Some of you may have noticed the outage here a week or two back; the reconditioned Digital box (you know it’s old when the company that bought the company that made it doesn’t exist any more) that was running the site has been getting increasingly unreliable. The outage last night, then, was me finally breaking down and porting everything over to a new server, a Shuttle XPC. It’s about three times smaller than the old box, only about 8" × 8" × 12", and quieter, too. (Not like that matters to all of you out in webland, but it’s not your room it’s taking up space in.)

It’s a nice side effect of the stagnation (or should I say “maturation”) of the computer industry that manufacturers can finally start to compete on grounds other than speed and price — the premium for ‘mini’ was only about 10%, and well worth it. It’s not quite as cool as Lara’s G4 Cube, but for a PC, it’s not bad. And it’s cheap.

The new box should be more reliable. It’s also about ten times faster than the old box, which is probably three times faster than it really needs to be — but it was the slowest and cheapest I could get without spending four hours of my own time messing around with cables and screwdrivers, which really is not, in any way, as fun as it was when I was fourteen years old.

Anyway, while I was at it I also figured out how to hack MovableType’s database to make all the links on the site relative, which means that it’s no longer the case that the only place I can’t post from is home. So — not that this is necessarily a good thing — you may see updates a little more frequently in the future.