Prepping for the next homelab project

Posted on June 23, 2025 by baudattitude

So, my homelab experiment is running generally quite well.  I keep running into an annoying Proxmox bug that makes the ethernet controller hang up, and hopefully they will fix that soon, but I have a lot of self-hosted services now.  File sharing, media sharing, comics and manga servers, so on and so forth.

Naturally I can’t stop there.

Neither my wife nor I are what you’d call vehemently anti-Windows, but we’ve both been a little annoyed by the direction Windows 11 has been going.  Not the operating system itself – that’s fine – but I’m pretty tired of the constant notifications and hints to install “suggested applications” and in general it feels less like a desktop OS and more like a cheap carrier-subsidized smartphone.

And, to be clear, I’m running Windows 11 Professional.  Not home.  I should not be getting a “hey did you want to install Telegram?” in my start menu.

So, that was one big reason we replaced her desktop PC with an M4 Pro Mac Mini – and it’s been working out very well for her!  But she’d still like access to some of her games that don’t have Mac versions.

Hence, I am delving into the Linux dark arts.

A little while ago, I bought an Ayaneo AM-01 “Retro Mini PC” which is basically just an AMD APU in a box that is heavily reminiscent of a classic Macintosh.  I did this based solely on how it looked, with no real idea what I was going to use the thing for, and thus far I have not been able to justify its existence.

Thankfully, it’s perfect for this project.  My goal is to install Bazzite on it, set it up with Steam remote play, and have it as a network-accessible game streaming device.  It’s only a 5700U so heavy duty gaming is right out – but lightweight stuff will be fine.

Assuming it works – and my guess is that it will, Bazzite has a reputation for being solid and Proton is very mature these days – the step after THAT is to slap a GPU into my Proxmox server and pass it through to a virtual Bazzite box.  Which will mean that the Ayaneo box will again be left without anything to do but also that any system in the house can just boot up Steam and run games from it.

In theory.  Lotta “in theory” in this plan.

Updates as I have them.

 

Posted in homelab, linux gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

More home server stuff. Reading is FUNdamental!

Posted on May 29, 2025 by baudattitude

It’s been a good week for projects.  Maybe a good couple of weeks, actually – I kinda forgot when I started working on this particular one.

I mentioned last month that I’d set up a home server for the purpose of actually learning new things, and that’s been working pretty well.  It did eventually get moved from the card table into the server closet, though there was a bit of a misunderstanding on my part when it came to the question of whether or not it would fit in my rack.  I thought it would, but physics disagreed and physics always gets the final word in this house.

Oh man.  Now I want a rainbow yard sign that starts with “in this house, we follow the laws of thermodynamics” and just goes from there.

It can go next to our Litany Against Fear sign.

(Note: We do not actually have this sign.  I live in the Pacific Northwest and our neighbors have no sense of humor.)

But, I digress.

At any rate, this most recent project has been setting up a self-hosted server to host our collection of comic books, manga, and assorted eBooks, and I’ve discovered that there is no such thing as one server that does everything.

I mean, first things first – we have a couple thousand books purchased through the Kindle and Apple Books stores.  There’s no real way to integrate those into anything self-hosted.  But we also have a lot of stuff that has been just kind of accumulated, whether that’s ePub format comics from Humble Bundles or PDFs from DriveThruComics or, let’s be honest, a WHOLE lot of pirated comic books that were mostly accumulated long enough ago that Demonoid was still under its original management.

Side note: Those books have been the reason I’ve been doing a lot of shell scripting recently, and abusing the heck out of generative AI.   There were about 30,000 files and many of them were duplicates and there was no standard for naming and some were rar files and some zips and it was a big old mess.  I’ve deleted about 10,000 and normalized about another 13,000 but I have a long way to go.  Being able to ask Copilot for a script that, say, descends into a directory tree and removes all instances of # from file names and pads all numbers to three digits with leading 0s has been a huge help.

Anyway, I’ve been experimenting with three different self-hosting solutions: Komga, Kavita and Suwayomi.

Komga

First, Komga.  Amazing for comics and manga – it handles the 2-page spreads in ePub files from Humble Bundle, which neither of the other two does well with.  It also doesn’t much care what format things are in and doesn’t have any particular mandates as far as naming conventions are concerned.  While I am still putting a considerable amount of time into normalizing filenames, if I just wanted to point a server at a bunch of unsorted folders to give me access to them via an internet browser, this would win.

I haven’t messed around with its metadata features at all.

Biggest downside:  Importing new media is SLOW.  Like, I assume it is doing some serious processing of each file but it seems to take an inordinate amount of time to do so.

Kavita

Next, Kavita.  I actually like Kavita a lot, but it falls down with the 2-page spreads in Humble Bundle ePubs and is very picky about how it wants its content organized on the disk.  It’s much faster than Komga when importing new content but that isn’t something you do much after you have your library set up.

It is, however, the absolute best for reading ePubs with words in them, as it has a ton of font size and line spacing options.

Suwayomi

Finally, Suwayomi.  Suwayomi is a single purpose app – it does manga, and that’s it.  This is a weird one, because it really doesn’t want to work with local copies of manga and doesn’t like stuff organized by volume rather than chapter.  It wants to read stuff off web sites, with optional downloads, and anything it does beyond that falls into “happy accidents”.

Really, it’s a piracy app that also works as a dang good aggregator for reading questionable manga translations.  My wife has absolutely taken to it, so big props to the Suwayomi team for making something that justifies all of my work.

If I could have one wishlist item for Suwayomi, it would be multi-user support.  We have pretty different tastes in manga and don’t really want to see each others’ manga libraries.  Fortunately, since I’m running it in an Unraid Docker container, it took basically no work to spin up a second instance of Suwayomi and now we have separate libraries based on the port number you connect to.

It ALSO made me figure out Tailscale so she can read manga while she’s on the go.  So that was a huge win!  I’m still kinda uncomfortable with allowing external access to our network, but Tailscale is big enough and reputedly secure enough that I figure I can trust them.

So, which one will I be going with?  Well, that’s the neat thing.  I can’t pick.  None of them do EVERYTHING I want, but each of them has one thing they are just really amazingly good at.

So, in the end… I’m running all three.  Thank God for Docker.

Once I get all of the media actually sorted out, I may want to look into some sort of tablet app for these, for offline reading.  That will probably be its own sort of fun.

 

Posted in comics, homelab, organization | Leave a comment

At this rate, I should be ready for Switch 2 around 2029.

Posted on May 20, 2025 by baudattitude

So, playing through Assassin’s Creed: Mirage has not yet inspired me to dive full-heartedly into the terrifying morass of games I have built up over the years, but it did at least get me to look at my shelf of red-spined Switch cases and pull something down.

For me, playing an October 2023 release in May of ’25 is practically like playing it on release date.   I actually have a little more shame than usual that it’s taken me this long to get around to it, because I not only bought it on day one, I bought it on day one IN JAPAN because, gosh darn it, I wanted to buy a major video game release on its launch date there at least once in my life.  Bic Camera even threw in a clear file and some stickers as a bonus.

It didn’t hurt that the exchange rate meant that it was, like, $42 instead of $60.  Or is it $70 now?  I don’t know what Switch games cost.

I’m not super far into the game, but it’s definitely hitting all the right notes.  It’s super colorful, cheerful to a fault, and finally fixed the one thing I most dislike about Mario games:

You can save the game whenever you want.  You don’t need to play a certain number of levels to earn a save, or get to a Toad house that lets you save once, or any other nonsense.  Open menu, press save, done.

Sadly, it still has a “lives” system, which is a pet peeve of mine.  I am in my 50s, I do not have particularly impressive reflexes, I was never very good at platforming games even when I was considerably younger, and I go through a LOT of lives once the difficulty goes up a little bit.  Most of the time, when I get into a Mario game, there’s a point where I have to go back to an easy level with a few one-ups or a lot of coins and just grind the heck out of it.

SMB: Wonder isn’t there yet!  It’s actually been pretty mellow so far, and I’ve managed to accumulate a nice stash of lives.  I’m only on the second world, though.  Hopefully I find that super easy 1up grinding level before things heat up too much.

Rant aside, I’m having a blast in general.  I’m even finding myself playing levels two or more times so I can see them in “regular” mode in addition to the absolute madness that starts once you pick up a Wonder flower thing.

So, definitely a good one to pull off the shelf.   The only real problem is the number of games still up there that have never even been booted once.  I’ll get to them.  Eventually.  Probably before I buy the next system and put even MORE red spines on the shelf.

Wait, what color are Switch 2 boxes?  If they’re like blue, or something, that’s going to be weird.

Posted in Switch | Leave a comment

Well, I had a pretty good run. All hail our machine overlords.

Posted on May 19, 2025 by baudattitude

It’s been a few years since I’ve seen one in the wild, but I’ve known a few IT guys who liked to rock a shirt with some variant of “Be nice to me or I will replace you with a shell script” emblazoned across the chest.

Here’s an example, stolen from Amazon:

Now, I’ve always felt that this was a little misanthropic, though that’s certainly nothing new when it comes to the particular line of work I’m in.  Being in IT / computer security / development / nerd stuff in general, we tend to get a bit of a sense that our contributions are not properly appreciated and rewarded, and that lends itself naturally to fostering a bit of bitterness.

And, occasionally, this sort of mentality is very accurate.  In my last position, I needed to get data from a spreadsheet that was supposed to update on Mondays, but that would occasionally update later in the week for no apparent reason.  Sometimes, it would even skip a week.  I eventually got annoyed enough by this to dig into it, and it came out that the spreadsheet needed input from a different system and that the process for getting data from that system into the spreadsheet was that a particular employee needed to hand-copy the values from system A into spreadsheet B, and they were the only employee with access to both, so if they were out of the office it didn’t get done.

That could absolutely have been scripted.

Now, I’ve never owned a shirt like this, and I don’t do a ton of scripting.  But I do some!  Occasionally I put up a post on this site talking about some new challenge I have faced and solved, generally with a lot of reading Stack Overflow and parsing through man pages.  It makes me feel very satisfied.

The post I put up just the other day, for instance, with me talking about how I had figured out how to use ffmpeg to add a new font to an mkv file?  Peak satisfaction.

…and then I made the mistake of getting curious.

I’ve used Microsoft’s Copilot to help debug scripts in the past.  How would it perform with something like ffmpeg?  Surely that software, while very useful in a specific domain, would also be fairly obscure?

…oh dear.  That would have saved me a lot of time.

So I was a little shaken, and then I made the mistake of asking for Copilot’s help with something else.  See, I have about 30,000 downloaded comic books in .cbz format, and they are not named in any particularly-consistent way.  I’ve been kind of mentally playing around with a script to normalize the filenames, but have hit so many edge cases and little frustrations that it’s never gotten off the ground.  I’ve probably devoted 3 or 4 hours to this, without a single line of usable code emerging from the thought process.

It did take me a few attempts before I managed to describe exactly what I wanted to Copilot’s satisfaction, but that was a few minutes, at most 10, and what came out of it was a working and (and this is even more vexing) COMMENTED shell script that did precisely what I wanted.

So, yeah.  I’m still clinging to a tiny shred of self-worth, because I did need to describe what I wanted, and being able to describe a problem well is probably a skill of its own, but boy did I get taken down a few pegs.

 

Posted in shell scripts | Leave a comment

A quick script to add a font to an MKV file

Posted on May 12, 2025 by baudattitude

Why do I do this to myself?

OK, so.  Some background.

I’ve been working on a Jellyfin server as something of a side project, with the idea that it will probably teach me something useful that I can apply at some later point in time.  I don’t NEED a Jellyfin server, since I usually serve all my content through iTunes, but I can’t deny that it is very handy to be able to just download an MKV file with embedded subtitles and play it without first running the files through handbrake to burn the subs into the video.

Also, files with non-burned subtitles mean that I can do stuff like fix typos in the subtitle script, mostly the ever-painful “YOUR WELCOME”, which I see as a sign that the person proofing the subtitles dropped out of school before hitting, roughly, third grade.

I make this sort of snide holier-than-thou comment despite being fully aware that my personal use (more properly, misuse) of, specifically, commas and (to a lesser extent) apostrophes is egregious enough to be considered a war crime in several of the more refined countries.  And also Angola, for some reason.

Note: I’m not sure Angola is a country, but I’m too lazy to google it and for the sake of the joke let’s just roll with it.  OK?

But I digress.

Moving on to the topic of today’s post, I have been downloading a bunch of anime to serve as content for the Jellyfin server – and one of the shows I downloaded was season 1 of The Apothecary Diaries.  I am not enough of a weeb to call it “Kusuriya no Hitorigoto”, but you can think of it thusly if you prefer.

You can also call it The Maomao Is Just The Best Girl In The World Show, which is also fine!  Honestly it would have been a better translation.

However, after downloading a batch of episodes, I noticed a couple of notes on the torrent:

I’m not certain that I would have noticed the missing fonts, personally – but since someone had been gracious enough to point out the errors AND provide links to download the fonts, I decided that I would correct the issues with the mkv files before copying them up to the Jellyfin server for future watching.

Naturally, this led me, as always, to ffmpeg, a lovely all-purpose Cultural Cat Girl tool for manipulating video files.

It also led me, after a couple of false starts on my own, to this superuser.com thread which explained some of the errors I was getting and gave me enough information to write a script to, well, attach fonts to mkv files.

The script is as follows, though I will caution you that it is not really the best thing in the world.  For one thing, it doesn’t check whether the font file actually exists!  It also doesn’t check that it IS a font file, and the mime type it assigns to the font file is always font/otf and never application/x-truetype-font even if that would be more appropriate.  I am relying on the video player to make the right call here.

Furthermore, I didn’t test it very thoroughly at all.  I ran it against a single file, and then a folder full of files, and tested the delete option, and these all seemed to work well enough for me.

#!/bin/bash
#
# add_font_to_mkv - adds a font as an attachment to an MKV file (Creates a new mkv file with .font_added.mkv extension)
# Usage: add_font_to_mkv all FONT_FILE - adds font to all mkv files in the folder
#	 add_font_to_mkv filename FONT_FILE - adds font to specified file
#	 add_font_to_mkv (filename or all) FONT_FILE delete - delete originals after update
#

if [ "$1" = "all" ];
then
	echo "Batch Conversion"
	for filename in [ *.mkv ] 
	do
		filenamenoext=${filename%.*} 
	if [ -f "$filenamenoext".mkv ];
	then
		ffmpeg -i "$filenamenoext".mkv -map 0 -c copy -attach "$2" -metadata:s:t mimetype=font/otf  "$filenamenoext".font_added.mkv
		if [ "$3" = "delete" ];
		then
			rm "$filenamenoext".mkv
		fi
	fi

	
	done
else
	echo "Single File Conversion"

	filename="$1"

	filenamenoext=${filename%.*} 
	if [ -f "$filenamenoext".mkv ];
	then
		ffmpeg -i "$filenamenoext".mkv -map 0 -c copy -attach "$2" -metadata:s:t mimetype=font/otf  "$filenamenoext".font_added.mkv
		if [ "$3" = "delete" ];
		then
			rm "$filenamenoext".mkv
		fi
	fi

fi

Hopefully this is of use to someone at some point in the future.

Posted in homelab, organization, shell scripts, video encoding | Leave a comment

Dunstabbin’ (again)

Posted on May 11, 2025 by baudattitude

Finished Assassin’s Creed: Mirage tonight, which is embarrassingly-enough the first “real game” I have completed all year.  I’ve spent entirely too many hours in soulless gacha waifu cash grabs, and I shall do penance appropriately.

I mean, after I do my dailies.

But, setting that aside: AC:M was quite good!  It utterly failed to stick the landing – seriously, if I need to do a web search of “meaning of ending of <game>” while the credits are still rolling, my thought is that the narrative needed some extra time in the oven – but it did give me 27-and-a-bit hours of running around Baghdad stabbing people that generally needed to be stabbed.

And, really, that’s the baseline you expect from an Assassin’s Creed game.  Well, that and occasionally making fun of guard AI that lets you lure a steady stream of hapless soldiers into standing next to the same, increasingly-full haystack.   And I was playing on the default difficulty!  The description for easy mode implies that the guard AI can be made even more brain-dead, if desired.

Look, if the guards were smart then the game wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining.

Playing through Luna also continued to generally be a good experience.  I did move over to playing it locally as I DO have a nice gaming PC and it DOES look much nicer when you can crank the graphics sliders to 11, but I could happily have gone either way.

I rarely sink to the depths of social commentary, but I did notice one omission in the game’s settings that I will mention without further comment: While you can happily sack monasteries in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and I am told that you can 100% shank people in Shinto shrines in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and then destroy the contents of the shrines, there was absolutely no stabbing of ANYONE in a mosque, or really any way to go into a mosque at all.

Well, maybe that was just left out.  It is a much smaller game than any of the massive open world RPG-style Assassin’s Creed games we’ve been getting since Origins came out, back in 2017.

…and typing that out makes me realize that it really HAS been nearly a decade since that came out.  Oh, dear.  I’ll just set a broom and dustpan next to my computer chair so my wife can more easily clean things up when I crumble into dust.

Anyway, that’s not a criticism!  I really appreciated the reduced scope and stuff like a simplified skill tree and gearing system.  Odyssey, in particular, had me spending far too much time in menus trying to decide whether 3% more of THIS skill was worth giving up 2% of THIS OTHER skill and so on.

The smaller map and more focused storyline also made me feel like I could do side content without it absolutely consuming my life, so I did most of the optional contracts and chest finding and collectables collecting.  Not all of it – I wasn’t trying for any trophies – but enough to feel like I’d fully engaged with the game and gotten my money’s worth.

Next up, I dunno.  I had a weird flashback to my misspent youth earlier today that has me wondering about the state of Apple II emulation.  Maybe I’ll find some 40-year-old game I never finished and bump it to the top of my stack instead of playing something more recent that I actually spent money on.

We’ll just have to see.

 

Posted in videogames | Leave a comment

The Cloudy Stabbing Mans

Posted on April 27, 2025 by baudattitude

While I am a big fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, I’m usually at least a couple of years behind the curve when it comes to actually playing the latest entries.

So, just getting around to Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, two years after release, isn’t all that unusual for me.  What IS a little unusual is that, in the process of getting to this point, I had to admit defeat and give up on AC: Valhalla because it was sapping my will to live any desire I had to keep playing it.

That isn’t to say that I don’t like the RPG-formula entries in the series.  I loved both Origins and Odyssey.  Bayek is top three AC protagonists of all time and Kassandra is right up there as well, and both featured a huge hunk of more-or-less-historical scenery to climb all over and drop down upon unsuspecting guards from.  Also Atlantis, which is maybe less historical and more…well, you know, I wasn’t around back then, I can’t PROVE it didn’t exist.

Valhalla, well, there may eventually be cities and buildings to climb?  But I was like a dozen hours into it, and I had done a lot of dice gaming and Viking Rap Battles and sacking monasteries for resources to construct new huts in my outpost and… well, I hadn’t really done any assassinating yet.  A little?  Not much, anyway, and it didn’t seem like any was really imminent.  I’d done a lot of running up to people, screaming at them, and hitting them with an axe, and that wasn’t scratching the stealthy stabby itch.

And it CERTAINLY wasn’t scratching the scaling massive structures itch or the parkour-style chases over rooftops itch.

That’s a lot of words to justify dropping it and moving on to Mirage, but it was absolutely the right choice.  In less than 90 minutes from “Press A to start”, I had gotten the “join the assassin’s guild! we’ll make a man out of you!” introduction out of the way, gotten my own hidden blade, received instructions to go to Baghdad and stab Bad People For Good Reasons, and ridden a camel there to get on with the stabbing.

This is how an Assassin’s Creed game SHOULD start.

I’ve put another eleven hours into it since arriving in Baghdad, the main storyline is somewhere over <gestures vaguely> there somewhere, and I am choosing to ignore it in favor of doing all kinds of side missions where I sneak into places I am not supposed to be and fill bushes and haystacks with the bodies of hapless guards whose last words are almost always been some variant of “hey, what are you doing here?” before they catch a bad case of Knife-In-Throat Disease.

This is also how I feel an Assassin’s Creed game should be played.  It’s a sort of very familiar gaming comfort food.

On the other hand, I’m going well outside my comfort zone in HOW I’m playing it, which is to say that I’m actually taking advantage of the fact that you can use your Ubisoft library through Amazon’s Luna Cloud Gaming service, which works… pretty well, actually!   I’m not sure I’d use it for something that demanded quick reactions, but Assassin’s Creed games are typically pretty forgiving in that respect.

The last time I tried a cloud gaming service was because Google had sent me a free Stadia kit.  That worked pretty well also, though it was a bit blurrier than Luna and considerably more prone to little visual glitches. I’m not sure how much of the improvement I’m seeing with Luna might just be attributable to having a better WiFi setup now, to be perfectly fair.

Even with the better WiFi, the graphics experience is not comparable to a high end PC or modern console.  I’d say you’re getting roughly the PS4 experience, or at least what I remember the PS4 to have played like.  It’s possible I have some overly-optimistic memories of that console.  It’s perfectly playable, at any rate.

There are two big points in Luna’s favor.  Maybe three.  I’ll just start putting down some positives and we can count together at the end.

First, assuming you have Amazon Prime and link it to your Ubisoft account, you can play the majority of the games you own through Luna without an additional subscription.  Obvious omissions are older Assassin’s Creed titles – anything before Unity seems to be missing, and while I do have access to Liberation HD I can’t see Assassin’s Creed III HD.  I don’t own any older Far Cry games, but Far Cry 5, New Dawn, and 6 are all available.

Likewise, you can link in your GoG account.  This is much more hit and miss when it comes to title availability, and I don’t own nearly as many games there, but some showed up.  I don’t remember buying most of these on GoG.  Is there something where Steam games you own link over to GoG?

The big plus here is that you don’t have to buy games on Luna and pray that the service stays around.  You can buy Windows games on other services, play them through Luna when you want, and keep access to them when and if Luna follows Stadia into the afterlife.

Oddly enough, this does NOT link in games I own via Amazon Gaming.  I’ve never actually paid for anything from that service, though, and I typically forget it even exists except on the rare occasions I claim free titles on it.  And it certainly does not connect to Steam or to games you own via the Microsoft store.  There’s a connector to the Epic Games store but that seems mostly there for Fortnite.  None of the games I own via Epic Games show up in Luna.

Second, the real justification for cloud gaming, it’s platform independent and you don’t need a desktop PC or a gaming laptop.  Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is a reasonably demanding game, it’s not going to perform well on an older GPU – especially not an older laptop GPU.  Something like Luna means that you don’t need to upgrade your computer as often.

That segues neatly into pointing out that it also gives access to Windows-only games to Mac users.  Since my daily driver laptop is an M2 MacBook Pro, that’s a big advantage.

I did need to install Microsoft Edge, which felt weird.  Not gonna lie there.  Felt icky.  Luna needs Safari support.

I think it should also work on a tablet or phone, though I haven’t tested it.  I definitely have doubts about how performant the streaming would be over LTE, though.  Maybe it’s fine and I’m just being a boomer.

Not needing to play the games using local hardware also means that the computer in your house is NOT sucking down a ton of electricity, while the computer in some Amazon data somewhere IS.  You’re (at least partially) outsourcing your electric bill to one J. Bezos, and I think he can cover it.

Lastly, if you have a capable gaming PC at home but also want to occasionally play games on the road – or in your living room – both Ubisoft and GoG claim that your save data and achievements will sync back to a locally-run copy of the game.  This has worked for me, in my limited testing, though Ubisoft Connect on Windows regularly complains that it wasn’t able to sync my save and makes me slam the “Retry Now” button a few times.

tl;dr version: Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is the best Assassin’s Creed I’ve played in a while and cloud gaming seems like it has maybe kinda almost sorta reached the “it just works” stage.

 

Posted in videogames | Leave a comment

(Let’s Get) Nerdy, Nerdy

Posted on April 8, 2025 by baudattitude

So, new project.  I have a lot of those.  Often they start with grandiose plans and get abandoned once the harsh reality of implementing them smacks me in the face like some sort of wet, soggy face-smacking thing.

New NEW project: work on my metaphor game.

But back to the original:

A few months ago, I got laid off.  It wasn’t entirely unexpected, and if I’m completely honest not entirely unwelcome.  I had been doing technical support for a Major Software company, and due to a quirk of fate had been granted access to all sorts of metrics that the rank and file weren’t supposed to be seeing, due to being all rank and… filthy, as it were.

And those metrics showed me that we simply were not getting enough work to justify the number of people that were getting paychecks.  They also showed me some AMAZING ways that people were using to pad their metrics, some of which I may make use of in future if I ever feel entirely without scruples.

I tried to write “unscrupled” there, but autocorrect made me take it back.  In my opinion, it is an awesome word and should enter the English language post-haste.

But I digress.  Short version, when I got the 9 AM “hey can you join me in a quick zoom call?” from my manager’s manager it did not come as a shock.  The rest of the day was mostly spent tidying up loose ends and commiserating with the rest of the team because a whole lot of us were getting those quick zoom calls.

Including my manager, hence the level skip on the meeting request.  Nice enough guy, hope he’s doing well.

Anyway, I took advantage of my sudden freedom to get rid of a small mountain of computer hardware that I had been maintaining as a home lab, because suddenly I no longer needed a half-dozen servers of various types and a shelf of obsolete laptops.

It was extremely satisfying.

However, life continues to happen.  And, while I am enjoying the freedom of not punching a clock every day, I should probably do something to get health insurance again.  Hence, I am applying for jobs.

This hasn’t been an incredibly productive process, but I did get an interview where one of the interviewers asked me, with the sort of air of someone asking something incredibly obvious, “so, describe your home lab for me.”

This is actually a fair question!  Someone in my field could reasonably be expected to have such a thing, and it immediately struck me that “actually I got rid of it” would not be the best of answers.

Instead, I quickly described my home lab as it HAD been, and the interview continued.

I didn’t get that job.  But it did make me realize that I probably needed to have some hardware around the house to make test boxes out of again.

I just didn’t want to wind up with another stack of decommissioned business PCs.  I mean, they’re cheap and easy to come by but they do take up space.

Instead, I threw together this thing, which as of yet does not have a clever name.

It’s… well, about half new parts and half parts that I scavenged from other systems.  It’s got an i5-12400 that used to be the guts of my gaming PC, an 8TB HDD that got pulled out of my NAS the last time I upgraded it, a 1TB SSD that used to be in a PS5, 32GB of extremely cheap RAM, some Noctua fans because I broke the stock Intel CPU cooler while installing it and then decided that I would replace the case fans while I was ordering a new CPU cooler, and a 1000 watt Corsair power supply that is the definition of overkill but also the only power supply I had on hand.

Oh, and a brand new modern mini ITX board that supports Intel 12th through 14th gen processors but has honest-to-god VGA and PS/2-style connectors on the back panel.  I don’t know if I’ll ever need them but I figured some legacy connectors wouldn’t be awful to have in a server.

All of this is in a cheap Rosewill 2U server case because I am going to rack mount this bad boy.  It will not live on this card table for much longer.

(In three months, it will still be on the card table.  Bet.)

It was not the world’s easiest case to work in, mostly because the cables for this power supply are far too long and Corsair does not sell shorter ones, but I eventually got everything jammed together.  There are some stability issues if I turn on memory overclocking, but otherwise it’s been up and running for the best part of the last two weeks.

Hardware is the easy part, though.  I needed some software to pull it all together and to look good on a resume.  So here’s what I have going on so far:

On the bare metal, I’m running Proxmox.  This seemed like the best option for a hypervisor.  I didn’t want to go anywhere near ESXi right now, and while I have plenty of Windows licenses lying around I didn’t want to deal with Hyper-V either.

Next, there are two Linux VMs.  One is running Ubuntu and the other Rocky Linux.  If I were a proper nerd, one would be Arch.

I don’t hate myself that much. Apologies to Arch fans, and may your fursuits be ever well-ventilated and free of parasites.

After the Linux VMs, I have an Unraid VM.  That’s probably just another Linux VM, really, but it’s Linux with a more user-friendly exterior and a licensing fee – and also with a requirement to boot off a USB drive, because reasons.  Fortunately, Proxmox let me pass through a USB drive so I didn’t have to dedicate hardware to it.

I also told Proxmox to pass through the on-board SATA controller to Unraid.  So, from the Unraid server’s perspective, it has a 128GB “cache” drive (this is a virtual disk) and an 8TB “array” drive (this is a physical disk).

Yes, I know.  I should have a redundant drive in there.  It may happen.

On Unraid, I’m running Docker for apps.  So far I just have Jellyfin running there, mostly as a test.  I can’t move my entire media library over to it, because I have a great deal of media that I’ve bought from iTunes and no media server except Apple’s own can play those files.

It’s just serving a few TB of anime right now, and seems to be working OK.

I have more to do.  Like, I should figure out some stuff to run that isn’t just a media server.  But, for now, I have a valid answer to “describe your home lab for me.”

 

Posted in organization, work | Leave a comment

It almost feels rude to point this out.

Posted on April 5, 2025 by baudattitude

So, while I’m personally OK with most of Microsoft’s OS releases over the years, I know that not everyone is.  Windows 11 in particular has raised a few hackles – not, to be clear, to the same extent that Vista or Windows 8 did, but it’s definitely gotten some people grouchy.

Still, Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, so they must be making enough people happy.   I’m typing this right now while sitting in front of a Windows 11 PC, in fact, and I am regularly happy when comparing the price of games for it to the price of games for consoles.

We will not, at this time, compare the price of my GPU to the price of a console because that is not something I would like to address at this point in time.

Ahem.  Moving on.

With their 50th anniversary, they put out a very nice set of retro wallpapers, which you can download directly from their server, here:

https://unlocked.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/50th-windows-wallpapers.zip

I particularly like the Solitaire wallpaper.

There’s just one thing.  If you unzip that wallpaper pack, you might notice a suspicious extra folder.

Now, it’s probably bad manners to point this out, but that _MACOSX folder means that this zip file originated on, well, a Mac.  Surely there are some graphic artists at Microsoft who actually work on Windows, right?

Right?

 

 

Posted in random | Leave a comment

Groundhog Day, Genshin Impact Style

Posted on April 5, 2025 by baudattitude

Continuing from the last post, here’s my impressions of Genshin’s Sumeru Archon quest from my second time playing through it.

My first pass through Sumeru was enough to drive me away from the game for a while, mostly because I thought I’d figured out how the game was structured by that point and assumed that the “World of Aranara” world quest series was going to be mandatory for the Archon quest.

For the uninitiated, the World of Aranara is a 15-to-20-hour quest chain where you mostly run around a forest with entirely too much verticality while you obey the commands of small radish-like creatures that talk funny.  Some people love it, and I’m happy that it brings those people joy.

For the record, it does not bring me joy.  And it was with great pleasure that I discovered that it could be completely ignored for the purposes of completing the Sumeru storyline, though it does become mandatory if you want to run around the jungle solving puzzles and collecting chests.  There are also a number of crafted weapons locked behind it, which is particularly important if you want to craft a good 4-star sword for Bennett.

The other pain point in Sumeru is, of course, the phase of the Archon quest where you are locked into a sort of an Endless Eight/Groundhog Day-style loop.  This was really the only point in my entire second playthrough where I found myself wishing that Hoyoverse would implement a “skip dialogue” button, but knowing that it was coming and – more importantly – knowing that it would eventually end made it more tolerable.

Also, quests in Sumeru felt much longer than previous regions.  This is mostly a problem because quests give rewards at the end.  So, while Inazuma or Liyue had a bunch of small quests that kept giving you twenty or thirty thousand mora and some material at the end, Sumeru has fewer and longer quests with, yes, slightly better rewards.  I don’t have any strict data to back this up so this is strictly from vibes, but it felt like I was suddenly in a new region, with new characters to build and new teams to try out, and not getting enough resources from quests to do so.

Presumably, this was not an issue if you were a veteran player who came into Sumeru at max level after playing through all of the earlier areas, with an inventory overflowing with spare resources.

I am being a little harsh on Sumeru, here.  While it does feel like it was designed to maximize player “engagement hours”, it does introduce some really fun characters – Candace is an all-time favorite, and Nahida is just the ultimate in oh-she’s-so-tiny-and-adorable followed by “wait, never ever get on her bad side”.  And, though it took me a while to understand how Dendro works, I have had a considerable amount of fun with Hyperbloom teams.

Another positive to mention is that the villains are pretty top tier.  It would be really boring if every new region was just “oh look, the Abyss / the Fatui are getting up to no good again”.

I mean, there are Fatui in the region.  And they ARE up to no good.  But they really aren’t the focus of the plot, most of the time.

Lastly, some of the biggest pain points were addressed with QoL updates.  We’re talking stuff like interior maps and fast gadget swapping.  No more going into your inventory every time you need to bust out a musical instrument, or getting hopelessly lost in one of the underground mazes.

I mean, I can still get lost even with a map.  I’m special that way.

Anyway.  While I could still say some things about the desert area, my opinion of the region went way up, this time around.

Then it was off to Fontaine!  More about that later, unless I forget again.

 

 

Posted in videogames | Leave a comment