for reasons I’m contractually obliged not to get into, it wasn’t long before I was looking for work again. I resigned from CGI at the end of June. ...

I have moved over from wordpress.com that I was using before on DavidCraddock.net to self-hosting using Python’s Hugo. I hope this will be a good move! A bit of content didn’t make it, but most of it, thankfully, did. I will continue to tidy up bits and pieces as I go along.