Every year (when I remember) I do an end-of-year summary to outline what has been going on in my life. I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and it’s a great way to look back on the year and see has happened. The Bad: The main bad news of the year is that, contrary to expectations, my Hodgkins Lymphoma cancer was detected again around April after the initial chemotherapy. So it had come back. The rest of the year has mostly revolved around subsequent treatments to try and reach a long term remission, e.g. cure. I’m not there yet, but there are a lot of treatments still available, and I have hope that my current immunotherapy treatment might be the one that works. It wasn’t just me that was affected, my wife suffered quite a bit on hearing the news, and has only just really taken it all in and come to terms with it. I’m pretty sure that I will be cured eventually, at least for a good 10-20 years or so, it just is a pain having to take time off work and go through sometimes intensive treatment sessions. The economy has not had the greatest of years either, and the cost of living crisis affecting the UK has had an effect on us, and my parents who are the main financial support we have while I am unable to work. The Good: I have found a renewed interest in my career, in software development, and I have spent a lot of my spare time, and part of my downtime for treatment, learning new technical things and just generally finding the enjoyment in technology that I thought I’d permanently lost for so many years. The career opportunities around working from home have been very good considering my illness. There is still, despite a downturn, more than enough work around, and a lot of it is 100% work from home work. I’m no longer worried about being unemployed for any great length of time, presuming I am healthy enough to work from home. I’ve been developing my writing and social media skills, which have been a welcome distraction from the bad stuff going on. I’ve always enjoyed writing, but I would say my writing has particularly improved over the past year. Work on the house We have spent a lot of time, effort and money on working on the house this year. Conny has put in a great deal of amazing work, in particular. ...

(Front desk view) (Whole office view) This is my work from home setup. I work from home every work day. I use the following equipment: ‘Studio.local’ - my main PC for WFH and gaming I run Windows 11 on this, and use Ubuntu Linux WSL2 with a Kali Linux virtual machine also. Ryzen 7 9800X 3D CPU GIGABYTE B850 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 Motherboard with 2.5Gbits/sec internet and on-board Wifi7 Be quiet! Straight Power 12 1000W power supply, ATX 3.0, 80 PLUS Platinum Cooler Master MasterAir MA824 Stealth CPU Air Cooler Samsung 990 PRO NVMe M.2 SSD, 4 TB, PCIe 4.0, 7,450 MB/s read, 6,900 MB/s write, Internal SSD Fractal Design North XL Charcoal Black Mesh G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo EXPO RGB 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 PC5-48000C30 6000MHz ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 12G DUAL EVO OC Gaming Graphics Card - 2550MHz Boost Clock, GDDR6X, PCIe Gen 4, DLSS 3, HDMI 2.1a, 3 x DisplayPort 1.4a (Supports 4K & 8K HDR) * 12th Gen i7 CPU 1x 1TB SSD that I use as a system drive for legacy reasons Keyboard and Mouse Topre Realforce UK without numpad 8BitDo Retro 18 Mechanical Numpad, Supports Calculator Mode, Bluetooth/2.4G/Wired Numpad for Windows and Android - C64 Edition LOFREE TOUCH PBT Wireless Mouse with USB receiver, Bluetooth, Wired Connection, Rechargeable, 4000 DPI with OLED Screen Compatible with glass surface for Mac Windows PC Notebook/Block Retro White Gray Elgato Stream Deck Neo - for controlling music playback, and enabling/disabling HDR for gaming. Technical Equipment shared between the laptops of the companies I work for, and my own workstation ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM gaming monitor ― 32-inch 4K QD-OLED panel, 240Hz, 0.03ms (GTG), G-SYNC compatible, custom heatsink, graphene film, uniform brightness, 99% DCI-P3, True 10-bit, 90 W Type-C 29 inch ‘Tate Mode’ portrait mode LCD VA 144hz refresh gaming monitor with Gsync 2x Genelec 8020 DPM speakers Logi USB headset with noise cancelling microphone Logitech Key light for web cam calls Elegato Facecam 1080p HDR Digital SLR Webcam R0de Procaster mic with boom, roll cage and muffler Presonus 1824i USB-c sound interface that is connected to the PC. Ergonomic Equipment Maksone Under Desk Treadmill Flexispot E7Pro Motorised Standing Desk Flexispot BS14 ergonomic chair with headrest Flexispot standing desk mat Wooden rocker balance board 360 style balance board Fenge Dual Monitor Riser and Storage FIFINE Microphone Arm Stand BenQ ScreenBar Halo 2 LED Monitor Light Bar Other Equipment Brother Black and White Laser Printer Flatbed scanner Pomodoro timer Morale/Gaming Equipment See My dedicated gaming site .

I have been working from home, the majority of the time, for over 5 years. It took a lot of adjustment, and I’m still not 100% adjusted, but if you want to undertake this, then these are my tips. Note that a big part of the benefit from working from home is the total flexibility in work environment, so these are only tips that work for me - they might not work for you! However, I think there is probably quite a bit of commonality. ...

This is based off of the 2021 Reddit post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PSP/comments/kcx4ei/tutorial_convert_most_video_formats_to/ I am using it with Handbrake 1.5.1. You can import it into your Handbrake via “Preset -> File Import”. Download PSP Handbrake Preset .

For years, UK politics has become more right-wing, popularist, and presidential. Right-wing, because the Conservatives have been in power for over 10 years, and have had the opportunity to implement most of their ideological policies, which we see at the moment highlighted to an extreme with Liz Truss gearing up to emulate Thatcher on almost every level. Popularist, because the Conservatives have implemented policies designed to appease the populations feelings, rather than those based on factual positive outcomes. ...

Here are some extra tips if you’re just getting started out on Ubuntu. You don’t have to go through the UI to shut down or reboot your computer. You can do it from the command line. The commands are: sudo reboot # to reboot sudo poweroff # to shut down and power off the computer You can get a lot more information on your computers startup and shutdown sequences by removing the default Ubuntu splash screen that obscures this. You should definitely do this if you want to learn more about what your system is actually doing under the hood, especially if you need to troubleshoot what it’s doing. To do this: ...

Click to view full diagram Hardware 2 x Reloop 8000mk2 turntables Roland 707m Mixer and DJ Controller 2015 Macbook Pro (DJ Laptop) SoundSwitch USB -> DMX interface, attached to broadcast PC Beatstep MIDI Controller mapped for controlling SoundSwitch, attached to broadcast PC Vestax VCM-600 MIDI Controller used for controlling Resolume, attached to broadcast PC AKAI LPD8 MIDI Controller used for controlling Serato’s FX, attached to DJ laptop Rode Soundcaster Pro microphone used as a DJ mic 4 x Phillips Hue Colour Bulbs in lamps Phillips Hue Lightstrip Behringer UMC1820 Sound Interface connected to broadcast PC, attached to broadcast PC 2 x Logitech C920 Cameras used for capturing video for streaming, attached to broadcast PC Software SoundSwitch lighting software running on broadcast PC Resolume Avenue running on broadcast PC Streamlabs OBS running on broadcast PC Serato DJ Pro software running on DJ laptop

For 8 TB of data storage on Google Drive, plus my own Google organization, I am paying £30/month, which is a pretty good deal. I wanted to use this space for backing up my NAS, but it was proving difficult. The program I was recommended for Linux backup, Duplicati, was not the best for this purpose. My backup runs would not complete, they would be slow, and full of syncing errors. ...

I had planned a different network toplogy for sure, but this is my current setup and it seems to work well: I was not able to implement connection load balancing using the Miktrotik router. It was just too complicated and didn’t work reliably enough. My current network is a gigabit network across all areas, so every PC has gigabit cables, switch and so on. I either have plugged in my Virgin Media 1000mb/50mbs internet connection or my BRSK fibre 900mb/900mb connection. I simply plug in the WAN cable from the main Linksys router into one of the hubs at one time. If one connection goes down, I manually switch over. I have a 10GB/sec SFP link between my server upstairs in the study and my main studio PC downstairs. This allows me to transfer files at 10Gb/sec rate between the two. I need two wireless repeaters, even though I have a small house, because the house walls are made of a concrete mix. This means the wireless signal needs boosting a lot. In the future, I may try load balancing again, or wait until one of my service providers offers >1000mb/sec speeds. When this happens it would make sense to expand the 10Gbs/sec links as there would be more point.

I have nearly 20 years experience, so my skill-set is in high demand from all sorts of different organisations. If I were looking for a job, then these would be my priorities: Understanding of medical appointments - My situation is that I currently have cancer. Although it’s recommended I work, some of my time will be spent in medical appointments at the hospital that is 15 mins walk away from me. Currently this is expected to take up 1 weekday every fortnight. 100% working from home - This means that, several years down the line, the company policy will NOT change to ’everyone in the office’. Almost all meetings should be remote-first, meaning that everyone is an equal participant in them if they are working remotely. Some people can of course dial in from an office location but they should be at no communication advantage compared to remote workers. Also, the main communication for the team and organisation should be done online, remote workers should not be ‘second class citizens’ to water-cooler gossip. No Java technology stack - This means that Java and IntelliJ are not used as the mainstay of the application stack. I do not like working with Java and find it convoluted. No unethical industries - This means no gambling, no defence, no industries which disadvantage society in a big way in general. Good Pension - An above-average pension contribution. I would expect to be seeing at least 6% max employer contribution which is double the NEST minimum. Good Pay - This is negotiable but I need to pay my bills, and that includes the 10% inflationary cost of living crisis we’re in. Ability to use my own development environment - My customised development environment will run without issue on Linux machines, OSX machines, and on Windows 11 with WSL2. I am SO much more productive and happy using it. Learning and dev time or budget allocated (nice to have) - This is a ’nice to have’ but really if you aren’t able and willing to expense costs such as monthly technical books (£50/month) maybe you should be asking yourself why not, as an organisation.