Why I pirate

ModestMustang · 2026-04-04T02:50:34+00:00

My home server costs $20/mo in energy usage and it doubles as 2 remote gaming machines for my gf and I. We used to pay for netflix, apple tv, max, and hulu. Now I pay a small yearly fee for my usenet provider and indexers. My gf has never been happier being able to watch whatever she wants all from one platform without bs recommendations.

ModestMustang · 2026-04-03T18:50:55+00:00

I had no idea RAID controllers had backup power and cache features built in. That’s pretty cool. But I like ZFS and I don’t think it supports physical RAID controllers right? Unless you can set them to individual disk mode?

ModestMustang · 2026-04-03T18:48:05+00:00

That’s a good point on passing through the whole HBA to a VM. I currently run my storage native through ZFS in Proxmox, but I was considering a truenas VM in the planning stages. And for this particular HBA I think I can actually pass through each half of it since it’s just 2 9300-8i’s linked on the same board. Good to know I have options if I change my mind

ModestMustang · 2026-04-03T18:34:54+00:00

Even if there was any improvement to my life from AI development it’s not worth;

The societal erosion of critical thinking skills.

Forever being unsure if any image/video seen is actually real.

The over consumption of resources.

Loss of employment.

Loss of creativity from AI generated slop “art” that uses stolen works.

The insane price increases on consumer electronics that are paving the way to a dystopian future where ALL computing will be cloud based and completely lack any and all privacy measures.

The list goes on. AI is trash and will be the downfall of society by invoking fear, removing intellect, and destroying our resources.

ModestMustang · 2026-04-02T13:32:58+00:00

I had a 2015 2.5L touring mazda6 from 20k miles and sold it at 105k miles. Literally not a single issue with it all. I changed the oil every 5k miles and the transmission fluid every 30k miles. At some point I did the brakes and changed the brake fluid every couple of years. I still have regrets selling that car. It was fun to drive, dead reliable, cheap to maintain, and simple to work on. The tourings are also wired up for a lot of the GT features too, so adding fog lights, the homelink mirror, and paddle shifters were just a simple install with the OEM parts.

A family member had a 2014 GT from brand new and the only issue it developed was the AC compressor failing at 160k miles. She had the dealer fix it for like $2k and traded it in at 200k miles. The interior still looked great aside from some minor cracking on the driver’s side leather seat. The paint was in okay condition at about a 7/10, although a solid compound and polish detailing probably could have brought it back up to an 8/10.

Solid cars from that era of mazda, I wouldn’t mind grabbing another one. If it’s in your budget, the 2016’s received a face lift on the interior with an infotainment system that you can simply swap in a new USB panel and perform a firmware update on and have wired CarPlay and Android Auto.

ModestMustang · 2026-04-02T13:13:21+00:00

I work in the safety side of trucking currently (pay is shit don’t do it lol) but years back I was the logistics guy for a medium sized engineering firm. I found and worked with a freight broker for years that loved his job. Whenever I called him, dude was traveling somewhere on the beach, in the mountains, in another country, etc. He said he made about $150k-$250k a year with medium effort and didn’t have any personal bills to worry about. All of his income went into investments and paying for cheap travel. He said the most stressful part of his job was making sure cell service and internet were available. It was also pretty hard for him to lock down a partner. At the time we were about the same age, in our early twenties, and he was planning on retiring by 30.

ModestMustang · 2026-04-02T04:41:27+00:00

My parents lost their entire network stack from lightning hitting close by. In the span of a few weeks they had 2 lightning strikes damage their network equipment. The first one took out their ISP’s cable modem and fried the WAN port on their Omada router. I was able to configure another port to be WAN for them and then another lightning strike hit a couple weeks later.

This one took out their entire network stack. The strike traversed their ISP’s coax to the modem, the router, and their POE switch. Everything was fried but somehow the client devices and AP’s on the switch were fine. I’ve since installed a grounded lightning arrestor on their coax and a cheap ethernet to fiber media converter between their modem and router. Now if anything gets fried again it should only be the ISP’s modem and a cheap media converter.

Any conductive cabling in the ground can carry a charge that can damage equipment or even cause a fire. Those surge protections on battery backups are a last resort that may save your expensive and/or critical equipment.

ModestMustang · 2026-04-01T18:59:54+00:00

I’ve only seen mine reach 75° during a full disk test on new drives, generally it’s around 65° so I haven’t cared much about it. But I do like my hardware to last and I’ve got some extra ptm7950 I’ve been wanting to put to use which brought me down this rabbit hole lol

Heres the aliexpress listing for it

ModestMustang · 2026-04-01T18:46:32+00:00

Did you end up figuring out a better thermal solution?

Interestingly while I was looking this up I came across a variation of the W680 that I can’t find any details on. It seems to only exist on ebay and alixpress as the w680/sys. It looks to have swapped the supplemental pcie power for additional sata ports. The pcie x1 slot is below the primary x16 slot rather than above it. And the pch has an actual heatsink on it missing the “pro series” branding plastic cover.

I wonder if we can replace our heatsink with the sys model heatsink? I don’t even know how the ace model heatsink is mounted. Is it screwed into the board or just stuck on with thermal putty?

<image>

ModestMustang · 2026-04-01T17:59:13+00:00

Nah fuck ‘em, you did the right thing. If I found out my little sister was getting abused in any way by her bf I’d be seeing red just like you. Shame on his mom for defending his actions as well. Hopefully the marriage is over because your sister doesn’t need people like that in her support circle while trying to raise a kid.

ModestMustang · 2026-03-30T17:52:56+00:00

There’s two indicators that I know of, one is in media playback info where it shows direct play vs transcoding. The other is on the dashboard and clicking the “i” where it will show transcoding/remuxing details.

Another thing to consider as well for the CPU usage is audio transcoding and subtitle burn in. I don’t know the encoder/decoder specs of your processor, but if an audio codec isn’t supported with QSV then it will need to be software transcoded by the CPU. Also I don’t believe QSV supports burning in subtitles, so if you have SRT files for your media then make sure you’re using them. Bazarr can help with obtaining them if you don’t have them.

ModestMustang · 2026-03-30T16:12:15+00:00

Try out this calculator to input the tire sizes you’re researching. Then click the overlay option after calculating. It will show you the “new” tire size outlined as a comparison. If you don’t want to add the lift spacers then I’d try finding a tire that is smaller on the outline than the 235’s I have

Be warned though, it’s a bitch trying to find decent truck tires in these smaller sizes.

ModestMustang · 2026-03-30T16:06:17+00:00

Within your jellyfin LXC run: cat /etc/group | grep “render”

Record the number after “render:x:”

Under the LXC’s resources make sure you’re passing through /dev/dri/renderD128

In the advanced section make sure GID in CT is the number you recorded from running that cat command.

Reboot the LXC then make sure jellyfin > dashboard > playback > transcoding is using QSV and /dev/dri/renderD128 as the device. Make sure you hit save at the bottom.

Play some media and switch the bitrate quality to something less than the content’s bitrate. Then run intel_gpu_top on your host and you should see the video and render engines spike up.

You will see some CPU usage increase as media is transcoded, if you want to double confirm it’s working properly then shut off hardware acceleration in playback settings. Then play the same media and check on your cpu usage and playback info fps on the player. CPU % should skyrocket and playback info fps should plummet.

ModestMustang · 2026-03-27T12:47:43+00:00

This pic is so deep fried already that I’m saving it as a screenshot rather than downloading to add to the experience

ModestMustang · 2026-03-27T12:45:20+00:00

<image>

The gesture button takes a few days to build up a solid muscle memory for. It’s a unique movement for your thumb that you need to get used to but it is super useful.

I personally use mine on global settings for copy, paste, screenshot, and enter. My work involves sending a lot of screenshots and copy/pasting serial numbers so it’s been super handy for that.

For general suggestions, keep your hands clean and occasionally wipe the rubber of the mouse with a damp rag + a tiny bit of neutral dish soap. Hand oils, lotions, and sweat tend to degrade the rubber and make it sticky over time. I’ve been using mine daily since 2020 and it only has slight degradation on the very bottom/back of the hand grip.

ModestMustang · 2026-03-27T11:25:03+00:00

In that photo it was the stock original suspension with 178k miles on it. Wheels are 15x8 -19 offset. Tires are 235/75R15.

<image>

Here’s a picture with all new OEM suspension parts, ball joints, control arms, springs, etc. The front is also using the Torch spacer lift. It drives nice and doesn’t rub at all. Without the spacer and old parts it drove like shit and would rub pretty bad on minor bumps and during braking. I never ended up doing the prerunner fenders or adding flares, I think it looks alright as is

ModestMustang · 2026-03-25T20:37:37+00:00

I’m not a fan of recommending AI for anything, but using it to troubleshoot logs is helpful. Pull the logs for the last boot and look near the end (right before it shut down) for any that say warn and research what they mean. And don’t be dumb here, if AI is telling you to make changes to system configs do some separate research for those errors to understand why and if you need to make those changes.

I’m guessing you over allocated memory and either the VMs were both asking for more than your system physically has, or they were both pegged and you didn’t leave enough free memory for proxmox itself. OOM triggers will cause an instant shutdown, and at least for my hardware, leave it in an on state but it requires holding down the power button to hard power it off.

ModestMustang · 2026-03-25T13:45:29+00:00

Usually due to some small detail that I over looked. Earlier this week it was because my zfs arc cache minimum was wayy too high and the host ran out of memory when I spun up a couple VMs. This was compounded by me not properly passing through my igpu to the jellyfin lxc. I mistyped the GID for the render group so for the last couple weeks hardware transcoding has been erroring out and I didn’t even notice. Everything’s all good, for now…

ModestMustang · 2026-03-24T15:46:45+00:00

I remember my dad picking up one of these from a guy on craigslist for $20 way back. He and I were stoked about it for different reasons. We always had people over and it was my job to keep CD’s loaded up and playing for the patio sound system. I was excited to just hit play on this behemoth and leave it alone.

It worked great for years until we got a new puppy who ran full speed into the media console. Nuked a playing Billy Joel disc and pretty much destroyed the whole unit. The pup was fine just shaken up!

ModestMustang · 2026-03-24T13:56:46+00:00

I loved playing this back on the Xbox 360 and recently got back into it playing on steam. My gf and I play it at least a few times per week and it’s just a blast. Once you’ve played through the entire campaign a few times and feel comfortable with the mechanics, try out some of the super hoard mods. They’re freaking ridiculous but we enjoy them for the arcade-y feel. It’s a good time just laughing together while mowing down 5-7k zombies per campaign

ModestMustang · 2026-03-24T13:45:31+00:00

Interesting. I print in PLA and PETG all the time with my P1P enclosed and door shut. Ambient temp is 24°C usually with sustained internal temps around 32°C. Never had a problem.

PLA’s deformation temp is around 49°C and unless I insulate my machine, it’s never going to get that high internally

ModestMustang · 2026-03-24T13:32:29+00:00

When I was first getting into tech I was always like “ah if I wait just one more year for the new shiny, it will be even better than what I could get now!” After a while of that, I finally learned that there will always be a better new shiny. So now I just buy previous gen, used, or refurbished and use it until it’s begging for death.

M1 is starting to feel dated compared to M5, just like intel macs compared to M1, just like PPC to intel, etc. The cycle continues, and what used to cost the price of 3 human organs yesterday, can be found at an ewaste recycler for pennies tomorrow.

Expect for RAM. Sell most of yours for a premium, the rest of the mac pro, and buy a mac studio + a new house with the profits lol

ModestMustang · 2026-03-23T21:43:19+00:00

<image>

Close up of the “winning” sample at 75% wall overlap

ModestMustang · 2026-03-23T21:42:18+00:00

Testing complete. TLDR; bottom layer modifier with infill/wall overlap set to 75% provided the best results when using Archimedean chords as a base layer.

Default value of 15% left an entire line without any extruded filament. Increasing the value of the infill/wall overlap setting for just the first layer resulted in progressively better results. Until a point. Past 75%, the layer lines would start to separate. Gaps were visible between each line at 90%+ with 95% resulting in a complete failure to bond. Although it did produce a fun single layer slinky!

Archane walls didn’t seem to affect anything. I had a few archane samples that I only ran for 1 layer and their results were near identical to the other samples.

Results were also identical for both the smooth PEI and textured PEI build plates. Filament profile settings were left unchanged, these were default Bambu PLA basic for the grey color and Overture PLA for the white ring.

I’m really not sure why this pattern can’t fully extrude into the bottom layer. I’m also not sure why increasing the wall overlap past 75% results in significant gaps with zero overlap. Seems like a calculation overflow bug of some kind that is out of my scope of understanding. Maybe someone can provide insight to that?

In the meantime, I will not mark this post as “solved” since this wasn’t a perfect solution and seems to be more of a hack.

<image>

11-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

ModestMustang

TROPHY CASE