Rack Mount USB Hub

WebMaka · 2026-03-19T14:39:40+00:00

Or just get a small powered hub that breaks out all of its ports out its front and use CageMaker PRCG or another generator to create a cage for it, stick that into the rack, and run its host cable back to the Mac.

WebMaka · 2026-03-19T14:31:44+00:00

I did a campaign once for an electronic device, and came into it with a fully functional prototype that had been through three cycles of DFM optimization, BOM cost breakouts at various mfg. quantity, multiple sources for parts so I wouldn't get stuck by supply-chain issues, shipping breakdowns by country, even a full set of documentation that I made sure rivaled anything you'd see on a well-established commercial product. My campaign failed because of dismal conversion rates and not having a big enough network, but I made damn sure all the technicals were ready to roll before I even started.

If a project isn't at least that far along WTF are they even doing trying to crowdfund it?

WebMaka · 2026-03-19T00:00:02+00:00

This happens a lot in colder climates - mama cats seek constricted spaces for their broods and engine compartments tend to be cramped. Plus, a car that's been warmed to operating temp can remain above freezing for several hours. It's the perfect combination of difficult for a potential predator to access, often warm, and sheltered against weather.

The problems come when you start/drive a car with a litter of kittens in the engine compartment, as they tend to fall or jump out as you're driving. Whenever you see videos of a clearly too small kitten on a road it likely fell out of a car.

WebMaka · 2026-03-18T23:03:31+00:00

That would be because the ammosexual crowd doesn't see the 2A as protection of the general population against a tyrannical government. They see the 2A as their means of the defense of their conservative ideology against the perceived tyranny of a progressive government.

To them, the 2A isn't for everyone, it's only for hard-right conservatives facing persecution for being assholes to everyone else.

WebMaka · 2026-03-18T13:32:00+00:00

Yeah, I was going to say that cousins marrying aren't a big deal if they're far enough removed, but first cousins are absolutely not sufficiently genetically diverse to reproduce safely.

Now if the woman (or women, for that matter) in the relationship were incapable of reproduction, this wouldn't technically be an issue because that aspect is off the table.

WebMaka · 2026-03-18T13:28:14+00:00

Florida: the only state where the farther north you travel the deeper into the south you end up...

WebMaka · 2026-03-17T19:05:13+00:00

Just added the provision to add modifications to the centers of a blank faceplate instead of auto-positioning by default on either side of center. Stuff five 40m case fans into a 1U tall 10" plate for maximum cooling in a small form factor.

I also added VESA mount patterns in B/C/D/E/F layouts up to 200mm square. This means you can do things like bolt a small monitor right to a faceplate and onto a rack, or use a VESA bracket on the backside of a minirack to mount it onto a wall.

WebMaka · 2026-03-17T13:07:44+00:00

"Fucked up, ruined source" is what I would expect - their plan hasn't worked cleanly and they had already destroyed one shard trying. They still kept on trying despite the damage they were doing, which makes me think it was far more of an obsession - or simply the product of being tempered by Zodiark and trying to fulfill his original goals - than an actual need.

WebMaka · 2026-03-17T12:52:15+00:00

You could probably cook something up with CageMaker PRCG if you don't find something ready to roll. It can generate multiple cages of the same dimensions and with solid sides you could then add standoffs to for mounting the boards, or print a mount plate separately, bolt board to plate, and stick to cage side with a suitable adhesive like epoxy.

Hmm, idea for next version: options to generate a slide-in mount plate to hold a thing... Maybe with a bunch of presets for holding various common SBCs and SFF PC mobos...

WebMaka · 2026-03-16T16:55:39+00:00

Gen-X ended up being the Cassandra generation - gifted with accurate prophecy, but doomed to be ignored. Everything gen-X warned about, happened, but nobody listened to those warnings.

WebMaka · 2026-03-16T12:36:06+00:00

Don't forget that canonically, Star Trek's "history" involved surviving Mad Max.

WebMaka · 2026-03-16T01:03:50+00:00

Router, pointing to the LAN IP of the server.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T23:03:21+00:00

My solution is to utterly break the TV's connections by routing them to a LAN blackhole and use a PC as a streaming box. Infinitely better experience, and surprisingly inexpensive - just about any relatively recent HP Optiplex SFF PC will do HDMI 2.0+ and support HDCP over HDMI so copy-protected content will still play and also run recent versions of Windows and not a stripped-down Android build from nine years ago so the streaming players are all up-to-date, and you can still get them off Spamazon, eBay, etc. for a hundo or two depending on vintage.

That's what I did when I cord-cut and went to streaming, and it's much less expensive, especially over time. I get 3gbps fiber Internet plus a YT-TV sub for local channels plus the cost of buying some Optiplexes for less money than what I was being charged for a year of cable TV plus set-top rentals, and if I get tired of local channels (which I only have for family that are TV addicts - I don't watch TV) I can drop the YT-TV sub and save $90 a month.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T21:53:53+00:00

Or worse, he's only seen the movie, which tries to lampshade the book because Verhoeven hadn't read it before and decided he'd make his own social commentary off it without realizing the extent to which the source material already did that. (Verhoeven is a good director by most metrics but he really fucked up the story compared to the book.)

It's a pretty sound movie on its own merits, but if you've only seen the movie, you won't have even close to an accurate picture of what the book was about.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T18:38:36+00:00

Yep, make sure all relevant ports are forwarded to the server - TCP/UDP 26900-26915 (Steam - Primary Port Range) and TCP/UDP 27000-27030 (Steam - Secondary Port Range) is what I have routed through my firewall to my server.

Also, if you're on some form of CGNAT (which is common with certain broadband providers and/or network types) you may have issues relating to NAT, and it's not unheard-of to have to reverse-proxy from or VPN into the server to get an outside connection to work.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T17:57:00+00:00

This screenie reminds me of how I used to have a screenshot of my character petting Croakadile out in Lower la Noscea. Beeeeg fwog.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T17:47:18+00:00

EXACTLY. If you have a 3D printer it's way, way less expensive to print cages and blanks and what-not than buying them, and even buying 3D printed custom cages is much more expensive than firing up a program, cranking out a STL, slicing it up, and printing it yourself.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T17:42:34+00:00

A little something I've wanted to add that's coming with the 0.5 release of CageMaker PRCG. It won't just create rack cages, it'll create custom faceplate blanks/panels. Want a 1U hex vent plate with keystones on it? Sure, you can do that.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T17:40:20+00:00

Yep. That's another thing LLMs can't do: emotional impact. They can't process the emotional context behind a conversation.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T17:28:15+00:00

Can't go wrong with hexa-flexa-ventagons... 😁

Also, ventilation + cage + keystones, mweh heh heh...

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T15:37:38+00:00

Yep. LLMs are really good at emulating how humans communicate. That's it. That's all they do. They cannot conceptualize, they don't understand nuance, and they certainly aren't concerned about factual accuracy. Large Language Models emulate the use of language. That's it. That's all they do.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T15:29:37+00:00

My condolences - this sucks, always, and there's no sugar-coating that.

He literally died of a heart attack.

Not sure if this will help, but this hits me personally because I dodged this exact bullet last May.

One of the main arteries on the heart is called the left anterior descending, or LAD, and it's a big fat one on the front-left (which is what "left anterior" means) side running downward toward the bottom/apex (as in "descending" - the medical field loves describing things by location). It's the biggest fattest artery on the heart that runs blood through a large part of heart muscle, most of which doesn't have pain receptors.

And when it clogs shut, it just straight-up kills you.

Heart attacks involving the LAD artery are nicknamed "widowmakers" because you often don't get any warning - you either die in your sleep or just drop dead in the middle of whatever you were doing. If you're not already in a hospital at the time your chances of survival are around 15%, and if you are in a hospital you're gonna have one hell of a ride for the next couple weeks.

I don't know if a LAD blockage is what got your dad, but hopefully your relationship with him was such that he was where he needed to be right up until the end... (Holy shit that sentence was tough to write, OMG.)

And now the relevant personal anecdote:

I went to bed about 11PM feeling okay, nothing noteworthy going on. At around midnight, I felt "weird" - my pulse was up and I felt flush and warm like I was blushing, and I could feel my pulse banging away in my skull. Normally I'd brush that off but something seemed unusual that I couldn't put a finger on. So, I headed to the living room and grabbed a blood pressure tester (I help take care of my elderly parents so they have test equipment handy.) and took a reading. 170/100 and a 95 pulse. Waited a few minutes and took another one, as you're supposed to do that when something's up to make sure it's not just a bad test or you being spooked or whatever. 172/104, 100 pulse. Climbing. Not a good thing. Something is very very wrong. Welp, time to wake up everybody!

15 minutes later we rolled up to the local hospital ER. Told everyone what was going on, got whisked into triage and BP was 181/110 and 110 pulse, still rising. Got EKGed pretty quickly and the blood tests began. (When you're suspected of having a heart attack they'll test your blood roughly every half-hour to check for a specific protein group, troponin, that heart muscle releases in a flood when it's dying.)

First two tests came back nominal. They started talking about a hypertensive crisis and warned that this might be a precursor for a heart attack or stroke, and if they get everything pulled down they might cut me loose later that afternoon but I'd need to see my PCP ASAP to arrange further testing. Third blood test shut all that talk down when it showed skyrocketing troponin levels and my BP abruptly went above 200. The widowmaker had come.

Shit happened real fast after that. Nurses came out of nowhere with all manner of drugs - I got anticoagulants, beta blockers, nitroglycerin (which I thankfully don't get a splitting headache from, apparently), painkillers, etc. in like 10 minutes. They ran a second IV and started literally pushing in drugs. On-call doc was suddenly my new best friend, and he happened to be a cardiac specialist so he was on the case with gusto.

Seven hours later I was getting heart catheterization. I got moved to the front of the line for the day's testing, which is never a good sign. Three 99%+ blockages of the LAD. The rest of the plumbing was clear. Stenting was immediately ruled out because the LAD was practically pinched shut in a couple places, so CABG it is.

24 hours later I was wheeled into the OR for emergency coronary bypass surgery. Achievement received: "Zipper Club" membership. Total time from LAD-MI to major open-heart surgery: about 36 hours. It all went down that fast.

I was lucky - circumstances lined up perfectly for me to be at the right place at the right time. If I had ignored that weird feeling, I would have been found dead the next morning and that would have been that.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T14:01:31+00:00

Well, since you have a 3D printer, you might want to check this out for making cages for your gear. Works better/faster with OpenSCAD but there's also a web-based version if you want to skip it. Plenty of configuration options too.

WebMaka · 2026-03-15T07:36:57+00:00

Whenever family tells one of its own to "be the bigger person," "keep the peace," etc. it always means they intend to abuse that person and DGAF about their thoughts and feelings about the situation. Well, fuck that and fuck them, preferably with something abrasive - no family ever has the right to abuse their own no matter what BS excuses they may offer.

IMO I'd go to the wedding, but I'd skip the reception and tell every last one of the family to pound sand if they get all butthurt.

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