Tech Upgrades across the board

I have made a number of tech upgrades in the last month or so.

• I happened to wander into a Apple store the day the new MacBook Pro 16″ launched…and walked home with one. I ended up getting far more machine than I need (the upgraded standard model with the core i9, 16 GB of Ram and a TB SSD), but it replaced a 2008 Core 2 Duo that I had been using for 10+ years. If this one matches the service of the one it replaced I think I will get my money’s worth.
• I moved this blog from GoDaddy to Amazon. This had been in the back of my mind for a while, but my auto billing for hosting failed since I had neglected to update the CC I had on file, so it prompted me to make the switch over the long Thanksgiving day weekend. Part of the reason I still maintain this blog is to give me an excuse to play around with tech and I really don’t have much recent “cloud” experience hence the move to AWS. I was paying about $160 a year for basic hosting at GoDaddy. My initial setup on AWS is with Route 53 for domain management and EC2 for hosting. I will see what my costs look like and may switch to Lightsail if that looks like a more cost effective option that will still let me learn some things.
• I upgraded my home “server” from a 10+ year old repurposed Athlon II desktop machine running Ubuntu with a random assortment of disks to a purpose built FreeNAS system with 4x6TB WD Red NAS Drives in a RaidZ2 config giving me a total of ~11TB of redundant storage running in a 12 bay case that leaves some room for expansion in the future. I am still getting this up and running, but the plans are to move all current duties from my old server to this one: PLEX, Time Machine backup for the family’s Macs, Network share, Unifi Controller and ZoneMinder for the security cameras in the barn. Then I’ll get to playing around with other jails and plugins.