Lossless conversion from JPG to JXL

Converting JPEG to JPEG XL

Introduction I’ve been a keen photographer for a number of years. Not professionally, of course. I mainly just enjoy taking holiday snaps and the odd luxury vehicle at car shows and the like. As you might imagine, being a digital hoarder has resulted in me having many thousands of photos stored on my various computer … Read more

Deploying Windows Server 2022 on Proxmox

Proxmox Server 2022

Introduction Although Microsoft released Windows Server 2022 way back in the latter half of 2021, I still hadn’t tried it out until last week. The truth is, I’d not had a need to deploy any new Windows Server instances over the past year and I didn’t want the hassle of upgrading my older Windows Server … Read more

How to stop your hard disk drive from running constantly

Hard Drive Running

Introduction Every once in a while, I’ll receive a message or comment from someone who’s accidentally stumbled upon this blog. They’re not digital hoarders, and sometimes not even technically minded. They’ve usually been searching for a solution to a technical problem they’re having and by some fluke, they’ve found my blog and decided I sound … Read more

Creating a Debian VM on Oracle Cloud Free Tier

Debian on Oracle

Introduction A few months ago, I was reading an article that mentioned Oracle were offering some of their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services for free. The so-called “Free Tier” provides enough resources to be able to run 2 AMD virtual machines (VMs) 24/7, and includes 200GB of free cloud storage too. Update: Oracle have recently … Read more

Yandex Disk Cloud Storage FAQ

Yandex Cloud

For the past few weeks, I’ve been using Yandex Disk, alongside more well-known cloud storage providers such as Google Drive and Mega. I was drawn to Yandex Disk by its competitive pricing and performance and was keen to test it firsthand. I was curious to see how it compared to its rivals and whether or … Read more

Choosing a RAID level for redundancy over performance

RAID Redundancy vs Performance

Introduction When configuring a new storage setup, system administrators around the globe face the same dilemma: which RAID level to choose. Like with most things in life, it’s a compromise, a trade-off if you will. We need to balance performance and redundancy, keeping in mind that losing raw capacity will result in increased costs. Digital … Read more

Hard drive too hot? – Causes and solutions

HDD Too Hot

If you’ve ever touched a hard drive (either internal or external) after it’s been running for some time, you’ve probably noticed that it’s quite warm. Being a mechanical component, we would expect a hard drive to generate some heat during normal operation. Like most computer components, however, the hard drive is susceptible to damage should … Read more