Weekly Digest

Life
Weather finally broke and while it’s been great to have a proper summer I loved having a bit of cooler, fresher and wetter weather again. One thing though – why couldn’t it have waited just one more day so I could have shot the blood moon. Bastard weather.

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Mission Impossible Fallout – best of the series and a cracking summer blockbuster. It’s a Tom Cruise vehicle but the supporting cast really do well to. Henry Cavill stood out not just cause he’s bloody huge but I can see him being the next big action star. Kudos to Laing Yang who really needs his own film to truly shine but biggest props to Christopher McQuarrie and the stunt team. The action was top notch and the set piece’s coupled with some great locations outdid the best of Bond.

No Mans Sky – Another great update adding multiplayer, better graphics, more missions….and much much more. I might have just bought this for the Xbox.

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Weekly Digest

Life
Impressed yet again with Apple support. Fixing my iPad screen which has a small brightness issue and couldn’t do enough to make sure I was satisfied with the fix.

Media
Darkest Hour – loved it. Oldman was really good.

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Moving Hosts

I’ve hosted my websites via DreamHost for years. Good price, excellent uptime and ok performance. Recently though I’d been starting to see the shared hosting plan I was on creak at the seams. My needs were pretty minimal but it looked like I would need to move to one of their VPS plans. It’s at this point all the podcast adverts rang in my head…so I tried Linode.

Linode’s front page says ‘hosting for developers’ which as Shak keeps saying isn’t me! However the plans looked appealing and I took advantage of an offer to try it for a month for free and so far it’s been really good.

Linode is a bit different to the hosting I’m used to. You pick a Linux distribution, tell Linode where in the world you want it deployed and boom – you have a Linux server that’s all yours. That means root access and ability to install whatever you like…but also means you are responsible for security and keeping the server updated.

Linode supports many distributions and also has an excellent set of tutorials and guides. Within a day I’d migrated a domain and WordPress website over to Linode from DreamHost. Performance was superb compared to what I was used to. I actually enjoyed controlling Apache directly, setting up redirects and getting to grips with installing security certificates.

Last weekend I migrated this blog. I’ve stuck with WordPress for now but starting to look at static site options so I’m more in control and rely less on plugins. Again the performance of WordPress on Linode is excellent and the website migration was pretty trivial. Next up is the podcast which will be a little more involved but hopefully not too bad.

If you are using shared hosting and thinking of moving to something more beefy then consider Linode. Requires more effort but being this in control of my sites is something I wish I’d done years ago.

Weekly Digest

Life
Great week off work. Needed the break and stayed away from checking mails which was good for the brain. Enjoyed the good weather – Scotland looks great in the sun, bugs and all. Also enjoyed the World Cup. Well played France, unlucky Croatia and something I didn’t expect to say…well done Russia. All the talk of violence turned out to be…all talk.

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Gave up and deleted some unwatched The Handmaid’s Tale. Plodding and miserable – there’s enough of that in real life without spending hours watching a drama which looks to have no hope.

Finally watched Ready Player One. While some of it was good, I found so much to dislike. The race for the first key was tiresome, the relationship between Art3mis and Parzival was rushed, there was some changes to the plot which didn’t work for me and the ending was just too saccharin sweet…but it’s Spielberg so probably no surprise. Just read the book and skip the movie. Or watch this homage from Gunship.

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Weekly Digest

Life
Scorchio week, well it was for Glasgow. I like nice weather but it’s a bit too hot for me. Also a good week at work with some positive news after a lot of hard graft…although you wouldn’t know it looking at the loons on Twitter. Just shows you should ignore much of the opinions on there or at least question if they are truthful and from a reliable source.

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The World Cup is eating up much of my time…and it’s been a cracker.

Reporting Trump’s First Year – loved this. First episode showed behind the scenes at the New York Times.

The Handmaids Tale – well made but it’s just so fucking grim. If it doesn’t reveal it’s hand soon I’m bailing.

Westworld – season 2 finale answered some questions but also posed quite a few more. Loved it.

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