Welcome to my Homepage

My home on the web

Hi, this is my ickle place on the web, where I'll put my thoughts and mussings about life and other sh!t. I work in the IT security field and love all things tech. Recently I have started to move away from the big (paid) software providers and started my journey with GNU/Linux and all things free software. So this will be a document of the steps I've taken and hopefully help someone else who is interested.

I've been an Apple Mac user for the last 15 plus years and as my MacBook Pro is coming to the end of its life (and I didnt want to spend upwards of two grand for a replacemnt), so I moved to an old Lenovo t460 (now a t480) that runs Linux extremely well. Everything I need can be done on this old laptop. Ive managed to get most the apps I used before.

In the last several years or so I got into VPS web services and now host my own domains, websites, email and have even set up my own VPN server. While I dont see me leaving Google totaly behind due to work/professional issues I am on a personal front, not reliant on them. I have even set up my own SearxNG Instance, so dont need Goole for searches.

Home

I lived in the Middle East for over 4 years and really liked the lifestyle... well I loved the weather... the sun shines practicly all year round and when it doesnt, the rain is a welcome change. Not at all like London where I moved from. I moved back to Blighty at the end of 2020 (just as the second lockdown kicked in) and lived in South Woodford, loved it there... it has a small vilage feel but still very cosmopolitan and only 40 mins on the tube into the city centre.

I recently moved to Surrey and now have a lovely house near Banstead. I just need to get a cat now to top off the middle age move:)

Gaming

I'm avid gamer with a PC, PS5 and Switch, However, I rarely use the Switch anymore after finishing the new Zelda. I originally moved away from PC gaming about 15 years ago and didn't have any real plans to go back due to the simplicity and power of modern day consoles. I started off with a second hand PS3 just because it was so cheap and was blown away by the open world games available and never looked back. 1080p 30fps was good enough for me, but now its 4k and 60fps all the way:)

The PS3 lead to a PS4 then a PS5, which is nicely setup in my living room, but a couple of years ago I saw a video of some gamers playing DCS, so decided to build a PC, something I used to do back in the 90s and wanted to see what the differences were... and there were a few :)

As for games. I'm a big fan of open-world and simulation games, with Elite Dangerous being a particular favorite. Recently, I've gotten into the Soulsborne series and DCS World, which reignited my interest in PC gaming. At the moment I'm still learning DCS and have just picked up an IR Headtracker device, which is a bit of a game change for DCS.

Linux

I got into to Linux after I bought a Raspberry Pi. I now have 7 of them (I have a problem...) all doing little jobs arround the house and I highly recomend them.

As with most people my desktop Linux journey started with Ubuntu. After a while distro-hopping I've eventually settled on Arch and have just moved away from Gnome and set up i3 windows manager

I dont even keep a Windows partition on my laptop anymore and apart from work and gaming I dont see me going back to Windows at all.