Tech pages

The blog contains most of the interesting content of a technical nature but from time to time, if something is important, or if I write a guide for some reason, I’ll add it to this section sot hat it’s more easily available. However that doesn’t happen regularly. 

History

I was given my first computer as a Christmas present by my parents in 1993. It was an AST 486 running Dos 6. I had the Hal 4.7 screen reader, Word perfect 5.1, about eight MB of games which for that time was just huge, an Epson LX100 Dot-matrix printer, a 128MB hard disk and 4MB of ram later upgraded to 8MB. I later upgraded this to Dos 6.2 then put a 1 speed CD rom drive and aSound blaster 16 sound card into it. Little did I know that it contained one of the first available text to speech synthesizers. When Windows 95 came out and the Jaws screen reader began to provide access to it I installed it and really pushed this monster of a PC to its limits. It had so little disk space that I had to delete the midi files that came with Windows 95 to get Office 97 to fit. Still, that trusty 486 lasted me years before finally giving up the ghost around July of 2000. Since then, I’ve owned a Dell D600, a Toshiba satellite, A Dell XPS600, an Acer Travel mate T130 and about eight or nine self built desktops. My current desktop is now a self built machine with 32GB of RAM, two 8 core Xeon processors, 1 SSD raid array in RAID 10 giving 512GB of usable storage, two 2TB hard disks in RAID1, two sound cards, one onboard and one sound blaster XFI, two 1GB network interfaces, and more little ports slots and coffee cup holders than you could shake a stick at.

Old Setup as of 2010

New setup 2020

Over the years I’ve been interested in a lot of different technology related topics. Back in the Dos days, I loved creating bat and BAS files that made things easier for people who didn’t like typing in full commands. Making Bas files was always interesting as it was always so easy to make the PC speaker play what ever tune you wanted. When Windows 95 came out, I have to admit I missed the Dos days however after a while I began to really recognise the power of this new system. I began to enjoy messing with media playback and learning about building and destroying systems. I made quite a few mistakes that taught me more than any college course or book ever has. Messing with the policy editor was always fun. Removing menu items and locking a machine down was fascinating! From Windows 95 on, I became very interested in Web development thanks to a friend who unknowingly teased me toward it. During Windows 98, I continued to want to learn as much as I could. I became fascinated with P2P networking and even set up a basic one at home.

Sorry. I’ve decided that going into my technical history is just way too complicated. Basically, I’ve explored a lot. Anything that interested me I’ve learned about. From web development, networking, security, domain administration, backup administration, assistive technology, music editing, Linux, mobile technologies, Raspberry Pi’s, Arduino’s, GPS and even photography. I’ve covered a lot but I’ve still not scratched the surface.

On this page, you will find audio and text relating to topics that are interesting me from time to time. It should give you some kind of idea as to what keeps me occupied.

Documentation

This section contains documentation that I’ve written. If there is anything you’d like to see here please get in contact with me.

• Linux server system stats at a glance.
• Backing up to a remote Linux server using SCP and checking your results
• Using RSA or DSA for SSH authentication in Linux
• Backing up a Drupal site.
• Quick tip for users of PuTTY. Including useful accessibility work arounds.
• iTunes documentation for users of screen readers.