Category: Housekeeping

We bought our current house in April/May 2023. It's been a slow slog since then: solar panels, new roof on the conservatory, new flooring throughout. One room remains to be tackled downstairs (upstairs gets dealt with next March!): the music listening room, otherwise known as the Holy of Holies, my Utopia, and Sanctuary!!

This week the plasterer was due, and then cancelled, and is now due next week (typical Lincolnshire, really). Which meant the listening equipment was removed from the room, then moved back, though not necessarily to the same places from whence they had come 🙂 Hopefully, next week (sometime) will be the charm... [...] 

I get multiple alerts every day about people trying to sign in to this website using names such as 'zaintaylor' or 'bpgenius'. I assume almost all such log-in attempts are bogus, bot-driven attempts to attack this site, but it occurs to me that there may be a handful of people trying legitimately to log in to this website using (for example) their wordpress.com user credentials. If so: please don't bother, since no-one can log into this website, except me. Attempting to do so will net you an instant 2-month long ban for your IP address.

If you are attempting to leave a comment, you don't need to log in to do so: just supply a name and an email address at the time of leaving a comment and, assuming you pass moderation, your comment will appear in due course. Once you've had one comment appear, subsequent ones should not need to go through the moderation process. [...] 

I find myself in a bit of a pickle of my own devising!

Back at the start of the year, I acquired a nice, new server and stuck TrueNAS on it (an 'appliance variant' of FreeBSD, run through a web interface). I then migrated this website off a Linux server I've used since 2014 or thereabouts and installed it into a FreeBSD 'jail' running on that machine (FreeBSD jails being that operating system's equivalent of KVM on Linux or Hyper-V on Windows: the OS's 'native', built-in and free virtualisation technology. As can be told from the fact that you're reading these words now, it's pretty obvious that everything converted across nicely and has been running well ever since. So, what's the issue? [...] 

The Other Half has long berated me for not selling my software, or otherwise attempting to monetise this site. I have long resisted doing so -but as buying new music or new computers to test and develop things on is getting expensive, I've finally relented, in a modest way: I've just opened an account at 'buy me a coffee', a trustworthy site that takes donations from grateful members of the public and sees them on their way to creators. I've labelled my account as 'buy me a music score', as that's what I'll probably end up doing with any amounts of cash I get from it, though a newer desktop PC is on the wishlist, too!

There's zero obligation and I'm not going to promote it heavily, but if you value anything I've produced here and can spare a fiver or so, I'd be grateful (and it might just keep the Other Half quiet, too!). Check it out at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/absolutelybaching [...] 

Well, it took a couple of days longer than anticipated... and my new "server room" is currently (and temporarily!) the laundry, but if you're reading this, you'll have worked out that I am indeed back on line and things are working OK.

In ten or so days' time, electricians are supposed to be turning up to electrify the loft space. I have no idea how long that will take. Once it's done, the server will be taken offline for as brief a period as I can manage, allowing it to be hauled into its final, permanent location in the loft. That will be fun: the new loft lacks dedicated loft stairs, so it will be a matter of balancing precariously at the top of a stepladder whilst holding on with one hand and balancing a very heavy server in the other. Fun times ahead, then! [...] 

This is by way of advanced notice that this website will be going offline between April 27th 2023 and May 9th 2023 (at least!).

The new house has been purchased and my existing Internet connection will be terminated on April 27th. [...]