I can’t remember exactly when a Raspberry Pi first appeared on my radar, though I do remember thinking it was a wonderfully ridiculous idea. Here was a complete computer, roughly the size of a packet of cigarettes, costing very little money and apparently capable of doing almost anything provided you were prepared to spend long enough persuading it. Naturally, I…
How layered security changed the way I used the internet. In Breaking the Feed I rather casually skipped over what happened during the two years I spent away from Facebook. Gmail gave way to Proton Mail, Chrome disappeared in favour of Brave, Google Search was replaced by DuckDuckGo and somewhere along the way I started learning about VPNs, DNS, browser…
How social media fatigue sent me down the privacy rabbit hole There was a point during the pandemic when I began to realise that my relationship with the internet had become rather unhealthy. That probably sounds a little dramatic now, but at the time it felt entirely normal. Facebook in particular had been part of everyday life for years. I…
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single byte During the pandemic, like many others, I found myself working from home and spending a lot more time alone. It was a strange period. Anxiety was running high, social media often seemed to be bringing out the worst in people and I found myself increasingly questioning the way I…
The Dawn of Elysium album “The Mandela Effect” has been a labour of love for quite a few years now, the sort of time it takes a lot of bands to fully write and record multiple albums. The reasons for this were many and varied. The seeds of the project were sown around about the release of our previous album…
Earlier this year I decided to create my own little piece of the internet. Outpost 10 began as somewhere to write about the things that interest me, revisit some old stories and generally make a home for bits of my life that I felt were worth preserving. I had kept a blog before but looking back, some of its tone…
How we stopped leaving our stage sound to chance Part II of my Welcome to the Machine series describes the evolution of our band’s monitoring system, from unpredictable noise to repeatable individual mixes. In the world of live music, certainly at the level of gigs we are involved with, few things are quite as unpredictable and changeable as on stage…
How our backing track rig evolved from simple drums playback into part of the live show In Part I of my Welcome to the Machine series, I describe the role and importance of the backing track within our band and how it has evolved. Plenty of bands (in fact more bands than you might think) use backing tracks, drum machines,…
How technology became part of the way I make, record and perform music Ever since I was a kid, I have been obsessed with gadgets and technology. My dad was an engineer and I was surrounded by electronics from a very early age. I was also obsessed with music from an early age, again thanks to my dad, so I…
We are extremely proud to present to you “First Light” – the first single from our forthcoming album “The Mandela Effect” Originally written back in 2020, it has been reworked and presented here afresh from the ground up Performed and reinterpreted by the current line-up, featuring the vocal talents of Kirsty Frances and spoken word by Phil Ragnar Audio produced…
The whole thing began very early one morning. We’ve all been there. I was awake too early, picked up my phone, opened Facebook and started scrolling as I had done a thousand times before. After a few minutes I simply thought, “Enough is enough.” The user experience has eroded more and more over the years and on mobile it has…
So what’s this all about then? Well it’s pretty much as it describes on my landing page really. It’s just a personal site where I can share things which interest me. A good old fashioned blog like what they used to have in years gone by, before the advent of Web 2.0 and the explosion of social media Why don’t…