SerialSeb.com has existed for a very long time, but has received very little love. As the saying goes, “shoemaker’s wives go barefoot and doctor’s wives die young”.

I always knew I wanted something better, and wanted to start 2016 going back to basics and making sure my online presence reflected my principles better. I also realised that I spent most of my time tweeting, and little blogging. I love twitter, but it is ephemeral and the knowledge sharing doesn’t reach new people.

So I shelved the old site and, over the last 6 months of on and off work, I built something new, and moved everything over. I’ll attempt to do a little series of the various bits involved in moving things over.

A new look

A design ought to reflect your principles. I wanted something that focused on the content, a design that stayed out of the way while being recognisable instantly. The words “sharp”, “light”, “airy” come to mind.

I based the work on the excellent Minimal Mistakes template, which I customized heavily. Mind the fresh paint as many tweaks are still pending, especially on non-mac platforms.

A new brand

I always say that any project ought to start with a cool name and some logo. Back in the 90s, my online identity was technoboy, as I was a boy and very much into technology. I had to move on when my nicknames got stolen on the various IRC networks I was hanging out on, so thetechnologist was born around 2003, on various blogging sites, all of them now dead. The domain name expired and I lost it, so SerialSeb was born.

There are many reasons to chose a brand, but three are very important to me: google doesn’t know the term yet, the name matches the domain with which one wants to be identified, and it’s spellable without too much trouble. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of the word cereal back then, so now have to live with spelling it.

What I did not have was a logo. I wanted something simple, hand-crafted by myself, visibly recognisable from a distance and cheap to print. Combined with my love of highlighters, and an obsession with logos being a play on the name associated with it, I came up with this.

The double loop signifies continuity, and is a play on the two S in SerialSeb. The highlighter emphasizes the hand-crafted nature of what I do, and the blue is blue because it is apparently my favourite colour.

I’m not entirely settled on the shade of blue yet but one has to make concessions if one is to release things on time.

A new typography

Titles all come from Helvetica Neue, in two nuances. I played with hundreds of fonts since the early plans of redesigning SerialSeb.com in early 2013, which you can still see in some of my early slides.

It’s very light, very sharp, and I’m yet to find something else I like as much.

I’m still tweaking the design and will probably change both the font in use for text, the weight of various titles and the vertical whitespace, which I really don’t like much right now.

A one-stop shop

Finally, I’ve aggregated content from all my talks, my codebetter.com, blogspot.com, thetechnologist.net, and thetechnologist.is-a-geek.com blogs, the few blog entries about the book (more on that later), with my CV and all my slides to follow soon, basking in the glory of this new design.

It really is good to be back.

As we say goodbye to 2015, a year my blog has had no updates at all, for reasons I may share with you one day, I’m thrilled with this new development.

It has taken months, hundred of hours labouring on various keyboards, crawling through archive.org and old hard drives, designing, failing, designing again, copying, typing, hacking. But here we are.

This is my new home, with a new dashing logo. You will find all the content from the old codebetter.com blog, the blogger.com blog, and even the old thetechnolgist blog. If you want to read the crazy things I used to say when I was younger and full of that fire that burns in your loins in your twenties, the archives now go back all the way to 2003.

Welcome back.

This entry will be very localised to the British isles (see what I did there?).

I’ve been a BT customer for a long time, and their hub is an absolute nightmare, a piece of crap, a useless chunk of equipment full of bugs, overheating issues and impossibility to manage even UpnP, across modems and across phone lines, not to mention security issues and random hijacking of DNS to show you some static html page about unpaid bills.

So to try and enjoy the internet for a little while every night, I’ve put together a user story, after a year of shoddy service.

User story: In order to enjoy the internet reliably, As a BT Business Customer and an Apple customer I want to be able to not use the BT Business Hub as a PPPoE modem and use my Airport Extreme for everything

After hours of going through forums with ridiculous, inaccurate or plain unhelpful advice, I’ve cracked it.

First, plug your airport extreme and configure it’s wifi as you want it. If you have an iOS device, this is dumb simple: Settings, Wifi, configure new airport. Set it to use PPPoE and use the network login username and password you received in a paper letter once upon a time. You’re done, leave the Airport to restart and get ready.

Plug yourself to an ethernet port on the BT Hub. Configure your network adapter to use a static IP in the same netmask (192.168.1.42 sounds reasonable).

Go to the settings (http://192.168.1.254/  usually), and do the following, in order:

1. Deactivate wireless. That access point has terrible coverage, you’re better off without.

2. Put the hub in Bridge mode (Settings > Broadband > Routing at the end of the page, Bridge mode enabled)

3. At that point, you probably already tried that, and failed miserably to PPPoE. So instead go for the hidden page on the router, at http://192.168.1.254/thd_setup and set the encapsulation to LLC. Save

Now you’re all ready, connect the WAN port on your Airport Extreme to an Ethernet port on the BT Business Hub, and see the connection being made.

I’ll be making the same changes in my home flat. If all goes well, I shall finally manage to use the internet properly.

Enjoy!