I took a quiet afternoon alone recently to do some homelab housecleaning. Breaking one of my primary rules of homelabbing (don't replace it if it ain't broke) I replaced an 8 port gigabit ethernet switch (saved from a dumpster at work when it wouldn't support 802.1x) with a smart switch that supports VLANs (on sale for 40% off).

Put my Linksys router back in place, running OpenWRT. My plan is to set up a VLAN for a guest/IoT network, a separate VLAN for PCs and media servers and another VLAN for my test Windows network.

After setting all this up, out came the canned air. My NAS sucks in dust like no one's business, so I took it offline, took the drives out and blasted the dust out of it. It's much quieter now.

Then, I replaced my hodgepodge of network cables, all different colors and all too long, with shorter black cables for the lab and color coded cables for uplink to my switches.

Took the back off of my "server", a Lenovo Thinkpad. Replaced the thermal paste and blew the dust out.

After all that, my UPS started beeping and flashing a REPLACE BATTERY warning. Got a new battery in a couple of days later, and APC has a battery recycling program, which means one less dead hardware item lying around.

For a sysadmin, this was a relaxing day.

One thing I've realized with blosxom - posts are displayed based on their modified date, not their created date. So, if I find a typo and correct it, the post goes to the top of the display. Looking at man (1) touch, I can pass a date string to the command and reset the modified date, but that seems overly complicated.

Better to leave posts as-is, errors and all. This isn't meant to be polished, by any means.

I found my old Flickr account from the 2000s with 18 pages worth of photos. Going back through them was a nostalgia trip - I shot a lot of film in the early 2000s, I'd discovered lomography and was working in a subject-rich environment, San Francisco. It was a town going through a lot of change, and some of the buildings I captured were gone in the following weeks and months.

There's a lot to be said for pocketable cameras. With a LOMO, I'd leave the focus at 8-10 feet and in sunny weather (or shooting with ASA 400 film), you'd probably get your subject in focus. Reach in your pocket, shoot, repeat. I've been shooting again with an old Canon digital pocket camera, but it's not quite the same.

With my phone I need to pull it out, unlock it, press the camera app, wait for it to load, then sight and shoot. It's just not the same.