Welcome

Going Forward

I'm currently looking at coordinating the material that is spread across a number of sites. I have 20+ years of content across 4 main sites each with it's own target area of interest. The main sites are Model Engineers Digital Workshop, Rainbow Digital Media and the L.S.Caine Electronic Services site. While this site was intended as a bolt hole that avoided my having to use any of the 'cloud services' that think they are the best way to protect my historic material. While the business activities have been run down, the material is still of use to long time clients and so needs to remain where it is (or at least redirected if appropriate). The history of all three business areas does need to be brought up to date and I am working on a few areas that will allow me to clear out the remaining stock such as 'DivisionMaster' and the 'Taig Mill parts'. Clearing out the remaining stock from MEDW is something on my todo list now that all of kit has been sorted out following moves through a number of storage locations.

While today none of the many hundreds of sites that ran the Client Management Systems still exist, a few are still using historic data and are still supported. The history of those developments is on the LSCES site along with my involvement in other projects that supported that in the past and this needs to be tidied up just to keep the record straight. A similar situation exists with the web hosting operation which James originally took on back in 2012. While James is no longer with us, his involvement is part of the history of Rainbow Digital Media. A couple of the sites he took over are still active today, while others have moved to their own hosting with our help, but many of the original sites were simply a con created by the sellers of the original hosting operations.

In addition to the business sites, I have been building a family tree for many years and the web based version of that needs to be restored. It uses a framework called phpgedview, which has had a chequered history, but while my own port of that needs some work, it does a very nice job of displaying GEDCOM material. I hope to have this back up and working again in the next few months.

Currently my daily activities are logged across a number of locally hosted blogs.

1. MEDW Blogs - Includes projects supported by kit that Model Engineers Digital Workshop has provided in the past
2. LSCES Blogs - The blogs here have little but historic material and so I'll move them to new ones here.
3. RDM Blogs - This has very little content and will be replaced with a blog here
4. Personal Blogs - The current set of material which will be extended over time.

In addition to multiple blogs, the TODO lists are also a bit spread around. I will keep two separate strings shared between here and the project tracking on MEDW and I think I have already phased out other list pages.

A little bit of History

When I first set up this domain the plan was to expose the way that the cooperative nature of 'the cloud' was being destroyed by the increasing isolation of the separate 'cloud computing' islands run by competing commercial organisations. There is a lot of discussion on passing information 'to the Chinese' but that misses the point that we do not know just where all this information is stored. I've been working with the CDDB data to sort out my music collection, and have used this new AI Chat technology to produce Summary of CDDB history which while better than I would have written myself, is not a 'good' summary. It's factually correct, but until I asked about some of the open source options they had not been mentioned initially. In essence it shows the commercial bias that even dumb search engines display.

When asked the question "Where are the computers you run on based?" I got a vanilla "I don't have personal experiences, a physical location, or a specific set of computers that I run on. I am a text-based AI model that operates within a cloud-based infrastructure provided by my developers. This infrastructure is designed to handle user interactions efficiently and securely. The servers and data centres that support my operations are distributed globally to ensure reliability, scalability, and low-latency responses." Which is actually quite accurate, but also misses the point? Today as I got up I did my daily medical checks, blood pressure, pulse, weight and so on, and these measurements were pushed to my mobile phone. Both Google and Samsung keep complaining that I have not 'backed up this data', but their applications do NOT provide a private means of downloading that data, it has to be uploaded to their 'clouds'. That the information needs archiving is correct, but that should be direct to my Doctor's surgery and remain on hardware housed in the UK! I have some information in the NHS app, but it's quite obvious that different parts of the NHS are working with different 'clouds' which do not talk to one another? Some pieces of information have now been updated, but as I understand this has to be done manually between systems. Just as I have to manually copy key measurements into other apps on the phone. Today nothing just works!

So I will sit on my own little island and try and keep the draw-gate up on others scraping my personal data. Not that I am doing very well here since the stats report lists some 20 crawlers reading what is posted here. That some of these are intent on hacking the site and are trying to find things like WordPress and other files that may be compromised is just what we have to live with today. It is about time IP-v6 was the default and every address used actually identified to an individual. Anonymity has a place, but not when they are indulging in activity that should be blocked by the 'cloud' as part of it's basic security systems. Just who has created emails should be readily identified by automatically tagging those messages with the origin IP address, and if this is missing then an email can't be forwarded at all. The volume of traffic hitting my own email server which are pure crap is irritating and addressed to non-existent email addresses on my domains. I just throw that traffic away, but I should be able to just bounce it back to the real originating server!