Back in 2020 when I bought RetroTech.io, I had a vision to use it to spread my love of old technology, and examine what we've lost in the course of "progress" over the past 30 or so years.
Unfortunately, after many iterations of this site, we still want to eventually do that, but it's time for a fresh start.
In my full-time job I am an IT Director for a software company. I live, eat, sleep, breathe tech- I have for the better part of 40 years now. The magic, the allure, and in spite of the fucked up world we live in, the hope, that modern technology has shown us is nothing short of breathtaking... it is as if seeing God for the first time. BUT, back on point, when I started this site, I had the idea of self-hosting the entire stack. Web, email, all of my projects, everything. And for close to 5 years, I have. Meticulously maintaining my own personal stack, sitting in the 42U rack behind me in my basement. The heavy metal propping up not only my home network, but RetroTech.io, has seen some hours. AND some traffic. But given the current trend of almost making it punitive to selfhost (even for companies), the financial costs associated, but more importantly the hours spent every weekend patching and maintaining, reviewing logs, updating firewall blocklists, fending off DDoS attacks by fucking cocksucker (and not the good kind) ChatGPT bots is...exhausting. Especially when I end up doing that as my full-time job. I'm PAID to do this for my company, I'm not paid to do it here at home. Even if I were, it gets old.
With that said, you'll likely notice that "hey, this asshole just stood up a Google Sites page" and... yeah. I did. How very hypocritical of me to profess my undying love of the technology we used to have by jumping to a platform responsible for killing not only most of the tech but the use cases and workflows associated with it. I'll wear that accusation as a badge of honor at this point. After yet another issue overnight that resulted from a combination of both an power outage AND an ISP outage, it didn't fucking mattery how much I pay for my internet connection or how many UPS batteries stacked with days of runtime I had- I woke up to dead domains across the board. And I'm sick of it.
So, I've moved our email to gSuite (or Google Workspace, or Google Apps for Business, or what are we calling ourselves this week?), I'm moving the site into Google Sites (as you can see), and I'm going to be migrating all of my random VMs to Google Cloud projects. Fuck, maybe I'll even dust off some books and jump back into trying my hand at Android apps again. Because why not make an impulsive decision based solely on emotion and go whole-hog in the process, right? That's...that's currently making the world a better place- doubling down on bad decisions before the chickens even come home to roost. Only difference is I EAT TACOs. I won't be chickening out. I need something that's more "set-it-and-forget-it" so I can spend the very few spare hours I have writing GOOD content, or at least content, I'll let you judge the quality.
So with that, I'm abandoning the task of moving any historical posts over, we're going to start fresh, and as soon as I figure out the best way to add posts to this site we'll get things kicked off. The first will cover more on this migration, and how, as an industry, we got here- that is, just throwing up our arms and surrendering to the current cadre of monopolistic fucktards running around California doing blood swaps with Narwhals inside of a black magic circle. Or whatever. So check back soon. As always, this site will remain ad-free, my gift to the world for allowing me to degrade your mental wellbeing just a tad.