Tech on CatalystND

AI Concerns

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:54:47 -0500

Its bad in new and exciting ways I never expected

This is what I kept saying at dinner tonight with my friend Andrew. We were out to dinner in between rounds of Undaunted Stalingrad and got on the topic of AI. It came up because our hometown favorite grocery store Wegmans stated collection biometric data in some of its stores which drew huge deserved backlash. I wanted to outline some of the concerns we discussed at that dinner.

AI Facial Recognition is Different

We are all used to cameras in stores and public areas in cities, and I am not entirely against them fully, although I do have reservations. Stores have a right to protect their goods and employees, and cameras help them identify criminals and security risks. If an incident occurs, they can go review the footage and hand it off the authorities.

When an incident happens.

Thats one of the big differences with AI facial recognition. It is constantly watching you. Before, there wasn’t someone in the back room checking how long you stared at that box of Fruit Loops before setting it back on the shelf. There wasn’t someone listening to who you were on the phone with. Or looking at who you went shopping with and linking you as friends in your file. But AI can do that, and that is different than just being recorded…

Now if I want to know everytime a certain person came to our store, I can list them all out. I could tell you how long they stay on average. Who they come in with. I can predict when they will be here again. These are all extremely problematic ideas.

First off - why do we give companies and cities the right to track us? This is not an inherent right that they have. Privacy needs to be legistlated yesterday. Walmart shouldn’t have the right to collect and sell information about me. That is my data, not Walmart’s, not Wegman’s, not Facebook’s.

Second - this is prone to abuse. Lets say someone working at a store with one of these systems is a stalker. All of a sudden, they have access to a potential victims routine and paterns. In this video researching Flock AI camera security vulnerabilities Ben does a great job going over the potential issues of this technology in the wrong hands - and to be clear it will fall into the wrong hands. If we allow this to become widspread, bad actors will use and abuse these systems.

What is the plus side?

Lets be honest, at best companies get slightly better lose prevention for this. If your local city or PD impliments it, maybe they are able to catch a few more petty crimials. But at what cost? Liberty lost is rarely taken back. Once we allow every private company and the government to track you with AI cameras, there is no taking it back.

Energy Implications

One part of the AI issue I rarely see discussed is the energy, land, and resource usage. Normally enviornmental impact is something towards the front of our minds with new technology, but for some reason the general public seems pretty quiet on the large amounts of energy, land, water, and resources used in the construction, build out, and operation of these data centers. Even today, while we are still fairly early in the AI boom, large tech companies are asking to revive long closed power plants to provide energy to their new AI focused datacenters. Not to mention the large amounts of land these massive data centers consume. The concrete to build them and the cooling systems used also consume massive amounts of water.

These datacenters are going to have massive enviornmental impacts. AI is by FAR the least efficent computing in the mainstream. By miles. Its not even close. Arguements between C and python are hilarious now that we are in the world of AI computing where we run a 100GB text model to tell you what to make for dinner tonight.

The Loss of Knowledge and Expertise

Forum usage has dropped to an all time low. People aren’t asking questions and having troubleshooting discussions where they can be indexed anymore.
This graph shows stack overflow submissions overtime. I did not validate the content of this graph, so please take it with a grain of salt. But I think we can all agree the internet has felt a lot more dead since AI started taking over.

On top of this, the jobs AI is automating today tend to be entry level jobs. It has, so far, mostly failed to replace senior technical resources (at least in IT|Cyber Securty).

This leads to a couple of problems:

Inablity to find information via web search

Have an issue that you are pretty sure is very common? Well too bad, the answer isn’t going to be on Google in a few years. If people are moving their troubleshooting conversations for technical issues to private, non-indexed AI tools search tools are going to continue to get worse (and lets be honest, they are pretty bad today). This is also an issue with Discord and Facebook groups over forums, but that is a rant I will save for another day.

A lack of juniors today is a lack of seniors tomorrow

It is looking like the tech industry is going to have a very similar issue to the issue the trades have had recently. Very few new workers are joining the workforce, and the current workers are aging out and retiring. This has lead to a shortage of workers in these industries causing increased prices and delayed timelines.

If we do not find a place for entry level workers in tech to sink in their teeth and learn then the gap between skilled seniors and the incoming juniors will continue to grow. This will lead to security issues as inexperienced workers are forced into possitions they are unqualified for with little oversight as the seniors get streched thin

A lack of ability to troubleshoot

One of the most important skills someone early in their tech career can learn is how to properly and quickly troubleshoot issues. Part of that workflow involves searching for similar issues so you do not have to reinvent the wheel. If the only spot you can find troubleshooting information is via an AI, then people will begin to fully rely on these tools and will lose many of the troubleshooting skills that are key to progressing their careers. I have already seen this trend in those entering the workforce right out of college - they more often than others will accept the output of an AI as the way things are “supposed” to work, instead of understanding that like any search tool, AI often supplies an incorrect answer or gives you a spotty explaination. You as the end user need to be able to digest that information and decide if that solution seems valid before taking it as gospel. I am going off on a tangent here, but hopefuly I made my point.

AI is coming. There is no stopping it. I wish there was.

Fall 2025 Info Dump

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 22:20:35 -0400

Wow Time Flies

Yeah, just like most of my journaling and writing attempts, I forgot about this for a while. Whatever, it happens don’t @ me.

Whats been happening?

A lot! Like, a lot a lot.

Our summer was jam packed, here is some of the top events:

Kim and I got engaged! News doesn’t get much better than that. I couldn’t be more excited to get married to such a wonderful woman.
Two of my best friends got married. I was the best man for one and a groomsman for the other.
We went on a wonderful vacation with my family to Lake Placid (where event #1 happened)
We saw Linkin Park on their From Zero tour and My Chemical Romance on their Black Parade reunion tour
I completed the New Hampshire Mammoth March - a one day 20 mile hike
LAN Party 2026 happened! It was a great time - there was a lot more RTS games in the rotation this year which was a huge plus to me.

What have I made

I will post more details and picture of all of these soon and link it here.

An engagement ring box made of canary wood and sapele
A cutting board as a wedding gift made of cherry and sapele
A cutting board for us made of walnut, sapele, and cherry
A set of 4 charcuterie boards as bridesmaids gifts made of black limba
A shot serving board as a gift for the host of the LAN party made of black limba
A DM screen made of old recovered red oak
A catchall tray made of black limba and purpleheart
A wallet that I hand stitched
A box made of recovered red oak
A box made of cherry and walnut for my desk
A sign for my shop made from walnut ply

Other random points

I have been getting m4ore into physical media - the concept of ownership has been top of mind for me. I have been buying more blu rays and am trying to start collecting CDs.

Privacy and Why You Should Care

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 21:02:21 -0500

I have nothing to hide, why would I care if a company or the government is keeping track of what I do?
What are they going to see, me scrolling on my phone?

Over the years, we have come to accept such a low level of privacy that many Americans no longer seem to even care about privacy as a concept. I am going to attempt to tell you why your privacy matters, why you should care, the harm this has done, and some steps that you can take to move help restore your anonymity.

How did we get here?

Imagine the advertising landscape in America 100 years ago. To these Americans advertisements are a small excerpt in the news paper letting the local community know about a sale at the local hardware store. You might see a billboard or hear a radio ad for larger companies advertising a new product, but besides that you wouldn’t know what they were offering unless you tracked it down in a catalog. The newspaper didn’t track which articles you spent more time reading, and they didn’t worry about “engagement”. They simply put out the best version of the local news they could to earn your business over other papers. It was a different world from the one we are exist in now.

The Invasion of Our Attention

Now we are bombarded by ads from so many sources that you likely don’t realize how many you are shown per day. Your TV serves you ads before you have even selected an app, that app then shows you ads to help you pick what to watch, and then unless you pay to avoid it, ads play at the throughout your show. Your scrolling session on TikTok or Instagram reels can have up to 30% of the videos attempting to sell you something. Your email inbox has become a horde of advertisements and receipts instead of a tool to communicate with your friends. Facebook no longer shows you posts from your family, now it shovels piles of AI generated content to keep your eyes on the screen. The tools we used to use to educate, entertain, and communicate have all been coopted by corporations trying to make one more sale. Understanding the infiltration of corporate greed into all facets of our lives is key. Each day they encroached into your life just a little bit further, until it became nearly impossible to keep your eyes away from their content.

The Trade

Unless you make a concentrated effort, you likely never go for a full hour during your day without getting served an advertisement. This is not normal, but because we were trading this invasion into our lives for convenience, we took the trade without knowing what we were giving up. We wanted free video entertainment, free news, free updates from our friends and family, but it was never free - your information and attention was the price.

At first, this seemed like a pro more than a con. Instead of getting random ads like we used to on TV, you were at least seeing ads that were a little relevant to you. Some of the products you were sold even solved problems you didn’t know you had yet! Nice. However, over time these ads got better and better, and because they got better at selling to you the products they were selling were able to get worse. In the current day it is often near impossible to tell the quality of a product, even if you try to put in the effort. How often do you buy a product on Amazon from a brand like JIQLAD without looking at the reviews since the product page looks nice, just to get it and find that, surprise, its trash. This is true of other “products” as well - mainly the news. Much of the news an average American now consumes is targeted to them, aiming to get them to click. After they click, the quality of the reporting is secondary, as their ad money has already been collected. This has lead to news sites with more shocking and provoking headlines, and with near nonexistent journalism. Many of these sites are now even adopting AI to generate the articles for them.

But apart from this side effect of product and news quality declining, you were paying a bigger price. Data brokers and advertising companies like Google and Facebook were building profiles on you. They were writing down what videos you watch and for how long, so they could keep you scrolling. They were seeing which of your friends posts made you mad, which kept you on the site longer than the ones that made you happy. They showed people more content that made then angry in the quest for engagement and screen time. This anger developed into hate after enough time. We can now no longer stand our fellow man, and social media’s drive to anger us to keep us engaged was a large part of this.

The Cost

We now live in a world without nuance. A world where there is right, there is wrong, and there is no in between; except the right and wrong is not consistent and switches depending on who you speak to. We now live in a world where the far-right is pushing us to authoritarian and isolationist policies because the media has preyed on fears of the average voter - fears of losing their job, rising prices, and of wars abroad - and sold them a silver bullet. A silver bullet, which is firing thousands of government workers, and raising prices through tariffs, and increasing tensions across the globe. Yet, anyone who stands in the way is the enemy, checks and balances be damned - he has a mandate. We now live in a world where the far-left praises acts of terror carried out by Hamas since those leftists disagree with Israel’s existence and actions - therefore any action taken against Israel is justified. Many others fully ignore the tremendous loss of civilian life inflicted by Israel, and would prefer Gaza be cleared out, bulldozed, and turned into a strip mall. There is no in between - no room for nuance. One side is good, one side is evil, but many don’t agree on which one is which. We live a world where we can not talk openly about these things, because if you voice the wrong opinion to the wrong person, you are no longer their friend, but instead the enemy.

The cost of the loss of your privacy is the loss of your sanity. Many Americans can no longer think for themselves, and simply wait for the algorithm to serve them their next opinion. Until we learn to value our privacy and our attention we will continue to be driven to further extremes, we will be encouraged to spend more to get less, and we will be lulled into a false sense of security. The ads and the propaganda you see are more effective than you realize because they were tailor made for you. They know what will keep your attention. They know which types of posts have changed your behavior in the past. They know you, every search you have made, and have accounted for every minute you have spent starring at a screen. There is no escaping if you keep playing.

The Way Out

To escape the system they designed for you to never leave, the first thing you need to do is care. By simply thinking about privacy and by analyzing what you are being shown, you will begin to see the patterns - both in what opinions you are being manipulated into holding, and also the patterns of behavior that are being engrained into you.

How many times a day do you check your phone? How many hours did you spend on social media this week? What did you gain from the time spent there? If you can’t remember what Instagram reel or TikTok you watched an hour ago, why do you keep going back to scroll?

The second step is to flip the table. Currently, the only way to respect your privacy and your attention is to leave. If you can not leave these sites fully, make it more difficult for them and for yourself. Remove the social media apps from your phone at the minimum if you can not delete your accounts fully. Allow the device that is on your person 24/7 to be a tool, not a distraction. There is nothing wrong with small doses of social media for entertainment but keep it on a separate device. This limits the amount those apps are able to track your activity, as well as lowering the amount of time you will spend there.

Unsubscribe from advertisements wherever possible. Use an ad-blocker whenever possible. Google has disabled many blockers from working on Chrome, take note of this act of aggression - it has been many years since Google removed “Don’t be Evil” as their core value, and the reason why has become more pronounced. Disable their location tracking when you are not using their apps, and consider using alternatives wherever possible, including gmail and maps. Switch to Firefox or other options that prioritize security and privacy.

Move back to offline backups instead of relying on cloud storage providers. This includes iCloud and Google drive/photos. Google is already analyzing the location data from your photos to stitch where you go. Right now, the FBI is pushing to get backdoors implemented into these service’s encryption. That means that your data would be able to be accessed without your knowledge or consent. Even if these systems are designed with the best of intentions to only be used in criminal trials, they will be abused. The threat of your own data being used against you in a criminal proceeding should be enough to concern you. What if the FBI demanded your document safe’s lock was replaced with a lock similar to TSA lock, so they can always get into it just in case they need to. We wouldn’t trust the government with that key, and thieves would certainly use the master key once they figured out how. Suddenly, the amount of trust we put in safes and these locks plummets. We should treat this no differently.

When you notice a service trying to manipulate you, ask yourself why, and if the reason is malicious, do your best to separate yourself from that service. Open source alternatives exist that solve many of the problems of modern digital life, and who have no incentive to manipulate you. Adopting these options does take an investment of time, but that is a small price to pay to begin to remove the interest of corporations and billionaires from your mind. Consider alternatives to social media like Mastodon, PixelFed, and Matrix where accounts and data are not controlled by a central source. Encourage movement to communication platforms with end to end encryption, where your messages can not be read in transit such as Signal or Matrix.

The future of the internet must become distributed. To continue down the path we are going down is to hand big tech the keys to our psyche, and that is simply unacceptable.

TLDR

When you protect your privacy, you protect yourself from influence. The opinions you hold should be your own - opinions that you have spent time forming and that are based on your experiences, not from the carefully crafted campaigns carried out by companies and politicians to sway us one way or another. Do not trust your data to others, their motive is always money and power. Remember that we are all human, and that the bonds that join us are stronger than those that divide.

There is a war going on for your mind, if you are thinking, you are winning.

N100 Unraid Build and Synology Migration

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 13:09:19 -0400

Parts List:

n100 motherboard
32GB DDR5 4800MHz RAM
m.2 to 6x SATA adapter
5.25" to Cooled 3.5" Adapter
Additional 2.5" Drive Tray
2x 12TB Refurbished SATA HDD
3x Assorted 6TB HDD
4x 1TB SATA SSD
1x 1TB nvme cache SSD
Old 600W EVGA Power Supply
Old Rosewell Mid-Tower Case

I recently moved my “production” homelab to an n100 based NAS I build in an old gaming computer case, from a Dell PowerEdge R630 and a Synology DS220+. It was a three step move, step one was to get the new box up and running. Step two was to transfer the data from the synology and the workload from the PowerEdge. Step 3 was to get the remaining drives out of the Synology and PowerEdge and into the new Unraid box.

The Build

It has been a bit since I have built a computer, and this was a bit of a new experience. The N100 board is a small forum factor, and already had the CPU and cooled built into the board. I have also never filled a case with so many drives. Now I didn’t add all of them until later on, but as you can see by the part list, it was ended up loaded.

It took some time to remove the old motherboard and drives. The old system was the motherboard from the first computer I ever built in 2012 - an AM3+ motherboard that started with a Phenom II x4 cpu that was later upgraded to an AMD FX-8350. I am still a sucker for the logo design on those chips.

Once I got the initial build done - n100 mounted, power and front panel headers connected, and 3 of the hard drives (2x 12TB, 1x 6TB) I was ready to get the OS installed. With Unraid, you install the OS on a USB drive. This board, being built as a NAS motherboard, had an internal USB 3.0. So I imaged a 64GB USB (which required me to manually make the USB bootable. I also only make a 20GB partition so I didn’t have to bother doing anything weird to get a FAT32 partition on it.)

Moving the data

Once everything was booted, I added a 12TB drive for parity, and the other 2 drives as data disks. It was going to take over a day to calculate parity, so I started transferring the data from the Synology. I found the best method was to setup and mount an NFS share from the Synology on the Unraid box. I added NFS to my network share and added the IP of the Unraid box as read/write.

Setup your share in unraid. In this example, the share name will be share
Mount the old servers share. Example NFS mount command bellow. Replace IP with your server’s IP, /share with the share name, and /synology/share with where you want to mount it.

mount -t nfs 10.10.0.10:/share /synology/share

Use rsync to ensure a full sync between the two devices

rsync /synology/share/ /mnt/share

This make take a long time to complete, depending on the amount of data you are moving.

Moving the Drives

I am going to skip past setting up all my docker containers, since I recreated them all and didn’t migrate. So at this point, I was able to take 4x 1TB SSD’s out of my PowerEdge since my workload had been moved to docker on the Unraid box, and 2x 6TB drives from the Synology.

I shutdown the Unraid box, and wired up the new drives. Once back in unraid, I added the SSD’s to a pool, which by default setup a mirror btrfs filesystem, which is what I wanted. So no change needed there.

I also added the 6TB drives to the array. Before it allowed me to format them, Unraid does a disk clear. This means the disk is written with all 0’s so parity is not lost and does not need to be recalculated. This is done automatically, you do not need to do anything special. Once the disk clear was done (It took somewhere between 3-6 hours, I was not keeping close track) I was able to format the drives with a file system (literally pressing the format button) and they were now part of the main protected array.

Lan Party 2024

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 22:20:35 -0400

Last weekend, I went to my first ever LAN party. I have brought my computer to friend’s houses before to play games, and we called it a LAN party, but this was the first real one. It was quite the experience, and I had a great time. The weekend was filled with great food, great games, and most importantly great people.

It was a 4 day party, from Friday to Monday. Many of us, myself included, chose to sleep in tents out in the yard. It was pretty funny with 5 tents out in the small back yard, but I slept great out there. We had all of the computers setup in the dining room, just over 10 total. In the living room there were 5 TVs setup, with a variety of PS5’s and Switch games getting played.

There was a constant flow of amazing food all weekend. The first night was spaghetti with homemade sauce meatballs. The second day there was a breakfast of bacon and eggs, followed by a dinner of brisket, ribs, and mac and cheese. The last day, there were bagels and amazing Lisi chicken wings.

The main game of the weekend ended up being Conan Exiles. I am a bit burned out on survival-craft games, but this was a pretty decent one. I ended up spending most of the time building our first house, which kept us safe until the last day where we upgraded to a much larger house.

We also played a few random games to take a break from Conan:

I am looking forward to more LAN parties in the future. It was great to spend time with some friends I don’t get to see as often, as well as make some new ones. It did bring back some of the feeling that games used to give me in childhood, gathered around the TV and participating in a group experience. Sure, I get that from other places - but its has been a long time since I got it from a game and it was nice to experience it again.

How Apple Won Me Over After a Decade in Tech

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 15:41:12 -0400

I Was a Hater

I have been working with computers for my entire adult life, and most of my adolescence as well. I have loved technology from the second I was old enough to play on my Mom’s SNES back on our giant CRT TV. I got my first laptop at 12, a terrible windows 7 Acer laptop, which had the HDD die 3 times in the first year I owned it. After I spent countless weeks troubleshooting that terrible Aspire, I was hooked, and knew I wanted to work with technology. I owned many laptops, smartphones, gaming consoles, and pretty much anything else I could get my hands on. But never, until 2023, have I ever owned a non-work issued Apple device - and now I am hooked.

Apple, for a long time to me, signaled that someone was into computing, but not computers. They didn’t appreciate hardware, not like I did. However, I have come to accept that I a lot of that was simply pride and a lack of understanding. I understood how computers work and how to fix them, so anyone who bought a computer you couldn’t repair yourself and that locks you out of so many parts of the OS must just be misinformed. Clearly Windows, Linux, and Android were the correct choices. You can install any OS you want onto the hardware, you can usually upgrade the hardware, and the prices were so much cheaper for the same hardware.

Now to be clear, I still think that Apple as a company has a lot of issues.

Apple will do everything in its power to prevent side loading apps on iOS and iPadOS because their app store cut makes them so much money
Apple only switched to USB-C on the iPhone due to the EU forcing them to
The only real way to get your Apple products repaired is in an Apple store, where they control part and labor prices
You have to use their products the way they intend, especially with iPhone and iPad
They price gouge users who need more storage or RAM to a comical level

However, Apple is Getting Their Shit Together

It may be because of pressure from EU legislation, or a drive to be competitive on features instead of only marketing, but Apple is doing a lot of things right at the moment.

Apple left the mac lineup neglected for quite some time after the mobile boom they experienced with the iPhone. macOS got updates, but many of the features people had wanted for years never came, and the hardware was the same thing you could get in any other computer, but at an extreme markup. Recent updates in the last few years are addressing both the hardware and software of the mac.

x86 is dead, long live x86

While it may be many decades until we are fully rid of the instruction set of the x86-64 cores which have been around since 1999, the future of computing is moving more towards the ARM. Yes, the same ARM that has been powering most of our phones for over a decade. Even Amazon is pushing its Amazon Web Services customers to adopt ARM, offering lower server prices for ARM workloads. With the release of the M1 chip in 2020, and the 3 iterations since, Apple has performed a near flawless switch to the new CPU architecture.

These chips, while not as powerful as the top tier x86-64 chips, provide plentiful power with one very important upside - power consumption. Power consumption means more than just longer battery life, although it does certainly provide that as well. Lower TDP processors also mean less heat, which solves a problem Apple has had no solution to for a long time. How do you put a powerful processor inside a sleek, lightweight computer.

The MacBook Air

These new chips allow the MacBook Air, which suffered from overheating and noisy fans in the Intel days, is now the shining star of Apples lineup. I personally use a MacBook Air M2, with the base specifications (8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD), and it has never struggled with a single task I have thrown at it. Photo editing? No problem. 50 tabs open along with news, Spotify, multiple terminals windows, discord, and iMessage? No sweat. All of this without having a fan and with a battery that lasts me multiple days.

The Software… including ‘The Ecosystem’

macOS is, at first, a capable but unimpressive operating system. It has a good UI, great application support, and all the management utilities you need to get by. Where the magic starts, is when you have multiple Apple devices. I know, this is exactly what Apple wants you to do, get all their devices. But in a world where we all have a phone in our pocket and headphones in our ears, having those work together flawlessly is truly magical. Get a phone call while you are on your laptop? Answer it on the laptop. Need an MFA code from a text message on your iPad? It automatically fills it in for you. Start listening to a work meeting on your phone after you were listening to a video on your computer? Your airpods switch automatically. All of these small quality of life features make it a treat to work with all these devices.

Overall

My MacBook has the best battery life out of any device I have ever owned, nothing else comes close currently. This is my #1 point for a laptop.
It has the best trackpad and gesture support, which makes working off a laptop much more useable
Best microphone I have had in a laptop
Full fledged shell with zsh or bash, no WSL needed.
HDR support - more on this in the Linux section.
Time machine took me about 5 minutes to setup and gives me hourly snapshots of my files synced to my NAS
Supports all the programs I use natively besides games, which will always prevent it from being my only computer
Continuity with my iPhone is amazing, and I don’t have to switch devices for notifications, phone calls, or messages.

Why Not Windows or Linux?

Sure, macOS has improved, but that doesn’t mean its better than other operating systems. Windows has been on a downward trend lately, and while I love Linux, it still has a few quirks that prevent me from daily driving it.

Windows

There was a time I would have sworn by Windows. It was simple enough to troubleshoot easily, it did what you asked it to without fighting you, and it didn’t try to lock you into certain software. Unfortunately, all of that started to change with Windows 10, and has gotten much worse in Windows 11.

Back in the Windows 7 days, there was barely such thing as a Microsoft Account, and it certainly wasn’t needed to setup your new computer. If you wanted to change settings, there was the control panel, where you could change anything about how windows operated.

Now there is the settings app, an incomplete mess, which often sends you back to control panel to change basic settings. Except windows now plans to kill the control panel entirely. They also keep killing ways to sign into your computer without a Microsoft account. Why might this be? It is because you are the product with windows, not the other way around. Starting with windows 8 Microsoft introduced widgets into the start menu, many of which in Windows 11 are now ads. This is the same reason they continually push Microsoft Edge and Bing. They want to collect more data on you to sell to advertisers.

The Broken Windows Key that Broke the Camel’s Back

Even after I got my M2 MacBook Air I was still perfectly content daily driving my Windows gaming PC for most tasks, until one day after formatting a hard drive windows randomly gave me the terribly annoying Activate Windows watermark.

My copy of windows was genuine. I bought a Windows 8 Professional license back in college with the education discount. Since then, Microsoft allowed me to upgrade that license for free to Windows 10, and then Windows 11. I tried all the troubleshooting I could to get Windows to reactivate, but it told me my copy of windows wasn’t genuine. It wouldn’t even load the Microsoft store so I could buy a new key.

With no options left, I called Microsoft support. After ~15 minutes of troubleshooting, the level 1 tech told me my case would need to be escalated. I wait on hold for about 10 minutes, and finally someone answers. They ask for my name, and then immediately hang up on me before I answered their question.

No worries, shit happens. I call back, a little frustrated but still being nice and patient with the new tech that answers. This tech also decides, after another 15 minutes of troubleshooting, that I need to be escalated. I get sent to another level 2 tech, who proceeds to pickup but doesn’t say a word to me (I could hear them talking in the background). I stay on the line because I don’t want to go through this whole process again. After a couple minutes of nothing, they hang up on me again.

I call back a third time, being kind to the tech but letting them know I need this escalated to a manger. “How can this happen twice in a row?” I thought to myself. After another 10 minutes on hold, the tech introduces me to the manager, who apologizes, and says that they will stay on the line with me while they escalate me to another tech. They warn me though, that they will likely not be able to help me as Microsoft is no longer honoring upgraded Windows 7/8 license keys, including the license I have been using for years, on this version of Windows, without a problem. They then go to transfer me, but instead to hang up on me a 3rd time.

How a company can operate like this blew my mind. They broke my product, that I purchased from them, with no warning. After they did this, I called them confused looking for support. Instead of helping me, they hung up on me 3 separate times. It was at this moment I vowed to move off of Windows as my daily driver operating system, although I do have to at least keep it installed for gaming, for now.

Linux

Oh Linux, you are so close to being good enough. Gaming compatibility has improved leaps and bounds with Valve Proton and the Steam Deck. I have run Linux, specifically Pop!_OS - a gaming focused Ubuntu/Debian based distro - as the primary operating system on my gaming PC twice. Both times, I enjoyed it. But even though I enjoyed it, I didn’t stay. There have been two main factors that sent me back to Windows for gaming and macOS for everything else:

HDR Support - I have an OLED ultra-wide monitor and HDR is what takes that monitor from great to amazing, and Linux simply lacks HDR support, especially for Nvidia GPUs.
Games with anti-cheat lacking Linux support - Eventually, I come across a game all my friends are playing, that simply can not run on Linux. Although they are getting farther and fewer between, there is still enough of them to keep me off it.

I run plenty of linux VMs and containers for hosting applications like this website, but I have yet to have it stick as my desktop operating system. However, I am thinking about taking the plunge once again on my gaming PC, as every time I go back to windows it bothers me more and more. Maybe this time will be the time it stays for good…

Overkill PowerEdge server or Underpowered NAS board

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 16:02:21 -0400

Currently, I am in the process from moving from a dual xeon cpu poweredge with 128GB of RAM running Proxmox, to a N100 white-label NAS motherboard I got for $120 off AliExpress running Unraid. This may sound like a crazy proposition, but hear me out.

Power - Big enterprise hardware is meant to be used and abused. Therefore, its idle power consumption is not really a concern. This means that even though I am only using 1% of the CPU at idle, I am still using ~200 watts, and if I do start taxing it, it can easily for towards 1000 watts.
3.5" Hard Drives - All of the servers I own are 1U servers, and only have 2.5" drive bays. Although I do not need nearly as much compute as I have available on the power edge, I do want to upgrade my storage. Most of my data is kept on a Synology DS220+ with 2x 6TB Western Digital Red drives in RAID 0 (I know this is insane and want to change it, thats part of what we are doing here). The plan is to setup the N100 as my primary NAS, which will have 12 SATA ports and will be in a case large enough to handle lots of 3.5" drives. Then I can convert the Synology to RAID 1 and use it for backups.
Unraid for array expandability - My Synology could only take 2 hard drives. The big benefits of Unraid for me will be the ability to add more drives at a later date, and being able to mix drive sizes. I have a spare 6TB drive, a ton of 1TB SSDs, and two 12TB used enterprise hard drives on the way.

My main concern is that I won’t have enough computer. Sure, I can always still boot up the big servers if I have a large task I need to handle, but they can’t stay running 24/7 since the point of all this is to lower power consumption. To help this, I am going to get my RPi 5 which has been collecting dust on a shelf setup as well. Most of what I currently have running in the lab are docker containers, so it will be easy to migrate some of those workloads to the Pi. I also have an old i3 NUC from 2015 I could boot up if I need to as well, but I would rather avoid it since it needs a new drive and probably isn’t worth the investment.

I am currently still waiting for the board to come in, and I will make a post going over the new setup once it arrives!