For the last six months, I’ve been running Plex Media Server on a Beelink Mini S12 Pro. It’s got the grunt to perform encoding on the fly, and it’s certainly more stable than a Raspberri Pi, while still running completely slient.

Well that was a fast year! We’ve been working pretty hard on other ‘day-job’ projects this year, which means side projects like the good ol’ Serpent tend to fall by the wayside as other priorities come and go. But I always like to end the year with an update to remind you all we’re still kicking.

I try to embrace change; modernisation, new tech and just getting old in general. But sometimes it hurts a little, when once great technology gets retired into oblivion, never to be seen again.

Welcome to the housewarming party, because we’re now hosted on Digital Ocean! Pull up an ethernet cable, pour some packets into a glass and enjoy that sweet new IaaS feeling without having to lift a washing machine.

I’ve been doing a lot of amateur projects with microcontroller’s lately. It’s a fun hobby which I incorrectly assumed would be quite straightforward yet rewarding. I was half right.

Christmas is a time of year for family, friends, presents, Turkey and yes, Linux networking.

For those with an eternal love of city builder simulation games, Cities Skylines II is for you. It comes just over eight years since the first game released, and promises to deliver all the realism that mod’s covered since.

Ask any IT engineer about their home lab and you’ll probably get into a conversation that rivals Cat lovers uniting or new parents talking about their babies. It can be long, passionate and you may end up never speaking to the person ever again. Well, ok maybe not that extreme.

It’s been a week since Debian released the latest iteration of their rock solid, super free Operating System - Debian 12. Codenamed “Bookworm”, it’s now on digital shelves all across the world for you to enjoy.

Every now and then, a game comes along that can teach you more about the world than your average school classroom ever could.

Microsoft have done a pretty good job with WSL, and while it still has a lot to do - for the basics, it’s pretty reliable and sure as hell beats spinning up VM’s every time you need to run a quick command.

The good folk over at Offensive Security had a surprise for us over the weekend. As part of the latest 2023.1 release of Kali Linux, they’ve added additional tools aimed at the purple\blue teams - defensive tools!

It’s been eight years since Cities Skylines blessed our PC’s with a fantastic city building simulator and helped us forget about the troubles Sim City provided in 2013. The good folk at Paradox Interactive have released this teaser:

The Internet is still similar to the wild west in many ways. There’s a lot more law enforcement than there used to be, but it’s still mostly about prevention, rather than justice.

One thing I’ve always liked about Android is the freedom to choose the default SMS app. Not that I’ve used SMS in a while, but when various services still rely on it - it’s nice to have the SMS messages combined with an existing messaging app, rather than something entirely different.