Why did I wait?

I finally got around to swapping out my cable modem for one that I own. I don't know why I was concerned -- if my company-owned modem failed, I'd still need to drive to their store for a replacement. If mine fails, I'll do the same.

I bought this modem at a local thrift shop a year ago and never got around to swapping it out. I tried, once, and didn't have the local password needed to switch it into bridge mode. Did a bit of googling to find that the vendor had changed from the admin/password credentials to a newer, slightly more secure standard. Since my internet was down for the third time yesterday, I had time to sort things out.

I'd tried with a modem I bought on Craigslist years ago, only to find out that it was Comcast property and they wouldn't reconfigure it.

$14.99 a month. Shoulda done this earlier.

Now, to find a way to hide the modem and my router, looking for a small cabinet with an open back.

posted Sat, 17 Jan 2026
permanent link

The 2000s...

I'm writing this blog the way I blogged in my younger days - hand hacking html in a console window. Using an FTP client to copy images to the server. Long forgotten bits of HTML coming back to me, vi commands burned into muscle memory.

It's the way we did it back in the late '90s and early 2000s. I was working in SOMA at the time, a center of the internet boom. First, with Multimedia Gulch, then later in streaming media and gaming. The web was a new form of self-expression powered by blogs - first, the lucky few who could hide a box in a colocation facility or worked for a company that offered home pages on one of their Apache servers. Then came Blogger. I always wanted one of their hoodies. Blogger begat Moveable Type, which inspired other blog platforms, including Wordpress, which now runs a good portion of the internet.

Then, there was Livejournal. Social networking, but long-form and creative. Twitter without the character limit. MySpace without the design limitations. LJ had a pretty decent templating system, the ability to create multiple friend groups, granular posting security and third-party editor support.

I was quite active on LiveJournal, looking for film photography groups and keeping in touch with friends. LJ had a knack for getting people to open up sharing amongst friends - I suppose we were young enough and naive enough to not worry about sharing on the internet. The age of data plundering was yet to come.

I went to LiveJournal to check out my old account. My friends list is still active, and one person was posting as of last week! Sadly, two of my closest LJ friends (and one my oldest friend in real life) have passed away. Their journals are still online, and I was vain enough to think that one post dated in 2003 was about me.

I don't know if I miss the environment or miss the people we were. It was exciting, but we were all wide-eyed at the new world unfolding before us.

posted Thu, 15 Jan 2026
permanent link

Beep Beep...
I woke up this morning to a beeping noise from my NAS - turns out one of the drives in my RAID array failed a data scrub operation. I replaced all of the drives in 2024, and ordered a spare drive to keep as a backup.

The drives have a 5 year warranty, so opened the spare drive, swapped drives, put the failed drive in the box and filed an RMA request. We'll see how long it takes for a replacement.

The drive failed at 20,000 hours - I replaced the previous drives in 2024 with an average of 50,000 hours!

I love RAID.

not my home lab...

posted Thu, 15 Jan 2026
permanent link

Cleaning up the homelab
I received a couple of 120mm USB fans yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised to find one of them fits nicely in a hole cut into the back of my server cabinet as an exhaust fan. An unused bookend made a nice stand for it. I was concerned about heat buildup, this should go a long way to resolving that. I have another fan I can use to bring cold air into the enclosure, once I figure how to route air into a 100 year-old chinese cabinet.

Woke up early this morning, finally resolved a backup issue - one of my containers couldn't write to the backup file. The container was non-priveliged, the backup directory owned by root. I needed to change the NFS mapping on the drive to allow non-root users to write there. One problem solved.

I was running Proxmox Backup server, until the server running it died. I went back to native backup, which should work fine enough. Set up my critical VMs on a weekly rotation, I realized that my backup job was limited to one server only, so when I juggled VMs between servers, they'd stopped backing up. Made a new backup job covering both servers so moving VMs shouldn't block backups. Two down.

Thirdly, I deleted 4 or 5 test VMs I didn't need anymore. Cleaned up the display and reclaimed some space.

I had 2 NFS mounts mapped to Proxmox, one of which was confusing because the mount name meant something else outside of NFS. Got rid of the confusing mount name, realized I had a VM running over NFS. Moved the disk image, deleted any stale CD-ROM references to it and unmounted it from the servers.

I noticed that Proxmox's management server was released yesterday, I have 2 VMWare servers I'm looking to upgrade and am seriously considering Proxmox instead.

posted Sun, 07 Dec 2025
permanent link

Writing with LLMs
I listened to a podcast where an author spoke about using agentic AI to make a writing "team". He had beta reader/critics responding from specific perspectives, another grammar LLM, and an editor LLM - he'd pass drafts back and forth between them like they were people as part of the process.

I have a couple of paid LLMs - Microsoft CoPilot for 365 as part of a subscription, and Perplexity (I have a 3 month free trial program). I started playing with them to see how they could benefit.

I was trying to research a science-fiction book I'd read as a teenager, I only knew the name of one of the races in book, and tried Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT and CoPilot. Only ChatGPT pulled up the book title and author, along with a summary - and this was the free ChatGPT version.

I assume that's more a function of the training library, not the LLM itself.

Then, I tried giving them outlines of plot ideas to write - Gemini came in last, the others were comparable. As a last task, I asked them all to write a 500-word short story about an astronaut stranded on Mars, with elements of the story Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Martian.

ChatGPT felt more nuanced, CoPilot even used the names of the sources in the story. Perplexity felt like a direct-to-dvd version of "The Martian" that you'd see one on of those free channels on Roku.

I think I'll use CoPilot when writing, I like the idea of training it on my own documents and having it easily identify my writing style and body of work out of the box.

posted Sun, 14 Sep 2025
permanent link

Proxmox 9 is out!
All historical lessons about early upgrading of systems notwithstanding, I saw the release announcement for Proxmox 9.0 and decided to be one of the bleeding-edge adoptees. I moved my primary workload to my secondary server, ran:

apt update
apt upgrade

Then, update /etc/apt/sources.list, change all references of bookworm to trixie, then run

apt-dist-upgrade

All went well, no issues so far. Already at 9.03...

posted Thu, 07 Aug 2025
permanent link

Down Again
I spent last week down with Covid. 2 days of high fever, followed by increasing energy. The one side effect this time? My sense of taste is off. A bear claw tasted like barbecued pork. Spicy mexican food tasted bland - they had mouthfeel but no flavor.

I can't wait for this to go away.

posted Sun, 27 Jul 2025
permanent link

Writing again
I've been on a writing binge, scheduling 1 hour blocks of time to write. Not edit, but to sit down with a spiral notebook and a Bic pen and write. No going back, no strikethroughs, just running with an idea and seeing where it takes me.

I realized my other attempts at writing have been heavily narrative - then again, they were nanowrimo efforts in 2014-2016. Trying to include emotions into the narrative makes for much easier flow and makes for better fiction, from what I've learned in this new experiment.

I like writing on paper with a pen, when I use a computer it's too tempting to edit as I go and break the creative flow. Or, to change the formatting and structure as I go. Better to let the words flow and edit later.

With my penchant for technology, gadgetry and toys, it's nice to eliminate the distractions and create with the lowest common denominator, a 45 cent notebook and 20 cent pen.

posted Sun, 20 Jul 2025
permanent link

"Return to Industry"
I've read articles chronicling Microsoft's latest round of layoffs. The headline reads "Microsoft to axe "thousands" of its sales staff".

Microsoft is continuing to "focus on building high-performing teams and increasing our agility by reducing layers with fewer managers"

I suppose that's better when they reported that hundreds were "returned to industry", as reported by Microsoft's Ministry of good.speak.

posted Thu, 19 Jun 2025
permanent link

No EV
I tried, I gave up. I bought a BMW I3 in 2023, while I was working from home. I installed a 20 amp 208 circuit in my carport, so I could charge my car at home, and all was well.

I started commuting a couple of days a week, a long commute - 75 miles each way. That was just enough for me to need to charge to get home. At first, I tried public chargers - roughly half of the chargers I tried failed to start charging, were broken, or in one case, the charger snapped off one of the plugs at the end of the car port, which is about a $3000 part!

I did love the car, it was efficient, quirky, well engineered. Surprisingly roomy for 4 people, albeit with front-opening rear doors.

I got sick of range anxiety, worrying about not having a spare tire, and wanting something with more room and bought a hybrid gas vehicle. Now I don't have to obsess over range, my electric bill will go down, and so far my best gas mileage was 52 MPG in freeway driving.

posted Sat, 31 May 2025
permanent link