Monday, 16th October, 2023

I’ve been running tinylytics on all my sites for a few weeks and it is interesting to look at. I don’t pay so they’re very basic, i.e. just visitor numbers, but that’s fine. Some days on this blog I get 5 visits, but there’s a consistent one visitor (can’t tell if the same person or not) every day. So I should try and maintain the daily nature of this site. October seems to have been quite a poor month for writing, 6 entries (including this one) and we’re half way through the month.

My new radio blog is doing quite well, up to 15 views per day. Peaks coincide with new blog posts and it probably helps it’s part of blogs.radio RSS site. Also likely that it’ll get views when I’m on the radio and talking with people (vs. using digital modes) as most people will look me up on qrz.com and I have the link there. Again, all the more reason to write stuff and add to it.

Surprising of all to me is that my main site is getting quite a few posts. I wonder if that’s just because it’s the oldest and maybe shows up more, or as I’ve been using my email with the same domain more that people are curious and go look. No doubt a combination of everything.

Today I’ve been debating a mac mini, the edu promo of a free £100 apple gift card ends this week, so if I’m doing it I should do it now. I even got right to the final stages of checkout for ordering one to collect today from the local Apple store. I hesitated and started reading reviews. The summary of which is, you should upgrade to the 512 GB model as the 256 GB SSD in the base one is really (relatively speaking) slow. That puts me at £739 vs. £539. Several reviews stated that for most people, they’ll never notice the issue, and I’d probably fall into that most people category. It’s also only noticeable when you run out of RAM and it starts swapping. I’m not going to be doing a lot of intensive work on it, usually I’ll just have too many browser tabs open but probably not a big deal, I can close those. So really the base model is probably fine…

I know I want to buy it as I like buying tech things…and macs are nice and macos is nice. I have iPhone and iPad and iCloud subscription already so why not make use of it with a mac. I sort of want to use Tinderbox (even though I probably won’t), and radio software like MacDoppler looks nice. I find that some mac software, whilst not free, is often high quality and a lot better than other things out there. It would be nice to use Photos.app for looking after my pictures. But it’s just going to be an expensive toy that I’ll rarely use.

If for some reason I lost all my computers, I often think I’d just get an iMac and have nothing else (well maybe a linux server) but to clear the desk of clutter.

But I still hesitate on the mini. I don’t need it, would I not rather run linux, it’s still quite expensive (vs. buying a used desktop for a linux box). I can wait. I’ll miss the edu promo, but they’ll probably be more of them in the future.