Andy Whittaker from Prestbury, United Kingdom.

General all round good-egg…..

I’ve always been interested in electronics and then with computer bits added on. From the age 17 I got interested in the oily bits on cars too. Now I have got all environmental and drive an electric car but what a beast it is! My day-job is for a large chemical company designing Instrument Control Systems.

The purpose of most of my projects nowadays is to become more efficient and spend less money in the long-term (and hopefully be less of a burden on the plant). One such example is that I have installed a large, on-grid battery system. This is to time-shift the cheap rate night-time tariff to be used during the expensive daytime period. Whenever I have spare cash, I buy extra batteries and increase the capacity of the system, thereby drastically reducing my daytime electricity kWh unit rate. Although the total cost can be seen as high, I think the return on investment is much higher than that can be achieved in a bank; additionally the savings become even greater when energy prices start to inevitably rise.

My skills include Microsoft Visual C++, C#, Windows, Raspberry Pi Debian Linux, Ubuntu Linux hosting (what this website runs on), Siemens C16x assembly, Bosch ECUs, etc, etc – and changing clutches and engines in my cars! I am qualified to the UK’s BS7671 electrical wiring regulations and have a BSc Honour’s Degree in Applied Computing from Manchester Metropolitan University (~1996).

Prestbury
Macclesfield
United Kingdom
[email protected]

Try ECUFix too

Contact me at [email protected]

Why Has AndyWhittaker.com Changed?

Back in 2004, my collocated Dell server suffered a hard disk failure and, since it was over 300 miles away from me and housed in a high security nuclear bunker, I let it go to waste. Since then, I now have another co-located server but this time located by The Hut Group (THG) in their London data-centre.

Life does get complicated as you get older which leaves you with less and less time to do the things you love. Over the last two decades I’ve:

been working in Germany (nice people)
got married
built a new house
left work
witness my wife die of breast cancer
dug myself out of a hole
met a new woman
got myself a new job
and turned my life around

Now is the time I put some new spit and polish on this place and try to resurrect my old content, as well as add some new content. My new server is loaded up with WordPress and is using DIVI as its theme (brilliant by the way). I’ve got a lot of previous content to upload and put on, which is going to take me absolutely ages to do…..

New for March 2022, this server is now running on a dedicated Ubuntu Linux host in London, UK. Since most of the hosting software generally runs on Linux anyway, I decided to hone my skills away from Microsoft’s IIS onto Linux and Apache.

A lot of my old content I’ve retrieved from https://web.archive.org/ which is a great way of researching into how the internet looked way back when there wasn’t much of an internet.

Don’t forget to come back but don’t fret too much – life’s too short…..