For a few months, I had issues with my Wi-Fi network. The 2.4 GHz network would be fine, but the 5 GHz one would suddenly stop working and completely disappear from the available Wi-Fi networks. OpenWRT upgrades also didn’t improve the situation. This was very annoying. After some discussions with a friend, I learned about Dynamic Frequency...
In 2011, I was finishing 9th grade. As a gift, I got to choose a laptop in the 400 EUR range. I ended up picking an ASUS Eee PC 1201PN. It was new and the first computer in my life that was 100% mine, but awfully slow for a lot of tasks. It was so slow that I ended up giving Linux a go as a result. Linux! I didn’t even know computing all that...
This is a follow-up to my two previous attempts on this topic: Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server? ThinkPad as a server: the follow-up Since then, I’ve had quite a few changes to my home server setup: I put my home server stuff on an IKEA pegboard I tried the Zimaboard I switched back to the ASRock DeskMini I got fiber again!...
I like Fedora Linux. It’s the Linux distro that stopped my habit of distro-hopping. Big deal? Ooh, big deal! It’s stable in day-to-day use, ships with up-to-date software, and the software selection is adequate out of the box. It also ships with a fresh Linux kernel version1, resulting in a good experience even on modern hardware. I’ve been...
Kubernetes: everyone wants to do it, regardless of their scale and business objectives.1 Common justifications include better scalability, cost savings, standardization and being super modern and stuff. It’s the future! In my personal experience, Kubernetes is far from the magical uptime machine that a lot of people think it is, and migrating it...
I had the opportunity to test the resiliency of my home server setup due to a scheduled power outage on 2024-09-13. It was also Friday the 13th. I’m not superstitious, but I’m a little stitious. My setup usually consists of the home server, a Wifi AP/router combo box, a converter box for the fiber line, and a CyberPower UT850EG UPS. The planned...
It’s been over 4 years since my first post on this blog. During those 4 years I’ve written over 90 posts, received over 1 million clicks, a dozen legitimate reader e-mails and thousands of spam e-mails. And I love it! I’ve found that writing can be very fulfilling and I encourage you to at least give it a try. This post covers the reasons why I...
I helped a family member upgrade to a newer iPhone and make some room so that the internal storage does not run out. They had Nextcloud installed on the current phone, but due to limitations of the Nextcloud iOS app, the backups only take place if the app itself is open, meaning that we had hundreds of photos and videos that were not yet backed...
I’ve officially worked as a software developer since August 2016, and by now I have a fair share of stories to tell from those years. But those are stories for another time. Today I’d like to focus on where it all got started. The early days I never considered myself good with computers, or a nerd, or anything like that during my childhood. All...
I probably shouldn’t have written down my notes on the eGPU setup I had years ago. I’d be lying if I wasn’t considering remaking this setup with everything I’ve learned 6 years later. Oops. I got access to an allegedly-faulty AMD Radeon RX 480 and an NVIDIA GTX 1650 for free thanks to my friend, so I ordered the EXP GDC Beast v8.5c, two sorts of...
The ThinkPad T430 has a few options for running it with an external display: VGA port, which is pretty much obsolete at this point mini DisplayPort connector on the laptop itself DVI or DisplayPort on a dock The mini DisplayPort port has annoyed me for as long as I’ve had this machine. Most places where I’ve had to present something only offer an...
The ThinkPad T430 is not a remarkable laptop. It’s thick, bulky and built like a tank. I got mine in 2016 when the first university scholarship money dropped, and it’s still my backup laptop of choice. Around 2017 I did something every reasonable poor computer science student would do: I got an eGPU adapter for it to play some games. I never...
This blog is running on a home server again. I have once again gained access to a competent internet connection1, and I think I have figured out the IPv6 setup as well2, leading to this change. The IP address is dynamic, there are occasional power outages and I might just mess up my configuration and bring it all down, but I get to brag about...
A family member has a Canon PIXMA MP250 printer, originally released in 2009. It has been a very reliable piece of hardware, especially for a printer. Then came Windows 10. The printer would not work out of the box with it and the official drivers got stuck during installation. Fiddling with the printer in device manager, trying to install...
I’ve reached a point in my setup where most of the devices that I use are based around the coveted USB-C port. This meant that I had a valid reason to get a few extra because I didn’t yet have a stockpile of good USB-C cables. That’s when I found out that there exist cables that have little screens on them that show the power consumption of the...
I got a Steam Deck. Only took me a year or so of contemplating getting one, and trying out HoloISO, the unofficial SteamOS installer finally convinced me to get one.1 It took another year to actually get down to writing down my thoughts on it. This post is written from the perspective of a software developer who used to play video games a lot as...
I recently busted out my old ThinkPad T40, the last of the OG IBM ThinkPads. I picked it up some time around my university days because I liked collecting ThinkPads at the time, and it was a nice complement to my existing ThinkPad T60 and T430. 20 years difference, but they still look similar. The...
My current ISP provides an internet connection over a copper wire. To use it, I have a crappy modem (Technicolor CGA2121, DOCSIS 3.0). It’s running in bridge mode, meaning that all it does is convert the signal running over the coax cable into plain old Ethernet. My main networking device is a TP-Link Archer C7 v5. It runs OpenWRT. This...
ThinkPad keyboards were once well known for their great layouts, feel and functionality. This included the media playback control keys. Media playback control keys on a ThinkPad T420 keyboard. On the ThinkPad T430, the new chiclet keyboard layout moved the media keys to the function row. Still...
This post isn’t a detailed line-by-line tutorial on how to set up each individual piece of the setup as those types of guides tend to get out of date really easily, but if you know your way around Linux and the command line, then you can definitely replicate this setup on your own. Over the past few years I’ve been interested in learning about...
I’ve had the opportunity to try out another new laptop at work. I’ve used a brand new laptop recently, and it was horrible. But this time I’m pleasantly surprised. The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen 4 has great specs: CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U (8 cores, 16 threads, up to 5.1 GHz) GPU: AMD Radeon 780M (integrated) RAM: 32GB DDR5, soldered SSD: 1 TB...
You’re Cletus Kubernetus: a software developer, and a proud Fedora Linux user.1 You know Kubernetes, especially after the time you migrated some services to it. Everything is calm. Your pods are running. Your service is up. Business as usual. You release some minor changes to production. Everything is still working. Great! But then you receive a...
Changelog: 2024-03-06: 58 days, initial post 2024-07-28: 202 days, still going strong! 2024-10-15: 281 days After months of contemplating I finally pulled the trigger and got myself a Fairphone 5. The fact that iPhone X stopped receiving major iOS updates certainly helped make that decision. “But why? My Xiaomi/Oneplus/Samsung/other...
This post is a short overview of my experience at a career day in Valga, Estonia, hosted with the help of GreenDice. Kind of felt like a teacher at one point. I’ve never spoken at a career day before nor attended one as a student, which is why I instantly agreed to going to one when GreenDice...
Those of you who follow my blog using the RSS feed might have seen that new, incomplete posts popped up around the time I published my FOSDEM 2024 post. Oops. I recently tried looking for an alternative to writing blog posts in IntelliJ and out of all the options I stuck to MarkText. Well, it does things a bit...
I finally went to FOSDEM. I’m sleep-deprived, completely exhausted, but incredibly excited about the whole experience. FOSDEM in one picture. I’ve split this post into three separate sections. overall notes on the conference and the city less technical, but sheds light on the FOSDEM experience the...
It turns out that you can’t trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec. I have a Catit Flower Fountain for my two adorable cats. The idea of a water fountain for cats may sound odd, but having one really helps with cats staying hydrated and that alone avoids all sorts of health issues. At one point I wanted...
Your service cannot process events fast enough during peak hours. There is no obvious quick and dirty fix. Refactoring would take ages. People have been unhappy for a while now. What the hell do you do? Rough representation of the situation we were facing. Not pictured: honking and yelling. ...
I’ve decided to intentionally take more time to play video games this year, since it’s a relatively healthy way to escape from the real world once in a while. A friend recommended one game in particular: Control: Ultimate Edition. During the Steam summer sale of 2023, I went ahead and bought it. ...
I have a bad habit of changing my computing setups all the time. I tend to see new gear, then I get some new ideas, and then I obsessively think about it for weeks and months until I just buy it. And then the cycle repeats. I’ve had time to think about why that keeps happening and I think I’ve got it. I keep changing the goals, constantly, and...
I stumbled upon this Hardware Haven video about the Zimaboard recently. I liked it a lot. I finally bought one. In short, Zimaboard is a small single-board computer that is relatively affordable and comes with an interesting selection of ports, which includes an exposed PCI Express port. Before we get down to the...
While on vacation I went on a small road-trip across Estonia. During the second half of the trip I ended up being in Võrumaa, and while driving I suddenly remembered a random fact that some people mentioned in a hackerspace Slack channel: there’s a new museum around here! The museum was officially opened on 10th of...
Steam recently launched a new feature: local network game transfers. The idea is simple: if you have a game downloaded on another PC and you’re both on the same local network, then Steam can download game data from that PC, avoiding the need to download the game over public internet. Using this method you can reduce...
I recently learned about the IKEA SKÅDIS series, which is a pegboard that supports a variety of extras. During my self-hosting journey having to figure out the best place for putting all my compute stuff to has always been at the back of my mind, especially due to limited floor space at my home. This pegboard gave me an...
A while ago I wrote about how easy it is to download an archive of Wikipedia and host it anywhere you want using Kiwix. Here are a few things you might want to consider before doing so yourself. The spam I have a specific e-mail address set up so that readers of my blog can reach out to me no matter where they see my...
k-space is a hackerspace in Tallinn, Estonia, and they organized a hackathon recently. Unlike in most hackathons, in this one you could whatever you like with no expectations about building a business or coming up with an MVP, just come on down to the space and start working on your passion projects! I had some ideas on what I could do, but a few...
It all started with me getting a Steam Deck. RIP the Ubuntu Server installation on my LattePanda V1. Background After getting familiar with the Steam Deck and how the Proton compatibility layer works, I decided to write a backup script that would back up everything in the home folder, excluding the...
There are two reasons why I haven’t written much lately, and one of them is that I was cooking up a talk about self-hosting, more specifically my own self-hosting adventure (the other one is the Steam Deck, more about that in the future). That's me! The talk took place on May 25th 2023 at k-space, a...
Oh boy, here I go testing a new laptop again! Well, it was new back in 2020. You might remember my article on why I went back to a ThinkPad T430 in 2022. Or that other time when I got a new HP laptop for testing and got so frustrated that I wrote about it. Well, today I’m writing about the Dell Latitude 5411. It’s not...
Over my relatively short career (6+ years), I’ve noticed a change in the way I approach building things. When I was still an inexperienced junior developer who barely survived operating in a Linux environment and saw backend development as a black box, I was happy to get things working at all. Nowadays, no matter what I do, I have to take...
Hard drives are still the default choice for many homelab and data hoarding enthusiasts. They still hold the gigabytes per dollar advantage over SSD-s (for now), and if you buy the big external drives and take the drives out of the enclosures, you can get a pretty good deal. Spinning rust has one obvious downside: it’s slow, both in maximum...
Yesterday was election day in Estonia and the results are in, which is why I remembered that one time I looked at my website on the Wayback Machine. This domain used to point to a Wordpress site that hosted content for a candidate in the local elections, at least around 2011-2014. For international readers: “Õunapuu”...
A friend once showed me a power bank that was so cool that I had to get one myself. Ended up getting two, and here’s why. This post is not sponsored. Removable batteries Let’s start with the feature that I appreciate the most: removable batteries! The TOMO M4 accepts up to 4 18650 lithium ion battery cells, which are...
As with many homelab experiments around 2022/2023, it all started with Raspberry Pi-s being either out of stock or absurdly overpriced. I once noticed a listing for a LattePanda V1 on a local auction site. The price was reasonable at 45 EUR, and after I looked at the specifications, I had to get one to play around...
2023-02-16 update: this post is not about the “GB vs GiB” issue, or the “lost disk space” that you notice after formatting the device in an OS. Please read the article in full before making inaccurate comments online. For many years, I have used two SanDisk Ultra 16 GB USB flash drives as OS installation media. Since...
It’s been a while since I last wrote about my ThinkPad T430 that was tasked with being a home server. After doing some experiments with my setup a couple of times, it is once again the main server for all my self-hosting needs. However, this time I have made some adjustments. Background The monstrosity that you’re...
I hate buying things that are single-purpose, which is why I ended up with this setup. Take a speaker, a battery, put them together, and what you now have is a portable speaker. Since I had access to both, I felt no need to buy a separate portable speaker for use in social events. The fact...
Near the beginning of my software development career, I worked on a pretty standard web application. The project was not a commercial success, but it did give me a good technical foundation that turned out to be very useful for my career so far. For those interested, the tech stack was relatively boring (in a good...
This post illustrates something that is not common on modern laptops: changing the CPU. The CPU we're replacing in the T430: a 45W Intel i7-3820QM. Loosen the CPU by turning the screw with a flathead screwdriver. A...
If you have spent any time in gaming hardware circles, then you’ve probably heard about the Steam Deck, the Linux-based handheld gaming PC built by Valve. Yes, you heard that right: not Windows, but Linux. I’ve had my fair share of attempts at gaming on Linux. When it works, it’s amazing. When it doesn’t, it’s incredibly frustrating. The last...
I’ve decided to give a new laptop a test drive, mainly because I had the opportunity at work, and also out of morbid curiosity. It’s the HP Elitebook 845 G9, and it has pretty good specifications: CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 6800U RAM: 2x16GB DDR5 Storage: 512GB KIOXIA NVMe SSD (KBG50ZNV512G) OS: Fedora 37, kernel version 6.0.8...
You have probably heard about the Raspberry Pi. It’s a nice little affordable single-board computer with a huge community using it for all sorts of projects. I got my first Raspberry Pi, the Model B+, during my first year at university, which was around the winter of 2014/2015. The idea of a super tiny PC that could actually do useful things was...
A couple of years ago, I worked on a ThinkPad T60. That ThinkPad had been in use by a family member before that, and I started its cleanup by disassembling the whole machine and making sure that it was pristine. However, once I put it all back together, I saw that it was password protected. I wasn’t even able to access the BIOS. After repeatedly...
I stumbled upon this post in /r/thinkpad, which got my attention. It showcases an ExpressCard to M.2 NGFF adapter that they purchased from AliExpress. The adapter has a similar purpose to the one designed by thinkmods.store, with the added bonus that it could fit longer NVMe SSD-s if you didn’t mind them sticking out of the case. You could also...
I’ve always been a fan of tinkering with cooling setups on my computers. I’ve even went as far as writing crappy solutions to make up for deficiencies on the hardware level. After years of dumb experiments I’ve seen how little you can get away with in cooling and how to run your machines as quietly as possible without giving up too much...
After playing around with fan curves on my ASRock DeskMini X300 based home server, I noticed one interesting thing. At least it was interesting to me. Background I had one goal: to try to see if I could turn it into a semi-passive PC by only turning the fan on when the PC was under load while keeping it off for as...
As some of you might own, I’m still rocking a ThinkPad T430, a laptop model originally released in 2012. It’s not the fastest laptop out there, but it is plenty fast for a number of tasks, even most software development work. I also try to keep my machines up to date and properly backed up. On my laptop, this means having around a couple of...
There really isn’t much to say here, nor is there a rational reason behind this. I just see it as an opportunity to send a signal and test the capabilities of my UPS. I’ve prepared for this moment with my self-hosting setup, let’s see how well it holds up. Hopefully better than the electrical grid. Winter is...
After some spicy feedback to my post where a ThinkPad T430 acted as a server, I decided to try out one UPS that was recommended on the basis of it being much more power efficient compared to the APC UPS that I previously ran. That UPS? CyberPower UT650EG. My ThinkPad-as-a-server, and the UPS that's powering...
I like having a safety net whenever I’m doing something potentially destructive, which is why I use the btrfs file system for my operating system and my data. Snapshots are one half of my “whoops, there goes all my work” strategy (backups are the other half). I’ve written about how I use snapshots on btrfs using snapper, but lately I’ve become...
I have the Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones. They’re good for consuming content. Audio calls with your colleagues? Forget about it. Thanks, Bluetooth. #notsponsored by Värska, it's just very hot right now. This is the setup I have to go with, and it has all to do with how Bluetooth works. Your options...
You’ve disabled the boneheaded Lenovo WiFi adapter whitelist using a tool like 1vyrain, installed a better adapter like the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260, and found that Bluetooth is not working as intended on your ThinkPad T430 running Linux? Here’s a guide on what you can try to resolve some issues you may encounter. The integrated Bluetooth...
I’m a man of many ideas. It’s a shame that most of them are quite stupid. This is one of them, but at least it makes for a fun experiment. Intro After adding an UPS to accompany my server, my setup was as complete as it could reasonably be. The server is low power, but packs quite a punch with fast storage and plenty of compute power around. The...
You may know that I really like small, efficient APU-based builds. At this point in time, they’re so close to being a viable mainstream option for gaming, especially the Ryzen 6000-series mobile APU-s. Forza Horizon 5, at 1080p high settings? Yes, they’re that good. I don’t have the new Ryzen 6000 series APU-s to play around with, but what I do...
This is a quick story about a fun discovery that I made a while ago. For legal reasons, all of this is made up and no such service ever existed. Accurate representation of the state of affairs in the project, circa 2019. Once upon a time, we had this Java service that handled all the backend work...
Friday afternoon. You’re trying out a script that you wrote to mass-rename and move some files around. You finish the script and test it out. Oops. All the files now have all the wrong names, and some have been randomly moved 10 folders deep. It’s a mess. And you didn’t make a backup of your files right before this step because you thought that...
I changed my setup again. I’m now the proud owner of an APC Smart-UPS 750. The UPS is many times larger than the actual server. Why? Because I got it as a gift, and I have never actually had an UPS before, so it makes for a good introduction to this world. Overview My setup is quite basic:...
The tagline for /r/datahoarder reads: “It’s A Digital Disease!”. I agree. Why can't I hold all these hard drives? At some point I realized that the pursuit to hoard all the things will just keep on consuming more and more of my time and money. Storage is cheap up until to a point, once you find...
Around a month ago I shared my blog post on HackerNews. I guess I lucked out with the choice of the topic, because it brought out a lot of enthusiasts who shared their own experiences with older machinery that still works in 2022. I really appreciate the feedback and the experiences shared! Anyway, what is noteworthy in my opinion is that my blog...
Not too long ago, I had the goal of consolidating all my computing needs onto a single desktop PC. That meant moving from an mITX-based build to something that had a bit more expandability. Since I already had a Fractal Meshify C Mini, I decided to go for an mATX motherboard. And that’s how I ended up with an ASRock X570M...
I wasn’t happy with my “one machine that does it all” setup, which is why I finally bit the bullet and got myself an ASRock DeskMini X300 bare-bones kit. This is a fantastic little desktop PC kit that is very small, quiet and can still be configured to have ridiculous amounts of power. In the past. I once built a low-power server based off of the...
This post is inspired by this article from the Low-tech Magazine. I highly recommend giving that a read as well! Over my lifetime, I’ve used a bunch of different computers, mainly due to new ideas and requirements popping into my mind every time I’m content with my current setup. One of my last changes might be a bit of a headscratcher for...
I’ve been running my all-in-one PC for a while now. It was my desktop, my NAS and my gaming PC. However, during the next couple of months I kept hitting small bumps along the road. Most of these were quite straightforward to fix, but there is one that finally convinced me to go back to a simpler setup. iSCSI As mentioned in one of my previous...
Do you have a need to host Wikipedia on your computer? Or a StackExchange site, like Super User? It’s easier than you think! Step 1: download stuff! The Kiwix project provides ZIM files for many popular websites, including Wikipedia. These files can be downloaded over at Kiwix wiki. Take a look at the content packages...
Welcome to 2021. We have: supply chain issues no reasonably priced GPU-s consumer-grade CPU-s with peak power consumption at 296W GPU-s that consume 350-400W of power under normal use Accurate representation of CPU-s in 2021. At the same time, we have made great leaps in CPU/GPU architectures and...
As you might have read from my previous post on this topic, I have a pretty neat “cloud” gaming setup running. I have one powerful desktop PC, one virtual machine with a GPU attached to it, and client machines that can be used to stream games from. To keep things simple (and because my current ISP is unbelievably bad), I have so far used...
This is a follow-up to my previous post where I covered the VFIO setup in general. For many people that would have been good enough, but my goal with this setup was to have a powerful gaming setup that I could access from my living room PC with 20 meters of Ethernet cables between the two. Cloud gaming? The concept of cloud gaming has become more...
Introduction Before we jump into all the nitty-gritty details, I’d like to go over what we are dealing with here since these topics may be unfamiliar to you. VFIO is quite a niche topic and not everyone knows about it. GPU passthrough: the process of allowing a VM (virtual machine) to use a dedicated GPU. This allows you to run GPU-heavy...
Introduction About a year ago, I bought an used PC based off of a Lenovo Erazer X510. It had a dual-core Intel Pentium G3220 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a crappy Codegen 400W power supply and a 60GB SSD. I added an Nvidia GTX 1050 and just like that, a budget gaming PC was born. My brother ended up using it, and it was good for games that didn’t...
Introduction I’ve covered my self-hosting setup in a previous post. It has been a couple of months and the setup has mostly been fine. Sure, the power usage was pretty big under load, and yes, my internet did cut out every time I turned the VM on with all the services starting, but other than that, it has been rock-solid. However, I soon realized...
Background I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X230. It’s a small and good laptop that I’ve used as my main laptop and a server as well. A couple of years ago I messed around with flashing alternative BIOS implementations on the X230, such as the skulls project, which made installing prebuilt coreboot images very simple. Of course, before doing any testing,...
Setup After I had a perfectly functional, quiet and performant server up and running, I fell victim to my imagination and completely changed my self-hosting setup. Again. Here it is, in all its glory: Find the server. Well, at least that’s what’s on the table. ...
Anyone that has bought themselves external WD drives from the Elements/My Book/Easystore series are probably familiar with the acoustic characteristics of the drives. The drives have a loud hum caused by WD running the drives at 7200rpm while claiming the drives to be “5400rpm-class” and the clacking of the read-write heads is audible as well. In...
The Orange Pi Zero is one hell of an SBC. It has served as a Wi-Fi access point for months without issues and as a testbed for playing around with MySQL. I wanted it to be a useful device again, but had trouble finding an use case for it due to its hardware limitations. After messing around with my amateur archival work, I had accumulated some...
Reddit is a great starting point for getting new ideas for your homelab: racks full of machines in /r/homelab, storage measured in terabytes (or even petabytes) over at /r/datahoarder, all the different services that people host over at /r/selfhosted. This can be a bit overwhelming for someone just starting out in this area, which is why I...
My self-hosting adventure started during my university days. Once I actually had money to buy myself a decent used laptop (ThinkPad T430) that had more than 3GB of RAM that my ThinkPad T60 had, I could use some of my older hardware as testbeds for any of the stupid ideas that I had. For someone that liked to learn more about Linux and wanted any...
Background My mother once had a laptop: the Compaq Armada 1592DT. It came with Windows ME which later got “upgraded” to Windows 98 SE after I managed to completely screw up the OS, a whopping 96MB of RAM and a hard drive that probably wasn’t much larger than 1-3GB. It wasn’t powerful or anything, but some of my earliest memories of playing video...
I used to work on a short-term project a while ago where the goal was to visualize some metrics that were collected from a pretty fancy smart home setup. This data included power usage of various sections of the building, temperature sensors, water usage levels and more. The data itself was collected by a proprietary piece of software that sent...
This is a list of lessons that I’ve learned while playing around with my computer setup during the last 6-7 years or so. USB connected storage is a bad idea when you are using BTRFS. USB connected storage is still a bad idea when you are using ZFS, but it is at least much more resilient. USB drive enclosures are a total crapshoot when it comes to...
Issue description You are running a Linux-based machine with an install of ZFS on Linux. Everything seems to work correctly, but after restarting your machine, the ZFS pool is not visible. You can still import your pool manually using zpool import poolname or zpool import -a. In my situation, this issue does not occur with Debian 10 on an...
While listening to the SelfHosted podcast, one of the hosts brought up their peculiar living arrangement multiple times. Essentially, he and his family are living in an RV that runs off of batteries, has solar panels, utilizes Home Assistant for automation, supports multiple mobile networking providers and also has some Raspberry Pi-s running in...
Introduction This is a short overview of one way to take your old video tapes and make digital copies of their contents. To get started, you will need the following: old video tapes that you want to make copies of (VHS and its variants) a device that can read analog AV signals and convert them to digital signals a device that can play back the...
One day I stumbled upon a Craft Computing video about his new server build, and on the parts list was a Sedna PCI Express 2x SATA adapter card: The card in question. There are different designs out there, including a 4x SATA card, which is bonkers. Anyway, I thought that I might as well give this a...
After a run-of-the-mill Windows BSOD, I was redirected to the UEFI settings and was presented with this fun little bug: 0GB ought to be enough for anybody.
LinusTechTips has some pretty great videos about building insane PC and server setups, such as: unboxing and deploying petabytes of storage 7 gamers, 1 CPU building sleeper PC-s testing sketchy CPU-s opening up a 100TB SSD I have the ideas, but not the budget of LinusTechTips, so writing them down and hoping that one day I can test this out is...
Maybe I am unlucky with computer hardware. Maybe I have the opposite of the golden touch of Midas. Or maybe it’s just the fact that I use my hardware for things they were never meant to be used for. Anyway, I have acquired two Seagate 4TB external hard drives for doing some testing with ZFS. I shucked them (took them out of their enclosure) and...
I happen to run on an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac motherboard that used to run fine, but ever since I installed one UEFI update, it has had this one annoying issue: whenever you reboot, it gets stuck at POST. Cold boots work fine and the shutdown-and-push-the-power-button cycle also does the trick, but it’s not something I want to do all...
You’re a web developer at a social media company that has recently made a big push for modernizing their frontend for the mobile-first era. It has taken a lot of time and effort from many people. Countless challenges, arguments, testing. The release is near. You’re probably a bit anxious. After all, the site is visited by millions of users every...
I have a bad habit of testing things whenever a “good” idea pops into my head. This is a short overview of one of them. The Orange Pi Zero is a SBC (single board computer) that has a slow 32-bit ARM 4 core CPU, 512MB of RAM and no display output. It’s actually quite OK for many tasks, such as reverse proxy (assuming 100Mbit/s is enough for you),...