Alex Kretzschmar

Wide reaching vistas are the name of the game around these parts. Lots of tumbleweed and horizons that never seem to arrive. God I love the West.

As we stepped once again out of the Raleigh bubble whilst ordering dinner we were quizzed "you folks aren' from round here are ya?". Truly NC is a different place to the Triangle.

I'd liken Xfce to the VW Golf in some ways. Years of refinement is the only way to achieve the level of polish that both of these products have. No monstrous rethinks of how we use the desktops here. And that, is a good - no great - thing.

The trouble with any 'smart' device such as a Nest thermostat or Hue light bulb is that they require an internet connection and a company to be in business running a server that they connect to. If the product you just bought requires a cloud service to be available to function, you don't own it.

That means I need a lot of threads and a lot of memory and a lot of storage.

That new hard drive. Should you trust it? Maybe. Edit: This article was originally published on https://blog.linuxserver.io. Over the last 10 years that I've been messing around with Linux servers (hence the name of the site by the way there's been one thing above all else that's always required special care - hard drives. They are mechanical beasts just waiting to eat your data at any time. Entire businesses are built around their inherent (un)reliability. Backblaze make a point every quarter

Denver is a proper crossroads sort of town. While other places we have been all had their own distinct identities Denver didn't seem to. Most of the people who served us during our stay were from elsewhere in the States and the food options on offer here range from Southern Fried fare to Sushi to Italian - in other words an eclectic mix of a little bit of everything. I must confess to not taking the image above, it is originally from this article. We did take a stroll through the park pictured

The worst hail storm in 20 years hit Colorado Springs bringing with it baseball sized hail. The storm hit around 1230am and was absolutely fantastic to watch but our hire car didn't agree. We awoke the following morning to sunny, clear blue skies as if nothing had happened except for the fact that all the cars in the lot, including ours, were peppered with large dents. Luckily no glazing was broken and even more luckily we bought the damage waiver so I'm relatively confident we won't get absol

I feel like I've waited my whole life to see the Colorado Rockies. We came oh so close last year in Moab but our itinerary took us a different way. Indeed, this trip was originally a 2 week trip to Colorado only - not a mammoth road trip. To say I have been looking forward to this sector of the trip then, would be an understatement. Colorado Springs tops many 'best places to live' charts presumably due to a low cost of housing and proximity to the large metropolis of Denver. The centre of the

Nestled in amongst the Blue Ridge Mountains in the West of North Carolina is Asheville. This is a vibrant mountain town with a huge array of breweries, restaurants and a fantastic array of options to choose from for hikes, scenery and other attractions. We were both struck by how little this place felt like America, in the best way possible. By now we know the drill of a new town. It's a grid. There's a long, wide boulevard with businesses spreading out their signs along it like a leaf reachin

Leaving DC behind we predictably did so in the lashing rain early Sunday morning. We headed along I-66 toward the (supposedly) beautiful Skyline Drive overlooking the Shenandoah valley. Alas, the weather was absolutely terrible and we opted to skip Skyline Drive and head for the northern entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway instead. Our detour took us through Madison, VA. The area was popular with German settlers over the years and we partook of some thoroughly delicious food at The Bavarian

The home of freedom, Washington DC feels like a real city. Not just that but a capital city. The drivers here are just as impatient as you'd imagine, the road system just as complex and buildings just as tall, stout and imposing. Driving the 4 hours or so from Raleigh we crossed an invisible, but very real, North / South divide. Gone were the Bojangles, Popeyes and other assorted Southern food outlets replaced by more traditional Pizza and Coffee ones. Gone too were the super polite and friend