BenQuick.me – Things about stuff

Please, try the fish

I remember Windows 95 being released, it was an absolute revolution. There was a Start Menu, a Task Bar, it was 32 bit! At the time, I didn’t know what that meant, but it was more than 16 bit so it had to be better. Plug and Play was a mind-blowing idea – You could just install a component in to your PC and it would …… just work¹? You didn’t have to power the PC off, plug the hardware in, maybe set some jumpers, install some drivers, then maybe a reboot? You could just plug it in and it would work? What was this sorcery?

There was a web browser available? What even was the web?

There was a whole world of possibilities with Windows 95. It was truly game changing

Of course, there was a whole multimedia experience that was possible – I had Encarta ’95 where even the opening screen was exciting. And don’t get me started on Dangerous Creatures. With those two programs it felt like you had all of the worlds knowledge available to you! It was real information that people had researched. With pictures, videos, and sounds! I still remember the excitement of loading either of them (but mostly Dangerous Creatures). Wikipedia is incredibly impressive, but it’s never had that same level of excitement about it

I miss people understanding computers

I’ve recently been reading Shareware Heros – It’s an interesting book, even though it’s not what I might have expected. It focuses more on the business side of the shareware approach rather than the actual development of the software or the problems that needed to be solved. There were some very large numbers mentioned when discussing the Apogee Model and the income some of the titles released under that model bought in

I’ve not quite finished the book yet, but I wanted more discussion about how problems were solved when computer resources were so limited – A couple of Mhz of clockspeed, some Kb or Mb of RAM, and probably some 10’s of Mb of harddisk

Looking back, it’s insane to me how much performance people were able to push from the hardware that was available at the time. How much time did you spend on tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys to make sure you had enough resources available for your program to run as well as it could?

I appreciate this isn’t about shareware, but it’s the book that made me start thinking

Another year done, a brighter year

As the previous year, my energy bill was minimal in 2025. I didn’t keep any good records of the actual costs for 2025. Roughly speaking, my fixed costs were £272 in standing charges and I figure I’ve paid £255 in energy costs on top of that

My total net energy bill for the year was around £255 – £21.25/month (£43.93/month if you include the standing charges)

In 2022, my monthly energy direct debit was £200/month. In 2023 I increased it to £250/month. This remained at £250/month in 2024 (first full year with solar) as I wasn’t sure what impact the solar panels would have on costs. In 2025, I reduced the direct debit to £100/month. For 2026, I have reduced it again to £50/month. Considering prices always seem to rise I’m quite happy that I’ve been able to reduce my outgoings

3 brief graphs:

Hosting a static website on AWS S3 using Route 53 and Terraform

None of this is new. S3 has been around since 2006, Route 53 since 2010, and Terraform since 2016. This isn’t even the best way to do it. This is simply iteration 1 for getting a website accessible. There are many improvements to be made here

Starting with a basic index.html we need to be able to serve that to the world, there are a few things that are needed to make that happen

Infrared heating – Good, bad, or ugly?

A couple of years ago (yes, this has taken me a couple of years from idea to implementation) I was thinking of re-doing my bathroom and decided that I didn’t want a radiator on the wall anymore, so I started to investigate what other types of heating were available. There was under floor heating, in-wall heating, or infrared heating

All appeared to have their plus and minus points. My original intention was to eventually convert all the upstairs rooms to use whatever I decided to go with, and maybe even replace heating in the whole house. Idealy, I didn’t want to use the boiler (and therefore gas) as I didn’t want to rely on gas, and I can hear the boiler (even though it’s been replaced recently with a far quieter one) when it’s being used. The only noise I want in the house is noise I make (for) myself. TV, music, whatever. I don’t want a background hum of some device

I started looking at infrared heating. Everything I found was a ‘thing’ that you had to mount somewhere, losing precious wall or ceiling space – All the reading I did also stated that you shouldn’t have anything in front of the infrared heater, so that severly limits which walls are suitable to mount any heating to

Mounting something the ceiling seemed more viable, but all the heating options I saw were frankly ugly and intrusive. They were also set off the ceiling so they would be dust and condensation traps which didn’t sound like a great idea

After many fruitless searches, I finally came across a company called ASTECtherm who provide an infrared heating solution which you plaster in to the ceiling. I already had some great electricians from SolarOrb who had installed my solar panels and battery system. This solution seemed like a good option for me to try

First (calendar) year with solar

With 2024 well and truly over, that completes my first calendar year with solar panels. Was it worth it? Absolutely

Over the course of 2024, I generated 105% of the electricity I used. Not much more to say than that really!

This is pretty much what my bills have looked like for the past 5 years (2020 is estimated as I don’t have the information for the full year)

Bar chart showing annual electricity bills since 2020

2020 and 2021 show the bill reaching 3 bars high. 2022 and 2023 show the bill reaching 5 and 5.5 bars high respectivly. 2024 shows the bill reaching about 0.25 bars high

Some numbers across the year

	Grid import	Solar generated	Grid export	House usage
Best day (kWh)	0.05	30.08	22.99	5.2
Worst day (kWh)	24.53	0.34	0.05	17.3
Total (kWh)	2544.61	3862.08	2363.81	3671.2

My net grid usage was around 200kWh, previous years were anything from 3,300kWh to 3,600kWh

I don’t think there’s much more to say here. Get solar panels if you can! And also get a battery to store the energy which will allow you to buy off-peak to store for use during peak periods

As I mentioned previously, I don’t think a heat pump is for me. But, as I generated more electricity that I used I have decided to get some infrared heating installed. I’m just working through getting that set up and will see how it works out!

DNS and DHCP for the homelab

I keep threatening to set up a homelab. I want to keep it away from the devices that I already have on the network, and I want it to ‘just work’. That means I need a reliable DNS and DHCP setup.

Firstly I set up a new VLAN and allocated an IP address range to it. I’ve gone with VLAN 4 and 172.16.4.0/24. My Operating System of choice is FreeBSD with the latest supported release being 14.1, so I downloaded the 14.1 bootable ISO, mounted it in my virtual machine and began the install.

I didn’t do anything exciting during the install. Once the install had completed, I did a quick freebsd-update fetch followed by a freebsd-update install to get the system up to date, then it was time to go.

I looked in to what DHCP and DNS servers to install, and kept coming back to ISC BIND and ISC DHCP. They’re both tried and tested and simply work. I did look at PowerDNS, but I couldn’t get it to behave in the way I wanted.

Ooh, I got solar!

Back in November 2023, I got solar panels installed along with a ‘solar’ battery – I don’t like the term ‘solar battery’ as it’s not a thing. The battery isn’t solar, and doesn’t require solar. It’s literally a battery.

I’m UK based, so I used a solar calculator from the Energy Saving Trust to see if my roof would be viable for panels – I did see a roof around where I live that faced the same way as mine, but they only have panels on one side of their house. I wanted to see if I could have more panels installed.

It turned out that my roof is South-East and North-West facing, both are suitable for having solar panels installed on them. However, even though I specifically asked, most quotes I got didn’t accomodate for panels on the North-West side of the roof, which was frustrating. In fact, only two installers listened to what it was that I wanted.

Accessability no longer matters. Phew

The pandemic is, thankfully, over. We all need to return to our lives as they were pre-December 2019. At least I think that’s what various governments are telling us.

As are various vendors. Do you want to attend an event that they put on during the pandemic? Great! It’s in-person only once more.

Who needs accessabilty, right?

Can’t travel to an event? Sorry, pandemic’s over!

Can’t get childcare? Sorry, pandemic’s over!

Have hearing difficulties so need real-time captions? Sorry, pandemic’s over!

Can only dip in and out so need to be able to watch recorded sessions? Sorry, pandemic’s over!

It’s quite frustrating. Somewhat understandably, vendors were scrambling to be as inclusive as possible during the pandemic. They need to tell you what products they can sell you, so of course need to get that message out however they can. But now? Sorry pal, got to be there in person.

The difference in vendor demos

I’ve attended no end of vendor demos over the years, and some stick in your mind for different reasons – A NetApp demo at a University campus. This was a great demo with a good account team, but the use of the word ‘tetris’ does start to bug you after a while. A Packeteer demo on site where I worked, where the tech tried to tell us that their product could reduce the latency between Europe and North America. No amount of explaining that you simply cannot change physics like that would convince them otherwise

An unnamed vendor who, no matter how many times you re-phrased the question, were unable (or unwilling) to answer how their storage arrays replicated data 🚩