Category Archives: General

The end of another year.

So another year is coming to a close, and what a year it has been. It feels as if it’s gone all so quick, but looking back, what I’ve done this year has been crazy.

I’ve not been away on a proper holiday at all, but the number of projects I’ve worked on and started out on properly has been great. My Freelance IT company: Frantik Freelance IT Support/Web Technologies has done pretty well considering I’ve squeezed it inbetween running Death Cap Records and my day job, and hope to continue successfully with that next year.

I’ve worked a great festival voluntarily as artist welfare person and look forward to working on it again 🙂 You should all check out Rythms of The World in Hitchin – great stuff!

During Autumn I came to work and manage Online Promotions for Club 85 in Hitchin (Facebook/Twitter/general web stuff) and have now become a permanent guest of the Club – My heart does lie there, and I honestly couldn’t have asked for anything better. When I felt I had no one else to speak to I could always find a friendly face there. Thanks Bob, I really do owe you one!

My Distro Label, Death Cap Records continues to grow and I’m using the power that is Twitter to make loads of great connections, and I’m going to work my ass off getting stuff out to the Press – this will be the next big step. (If anyone is reading this, who happens to be in Music Press, and/or PR get in touch?!)

I’ve put the winter blues aside, given up on people I once classed as ‘friends’ and aim to continue with what I do best and hope to meet safe people on the way.

I wish you all a Happy Christmas, with lots of good cheer (and Beer, but not too much) and a very Happy New Year – all the best for 2010!

\M/

Toby

FreeNAS: The ‘Free’ network storage solution!

In an attempt to save money, and my ability to ‘acquire’ an old PC, I was recommended a piece of software called FreeNAS. I currently have some extra HDD’s in my PowerMac G5 which I share over the network using SharePoints. This works very well and I’ve set up a couple of AppleScript scripts which I’ve saved as apps, to mount these shares. Work’s very well all in all, and hasn’t failed me yet.

What would make more sense is if it wasn’t a G5 which consumes lots of power, and was something small and quiet that I could pick up from work (old PC being chucked out).

I therefore ended up with a 2.8Ghz P4 machine with a gig of RAM which I will soon be kitting out with a 500Gb drive or 1Tb drive (internal) to use as a storage device. I have now got FreeNAS installed on a USB stick (very quick and easy, had it set up in about 1hr) and boots in no time.

What’s nice about FreeNAS is that it doesn’t have a GUI so there’s nothing to load. It has a Web interface instead, although you can also set the IP address and what not from the device itself. But overall it’s great, I can power it on and off as a headless unit, and can get some nifty logs as well and status graphs from the web interface.

All in all, this will probably have saved me over £100!

You can’t write in English; but you’re still a human.

This is an interesting thought I had the other day, consisting of many many incidences of coming across people (yes, normal people) not being able to write or speak English yet they grace our streets and mix with us. Yo tlk liiiike dis ennit bruv and shIT &&& need to put unnecessary symbols in your writing. (I mean no offense, but your shortening of your words actually increases the length of the phrase you are writing.)

I began to think, who is to blame? Which part of society has let them down. Should their parents be blamed for not helping them, or supporting them through their education, or should their families be blamed for being a bad influence? Should the Government be blamed for not doing enough to help?

The fact is, in my opinion, that these are normal human beings. They are scrutinised for their behaviour, but what are you doing to help them?

Help them along, don’t treat them like aliens, they deserve to be here as much as you, you ignorant prick! Of course, I’m not suggesting them acting or behaving this way is a good thing – in fact I am saying quite the opposite, that it is quite unfortunate that they had to turn out this way. Listen to some metal, it might help!