September 2022 Another month, and not enough music listened to. However, it also marked the return of gig attendance, with Grumpy Metal Girl and myself attending a gig together for the first time in nearly 3 years. Was a strange sensation to be sure, but also a welcome one, and hopefully the first of many more! Blind Guardian - The God Machine I’ve been a massive BG fan since the Imaginations… days, so hearing that the new album was going to be a more stripped back affair brought happy tinglings to this Grumpy Metal Guy.

I had a conversation with a colleague at $COMPANY recently. We catch up every now and again to discuss Life, The Universe, and Sometimes Work Things1. He knows I’m a bit of a Rust fan-boy, so if I bring it up in conversation, he tends to be less fan-boyish and more rational in his approach to thinking about it. This is a Good Thing! We need people to make unbiased judgments on new technologies, ideally with the help of a number of years experience in other languages or domains to shape their thoughts.

Quite some time ago1, I set up my very first home server. Over the years, it’s become more and more central to our day-to-day technical needs, including (but not limited to!) photo backups from all our various devices, syncing files from desktops to the server for archival purposes, documentation management, photo album displays, and most importantly, backing up important files to an off-site location. With all of this activity, I’ve been running more and more nightly jobs.

Prologue In a time, when dinosaurs walked the earth… A young man, known simply as Grumpy, stumbles across something in his home town called a “record store”. In it, many large flat packages are displayed, colourful pictures adorning the front facing card. Enticed by the imagery and the strange sounds coming from boxes mounted to the walls, Grumpy saves his money and begins buying these round black discs, often produced by new and upcoming groups of bards, some local, some from over the waves.

For a long time, I’ve used Damon Lynch1’s excellent Rapid Photo Downloader (RPD) to manage the photos and videos that are part of the ever-expanding Grumpy Metal Photography collection. Like most people with a mobile communications device, we tend to take photos of many things when out and about2. And like most people, when we want to share the best shots of the day to friends and family (the ones that don’t use social media - hi Grumpy Metal Mum!