djdarren

Bold of you to assume they have any certs.

Of the two of them, one used to work for IBM, but that was some years ago, so his up to date knowledge is barebones at best. His world is Windows. Give him XP or 7 and he’d be well away I imagine. The other lad is mostly about the infrastructure and networking, but again, has only ever used Windows. So that’s their comfort zone. And then there’s the boss’s son who administrates things remotely, rarely answers any emails in a satisfactory way, and refuses to give admin access away, even to the other two.

To be fair, the computer policies here were non existent until a few months ago, when landing a huge contract meant having to actually comply with cybersecurity requirements. So until that point I used first my old Mac mini, because I was more at home with macOS than Windows, then a tiny Dell Optiplex that I put Kubuntu on. No one gave a shit and that suited me just fine. In fact, I was given to understand that I’d be left alone when all the new PCs with Win11 were rolled out, largely because, until that point, mine was the only one running actual up-to-date software, while everyone else was on Win10.

But here we now are. And so it goes.

Stay strong.

Bring out the GIMP.

Yep. Most of the past couple of months have been spent poking and prodding at the boundaries to see what I can get away with, and I can install a bunch of stuff via winget.

I’ve even taught myself how to jump to my server at home using SSH via my VPS so I can access stuff even without being allowed Tailscale.

In a way it’s quite fun. A small way.

I wish I could, but I don’t have the admin rights necessary to activate it.

Fortunately we’re a reasonably small firm, so I may be able to make an argument for it. And in the meantime, I have a dashboard server running Debian onto which I have also installed a bunch of useful tools that I can either get to with my browser, or SSH into.

I have to use Windows at work. It’s genuinely horrifying.

Every time I open Word - and I mean EVERY. TIME. - I have to dismiss a box inviting me to ask Copilot to do my work for me.

I KNOW that I could bung Debian on that PC and wring SO MUCH MORE performance out of it, but noooooo, I’ve got to use SlopOS, because our IT guys don’t know the first damn thing about Linux.

It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.

I started doing a radio show / podcast on an online station a couple of years ago. To start with I just put it on their site and Mixcloud and that was that.

But 18 months ago I had to part ways with them, so figured I’d probably just carry on doing it and putting it on Mixcloud. But I needed somewhere to stream live, so I had to put together a website.

Long story short; yeah, I now have my own website, with Owncast and Icecast subdomains and my show is available as a podcast that has an RSS feed.

As an added bonus, seeing as I already have a VPS, I’ve created a bunch of subdomains that I use to redirect some services that are hosted on my home server.

It’s fun.