Miscellaneous

Introduction Google recently announced that it was getting rid of the legacy free tier ↗ for Google Apps/Workspace accounts, a service I’ve used for 10+ years. I don’t appreciate it when free tiers (of anything) get switched into paid tiers by holding your data ransom through inconvenience of migration, so I started looking at alternatives. I am heavily embedded in the Apple ecosystem, my phone, tablets, laptops, home automation system, everything really lives within the walled garden to some extent - for better or worse....

Context Hey… so it’s been a while since there was a post here (stares at last blog in 2019) - for a number of reasons, and you might have noticed a few changes around here if you’ve followed the blog for any length of time. Some context behind the large gap, and reasons for the changes: Working in Technical Marketing for a vendor means that a lot of the time you spend working and researching things that are essentially part of the “output” for your job, meaning that most of your time and effort is spent on building content that can be used internally and externally, and subsequently if there is a decision for “does this belong on my personal blog, or on the work blog?...

Over the last 9 months, a lot has happened in my life; I have a nice titanium plate in my shoulder now courtesy of a major car accident. I changed roles at Novosco ↗ from Infrastructure Engineer to Cloud Technologist - focusing more on R&D and emerging platforms, and I helped out Frank Denneman ↗ and Niels Hagoort ↗ in editing their best-selling vSphere 6.5 Host Deep Dive book ↗....

I’ve been putting off doing VCAP level exams for a long time, probably longer than I should have in hind-sight. But a month ago I took my brave pills and booked what would be my first VCAP level exam: VCIX6-NV ↗. So the date was set and I have been studying in pretty much all the free time I have over the last month - repeating HOLs over and over, standing up, breaking, fixing my home lab’s NSX environment, setting all kinds of stuff with API instead of the UI to try and get a grasp of everything this exam is supposed to encompass....

I am very passionate about my photography, usually I’ll go on a few trips a year just for that and this was one of those instances. I’ve decided I might as well start posting them up here so I have a nice centralised location I can give to people that want to see them. We visited quite a number of places, most prolific in my mind was DUGA-3 which is hands down the single largest free standing structure I’ve ever climbed at 160m, It’s very hard to get the scale of it in any of the pictures, but just know, the ladders were very rusty and large sections were missing as you climbed up, got to the top though, much to the dismay of our guide Igor, who, according to himself only ever went halfway up and that was more than enough!...

So after the last one met it’s fate fairly quickly due to a number of tuning problems I set about rebuilding the engine again, this is what happened: Why not follow @mylesagray on Twitter ↗ for more like this!

Spent a lot of my free time recently finishing up an edit I was doing for my climbing club ↗, for our trip to El Chorro, Andalucia, Spain in February. Shot it on 4x GoPro HD Hero 2 cameras over about a week, check it out. Why not follow @mylesagray on Twitter ↗ for more like this!

Video I shambled together for my university climbing club’s recent trip to Scotland. Why not follow @mylesagray on Twitter ↗ for more like this!

For those of you that don’t know, emoncms ↗ is a small cms that will accept inputs via GET requests for things like power meters, temp probes for measuring household power usage, PV panel, windmill etc power production levels. To achieve this you need to use git to download the newest version of emoncms (the new more modularised version): git clone git://github.com/emoncms/emoncms.git Next step is to set up a mysql db:...

Spent a good deal of my summer building the engine in my R53 Mini back up from scratch with the help from an American friend. Car now produces 293bhp and is good to rev up to 8.3-8.5K rpm, a full spec list can be found here ↗. Nice little time-lapse of the build: Why not follow @mylesagray on Twitter ↗ for more like this!