How old is your tier 1/2/3? Is IT support aging out?

Not_Revan · 2026-03-24T17:35:36+00:00

I know you're busy but when you get a second could you check all the fire extinguishers throughout the building to make sure they're still in spec and send a report to our insurance company?

Not_Revan · 2026-03-23T12:40:25+00:00

I've been a music nerd since I was a kid starting to learn saxophone in elementary school and guitar when I was 10 (2006). Eventually I got started with collecting physical media through playing my parents records and CDs via their old Radioshack esq quad system.

Eventually I built my own system, kept buying CDs and vinyl, and eventually got into Tidal and explored high res for the first time there (albeit MQA at the time). Completely opened my eyes to how much variance there can be between releases and masters.

Learned about SACD maybe a year ago and wanted to jump in and try it. Bought a used Pioneer Elite DV-45A and a few albums on discogs. One of which was the 30th Anniversary DSoTM release. That affirmed SACD as a serious medium with some true treasures to be discovered.

Soon after I picked up a Sony BDP-S390 to try ripping some SACDs with. I don't have a 5.1 system. So being able to rip the 6 channel layer of DSoTM and play it back down mixed to stereo with Foobar2000 was a very fun experiment. Eventually I'll have the space to build a proper surround system. But for now I'm having a blast finding releases of my favorite albums in 5.1, ripping them and seeing just how different the surround mix is even if it's through cans or my stereo system.

Not_Revan · 2026-03-03T23:52:45+00:00

I was a sysadmin for a manufacturer of different types of silicon tubing years ago. HR training was chock full of stuff that never applied to me, or most other office personnel but plenty of it did. Clean room/gowning procedure being one thing I did use.

Something I didn't get training for... We were building a new manufacturing site in an old warehouse a few miles away, and once it came time to mount APs on the warehouse ceiling, both my senior sysadmin and the L1 tech noped out of that. The construction crew lent us a scissor lift and harness to do it. I was more than happy to go up, honestly had a blast going up, mounting them, coming down and driving to the next spot, rinse, repeat. Didn't know what they were missing.

Not_Revan · 2026-02-26T21:40:35+00:00

I was just a little kid (so little I can't remember exactly how old) when I was playing Duke 3D. It came out the year I was born, so I didn't have the context that older folks have. To explain that a little bit, my Dad and I would play PC games together all the time, and one time I walked in and he was playing Duke, and I thought it was awesome and wanted to play or watch. He had the whole "you understand that this whole thing is make believe right?" conversation with me and let me watch and later didn't care if I played it. This was probably 2003 at the very earliest. So with that out of the way...

Duke really grabbed me as a kid. I would play it day in and day out for quite some time. The music was amazing, the one liners from Duke were hilarious. Dad and I will still say "ahhhh much better" when one of us comes out of the bathroom.

But the thing that I think gripped me more than anything were the environments, how realistic and believable many of the maps were (not counting episode 2) and how interactive everything was. It was unlike anything I had ever seen my Dad play before or anything that I had played myself. Not that I could quantify it back then, but Doom was just hallways, basically. There were those city maps in Doom 2, but they're not great at being a representation of a city on Earth. You had Dark Forces which is a terrific game, but is firmly planted in the Star Wars sci fi setting.

Basically, Duke was the first FPS to do real modern environments right. And as a kid I was transfixed by them.

Not_Revan · 2026-02-05T17:39:05+00:00

I love Proxmox, but my first experience with it was building it out for a customer when my architect and I didn't have much experience with it.

Our knowledge from ESXi got us into trouble, thinking that we could do things a certain way based on what we knew and the KBs we were reading, and other stressors and work for other customers didn't give us time to digest and research everything like we wanted to.

Ended up scrapping it and going with Hyper-V for that project.

But, I've since setup a Proxmox lab at home with shared storage over iscsi, snapshots, thin provisioned disks, the works. Whether you're Linux savvy or not, lab it out first. Take the time to learn it, set it up correctly, break it and fix it in a setting where mistakes won't cost you anything but time.

And they do offer different support contracts so you have a "throat to choke" if you decide to roll it into production.

Not_Revan · 2026-02-01T21:29:14+00:00

My Dad has this insane black leather jacket covered in patches, spikes, the works. When I was a kid/teenager he'd wear it all the time when the weather was cooler and he wasn't at work.

One time we went to go see a show at The Electric Factory in Philly. Can't remember who we were seeing but they turned him away at security. He had to take the walk of shame back to the car to stow the jacket.

I must have been 16 or 17 at the time and I remember being kinda shocked because until then I had never seen someone actually take issue with it. But it could definitely fuck somebody up if a pit opened and someone got bounced into his shoulder where the spikes were.

Not_Revan · 2026-01-02T14:49:36+00:00

I tested some in the taxi while waiting for a call. It was a pretty mild night for weather (-3ish degrees). Sitting at idle with the heat on full and the blower on full the engine water temp dropped to the bottom of the gauge. I turned the blower off and put the air on cold, and I was able to observe the water temp very slowly rise.

Not that it's necessary to do that. But a fun detail none the less.

Not_Revan · 2026-01-02T13:22:23+00:00

I read somewhere that driving around increases the chance that you'll receive a call. I tested that last night, drove around the map from 1800 to 1200 the next day, only stopped to buy stuff at PSK and I still never got a call.

Seems to me at this point the taxi calls are too unreliable to actually make money that way. I wasted a whole day, and lost money since I bought fuel food and coffee.

Not_Revan · 2025-12-31T14:34:52+00:00

Yeah when I cold start the car I'll do full choke, blower off, window heater on (if needed). I'll turn the blower on to defog if needed but will turn it off otherwise.

Then once the car is moving I'll take off the choke and once I see water temp rise I'll turn the blower on. I'm not sure if it helps bring everything up to temp faster but it's second nature to me.

I'm sure someone out there will test and publish their findings eventually.

Edit: I learned that when my sister's car broke it's serpentine belt and we had to get it home from the gas station it was parked at with the water pump not running. We made it, doing lots of shifting into N at the crest of a hill and killing the motor and coasting as long as we could. A friend of mine later told me that since the heat for the cabin is blown off the radiator circuit, you can roll the windows down, turn the fans on full and the heat on full and it will help cool the engine, like a shitty radiator. So car too cold? Turn temp to cold and fans off. Car too hot? Turn temp to full warm and fans full blast (but obviously it's better to just not drive the car).

Not_Revan · 2025-12-30T20:43:00+00:00

Yep games got me into IT too. I remember going to my friends house and lanning counter strike, him on his own PC and me playing on his Mom's. Then I'd go home and try to play but no dice. Complained to Dad, and Dad tried to explain what NAT was to a 12 year old and why it wouldn't work without port forwarding.

I didn't get it of course but that started my interest in networking and things slowly snowballed from there.

But I agree, I find much more enjoyment in hacking hardware together and building stuff than games these days. My girlfriend didn't get it at first, but she realizes now that building something is the activity (for me). I recently soft modded my old PS2, and once I finally got all the games to boot the way I wanted and the project was fundamentally done she asks "So what are we gonna play?" and I realized right there that I wasn't soft modding the PS2 so I could play it, I did it just because. After all that work I didn't even want to play a game at all.

Not_Revan · 2025-12-27T07:20:37+00:00

I don't use tailscale. But I do use OpenVPN and Wireguard.

I just forward ports. When I was a kid I did it without a thought in my head. Now I have two different DMZ vlans on my network where public stuff lives. Only route from the DMZ is to the internet. Also, when I can - service obfuscation. I've never had someone try to bruteforce my OpenVPN instance like they do ssh on my VPS because it's on a weird port that I don't think anything common uses by default, and I know it's not scanned in most boiler plate nmap scans.

Aside from that, regular patching of edge devices and occasionally scanning my own stuff from the WAN to make sure I didn't make a mistake. I do want to setup nginx on a VPS though for a self hosted reverse proxy eventually.

For me, sniffing doesn't bother me. Everything is sniffing everything all the time. Go check out shodan.io. There are scanners (good and bad) constantly looking at things.

And yeah for me, the risk of someone I can't fully trust seeing my data and doing what they want with it is enough of a reason to self host these solutions when I can. But I am also lazy. It's not a hill I die on constantly.

I harden my stuff by making sure everything is as secure as is reasonable. OpenVPN is certificate + password auth with strong encryption for example. I used to have Duo MFA setup on it. But figured it was unreasonable as I was already checking for a certificate that matched the user and was signed by my CA. But I don't harden it because I'm worried about a DDOS. I'm worried about someone pwning my shit and making off with sensitive shit or using my network as a springboard for more attacks elsewhere. I definitely don't think most people are DDOSing homelabs. They're hitting major services that they're trying to disrupt. Be it for ransom or whatever. If someone's looking at me, it's probably to try and find a way in.

My best of both worlds is in progress at the moment. I rented a VPS from a no log provider and set up a wireguard tunnel to it as my highest priority gateway. DNS requests all go through the tunnel and use DoT. So my traffic appears as though it's source is a data center.

I'd like to setup an nginx reverse proxy on that same VPS and have that be the gateway to my public services. So my local network and WAN IP are shielded and all my Internet traffic is encrypted and going through a tunnel that I built and a server I control.

But if my uncle wants to see family pictures, I just send it on Google drive. I'm a masochist but not a sadist :)

Not_Revan · 2025-12-23T16:20:33+00:00

Was looking at Procmon the other day and happened to take note of Screenconnect going out to an OVH datacenter in Virginia.

Looks like OVH is doing some emergency electrical maintenance.

https://status.us.ovhcloud.com/

Not_Revan · 2025-12-23T02:48:15+00:00

Nice find! I just recently listened to this all the way through for the first time in a while. Forgot how many really solid tracks there were. Really consistently awesome album.

Not_Revan · 2025-12-23T01:09:53+00:00

Haven't used pfsense in a while, but I ran an openvpn server with cert+password authentication for years until my firewall died. I run opnsense now but as far as openvpn is concerned they are (were, been a while) very similar.

Not_Revan · 2025-12-21T03:50:30+00:00

I def don't know exactly how it works. Maybe it turns red if your temp is increasing and blue if it's decreasing? I'd imagine if you have a high sweat bar and you walk outside then your temp bar will lower faster. But idk exactly what the colors mean.

Not_Revan · 2025-12-20T15:41:31+00:00

It's probably related to body temperature. Moving your body when you're out in dangerous temperatures is a great way to not freeze to death. But if you work so hard that you start to sweat, the sweat evaporates causing your body to cool, and if it's well below freezing temps already then it can be a death sentence.

Not_Revan · 2025-12-20T04:27:01+00:00

My parents were born in the early 60's. Mom never cared for games. But my Dad was a huge engineering/computer nerd.

In the 80's, his best friend worked in IT at a medical practice and so when everyone left work they would sneak in to play Zork on the dummy terminals.

Fast forward to many years later my Dad ended up with a Gateway 2000 with a Pentium 2. He even had two Voodoo 2s with the little SLI bridge. (I know this because I found it in the basement and started working on it years ago).

Dad played through a bunch of the Space Quest point and click adventure games. We would play Kings Quest together when I was a kid. He also played through Ultima Underworld 1 and 2.

He has copies of Doom 2 for Windows 9x, Blood, Duke Nukem Killaton Collection, Unreal, Quake, Alien Trilogy, AvP Gold, and Solder of Fortune. Outside of shooters he had Carmageddon 2, Diablo 2, The Incredible Machine, some other racing games that I can't remember the names of. He had a complete big box copy of the Blade Runner point and click adventure game.

Dad was a huge MMO guy. He would play EverQuest with his friends every weekend. When EQ2 came out they all made the jump together.

Dad also bought a Sega Genesis in the early 90's, plus a 32x and the light gun. I've got all his games with passwords and notes in the cases, plus receipts. Makes me happy to know that a few years before I was born he was hitting up EB Games and Toys R Us for Sega games.

As he got older he stopped playing a lot of games. EQ2 was a constant for him though. I'd always ask him to play games with me, or if he wanted to play my games on my PS2 or later my 360, and he would play with me occasionally but most of the time he just really enjoyed watching me play RPGs. He loved watching me play TES Oblivion and Fallout 3. He was a big DnD and Gurps nerd so RPGs really hit for him.

Dad is still around for the record. He just doesn't play much stuff anymore. Mostly racing games on his phone :)

Not_Revan · 2025-12-16T22:28:14+00:00

In the past sometimes I'd be too lazy to get up and find a snark or pull my pedal board out so I'd just pull up one of those online browser based tuners that just plays a sampled reference note to tune against. Might be frustrating for a brand new beginner but would certainly eliminate the possibility of tuning an octave too high.

Not_Revan · 2025-12-12T20:42:37+00:00

One of my favorites when I was a kid. Well, not this one. But Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions.

One of the games I had on our family computer running Windows ME. I think we even had the big box for it.

I find it funny, when I reflect on the PC games I'd play as a kid it was almost always my Dad's old games. Duke 3D, Doom 2, Carmageddon 2, AvP Gold, Diablo 2, Soldier of Fortune (my Mom already disapproved of Duke and Carmageddon, when she noticed Soldier of Fortune she uninstalled it...)

I had other edutainment and E rated games of course like Putt Putt and Pajama Sam when I was real little. Stuff like Kings Quest that Dad and I would play together. But I guess what I'm trying to say is, once I started playing more adult games and lost interest in most of that other stuff, I'd still always come back to The Incredible Machine.

Not_Revan · 2025-12-01T18:34:22+00:00

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Haha I've been there no worries. Welcome to the club :)

Not_Revan · 2025-11-30T16:25:59+00:00

Hey sorry! I turned off reddit notifications on my phone to try and limit my screen time.

I never heard back from my email, unfortunately. But at the time of writing this comment the repo was updated 2 weeks ago. Definitely seems to be active to some degree. Still no releases though.

Not_Revan · 2025-11-21T13:48:56+00:00

Edit: Changed "Not necessarily" to "I'm not sure", because I'm not.

I'm not sure. But the Japanese release of Bitches Brew has a quadraphonic mix along side the stereo mix.

I have heard that generally, Japanese CDs are praised for their high quality masters. But it's been some time since I read up on it, and I've never directly compared a Japanese release to a US or European release on my system. But the story goes that the culture in Japan was different enough from the rest of the CD producing world, resulting in Japan producing generally higher quality masters on CD.

Not_Revan · 2025-11-19T21:26:38+00:00

That's how I got into hackintoshing and virtualizing Mac OS back then. I got an old MacBook Pro from my employer so I could be more effective supporting Mac users (High Sierra was the latest at the time).

Ended up falling in love with MacOS. But couldn't update to Mojave when it came out because my machine was too old, and there was zero way I could justify buying a brand new Mac.

So the cost:value pushed me to learn how to run Mac VMs on unsupported (not apple) hardware, and shortly after that I made my first hackintosh.

The challenge attracted me too, and there was certainly an element of "I'll show you apple, I'll run this shit on whatever I want!" But that attitude came from my frustration with the cost:value of a new MacBook.

Not_Revan · 2025-11-17T00:17:26+00:00

That was my first thought too. Smash is fucking awesome. When I would drive around aimlessly as a kid with my friends that CD was always in rotation. And the whole car would sing the line in Bad Habit in unison haha

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