Other What currently makes your life awesome?

Now that looks awesome!

Back on topic: so far the flights to Glasgow on Sunday have not been cancelled (yet). Please let me have my cottage holiday...

 

Awesome.

Oh you should be fine, depending how long your trip is you may get stuck here though

Willkommen

 

Wouldn't mind that, tbh.

It's 10 days, 7 in the country side, 3 in Glasgow. This'll be soooo much fun and relaxation.

//edit: feeling "proud by proxy" when I saw what's pictured below. @Gareth Halfacree

 

Well, better get to it, then. I watched a video about the Raspberry Pi4 desktop kit and was pleasantly surprised by seeing your book in there.

 

How much have you sanded off the desktop?

Is it still strong enough to support the weight of a mouse?

I could have done with a belt sander when I made my workbench, would have saved a lot of effort hand planing.

 

It's still, believe it or not, nearly two inches thick. I forget what grade of timber it is, but I think it was for supporting a roof, so it's fairly substantial.

Yeah, I can't work out how I ever tolerated not having a belt sander at this point. It's definitely a blunt instrument, but boy is it effective.

 

Wouldn't it have been easier to get the excess thickness sawn off... or is the largest area too impractical for any saw available?

Yes, I mean commercial saws...

 

I did think about that (And had done some asking around in the UK), but the overriding response was that my bit of wood was too big to do in one piece, which would have lead to more cutting and gluing - But at the time it wasn't sufficient bendyness enough to bother.

Unfortunately it stood in a non-climate controlled storage facility for over a year and that made the little bendy bits worse. It's not the end of the world, it's been far too cold to cure resin the last few weeks anyway (A test batch I did was just starting to cure last night after four days in the same garage) so I've not had much else to do.

Top wise, it's pretty much acceptable now. I need to measure, mark, and measure again to cut the holes for the insert and LED's and the doom insert, possibly do some burning, a light application of black in a certain spot, and pick up the length of steel (Which I may have over-ordered on quantity..) that's going to serve as the brace.

Once the resin's on and cured I need to cut channels for UV LED's, recess the spot where the power brick is going, the spot for the arduino, and the last cut for the plexi that's going over the DOOM doodad so I can polish it so it matches the resin and, hopefully, disguises what's underneath until the lights are turned on.

 

Realising my OCZ Agility 3 360GB SSD finally gave up the ghost yesterday after approx 9 years of constant use.
Complain about the Sandforce controller if you like but it has served me well.

RIP my little friend............

Tear down time

 

After I did this last weekend...

...I'm getting my network closer to where I want it to be.

My storage server is now just that: a storage-only box with very few compute services left on it. The aforementioned Z600 workstation is now running Proxmox and a new VM is handling the heavy-ish-duty of running Plex Media Server. The few remaining compute services (mostly download services) will be moved to the new Proxmox host once I get a RancherOS VM up and running. I might even keep them where they are for faster disk access - I'm using an unmanaged gigabit switch, so traffic isn't partitioned into VLANs. 10Gb networking would be nice but a "proper" SAN is probably overkill for my needs; moving to a managed switch and partitioning the network into VLANs would probably be enough to manage traffic more efficiently.

Virgin's SuperShyteHub is now running in modem-only mode and hooked up to an AMD Kabini system running pfSense. Picked up a TP-Link 802.11ac 5GHz access point to take over WiFi duties from the SuperShyteHub.

Also got a Pi-Hole DNS server up and running for ad blocking - which is absolutely bloody awesome, I don't know why I didn't do this sooner - but I'm planning to replace the Pi-Hole VM with pfBlockerNG and have all the core networking stuff self-contained on the router. The router hardware can certainly handle it, people run pfSense on far teenier systems than I currently am.

Just deciding whether I want to carry on doing stuff tonight or make a start on the rather drinkable wine I picked up earlier... I might at least have a crack at getting OpenVPN up and running.

EDIT: OK, I set up OpenVPN. That was remarkably easy. Now I'm gonna get drunk...

 

When you sober up!

Look I to cloudflared, the doh service. Also look at this block list;

https://www.reddit.com/r/oisd_blocklist/comments/dwxgld/dbloisdnl_internets_1_domain_blocklist/

its a good list I quite like. Also if anyone in your house plays Xbox, some of those domains are on the default lists. If I remember rightly when I asked they're not on that list above, but they do appear on default lists that are suggested to be left running with this one. I did make a comment with exclusions here somewhere. And Reddit somewhere.

 

Yep, will be setting up some kind of secure DNS also, likely via cloudflare. I found out how to do that with PiHole but I don't know pfBlockerNG at all. Want to move away from PiHole primarily because it messes with hostname resolution on the local network - I really am sick of memorising IP address assignments, and if I ever do move over to IPv6 then that'll be pretty much impossible! (I can probably make it work properly with PiHole, but there are other advantages to having all the network-stuff on one device)

 

Yeah, the hostname resolution pissed me off too - I enabled conditional forwarding for my internal domain (some bs .local) and so far I've only had name resolution issues with unifi stuff.

Edit: unifi stuff that has no reason to announce itself because it's all controlled via the controller I hasten to add.

Edit 2:



The desk lives! I need to decide on some wood stain, because I really can't be bothered to light this thing on fire in the pursuit of a darker look.

 

Seeing kestrels and kites from my sofa.

Oh and continuing to gradually lose weight over the past couple of years, mainly after going gluten free - at least there's an upside to it.

 

So I get a lot of "corporate spam" - like it's legitimate targeted marketing mail, but still essentially spam. A regular feature of the spam folder is "cash for thoughts" - i.e. offering incentives such as vouchers, parts, software or just outright cash for answering a few questions, survey, webex and so on. Always emptied the spam and disregarded them.

Last week I decided to to some background research on one of the mails - real person, real research company, all seemed above board and the ask wasn't too much (short survey). So I bit, exchanged a couple mails with a person (a few qualifiers), then did an online survey that took around 15 minutes. Boom: $60 via PayPal. Thinking that maybe that was a one-off, got another one today, checked it out and all seemed above board, another 2 minute survey done, another £5 in PayPal.

I can't believe how many of these I've deleted with the rest of the spam... I had one a while ago offering $500 for a 60 minute call and dismissed as spam because who would give me $500 for just chatting for on the phone for an hour

And here I've been doing the odd Google Reward survey for 12p

 

Windfall. Probably at the best time ever.

When I got my rig sorted last week I set aside the Titan XP for a mate whose always there for me. I then had the most skint week ever but didn't crack. News came in this morning, so I told him and he's per your pants excited.

Just as his kid was sent home with a cough and now he's housebound for two weeks.

Karma. It's a wonderful thing.

 

The cringe-fest that is the "Eurovision Song Contest" is CANCELLED!

 

Plus they've stopped filming Eastenders and Holby City amongst other dross.

 

I still have an OCZ drive older than that running 24/7 in my server. It's never batted an eyelid (tempts fate...).