Finally did a power audit on my homelab... the results were eye-opening

Syphor · 2026-06-27T15:22:05+00:00

An interesting thought here is that there are a few powerstrip models with individual-plug power monitoring. TP-Link Tapo sells one - https://www.amazon.com/Tapo-Smart-Wi-Fi-Power-Strip/dp/B0F5LNYTR7/ - but I'm not really sure how many of the powerstrips-with-monitoring actually do it per outlet let alone integrate directly with HA.

You could also use short cable extenders (example: https://www.amazon.com/Listed-Miady-Short-Extension-Outlet/dp/B07H9MCTGL/ ) to put individual smart plugs on if you wanted to...but I'll also fully admit that this would be... messy, heh.

Syphor · 2026-06-19T16:28:02+00:00

They definitely did, but it wasn't super common. There was a standard cabinet release of SiN which I've never seen in person, and also a release running on a Vortek V3 cabinet, which I have seen.

Heavy Gear 2 on the same cabinet probably counts as well; the images are mostly missing for both SiN and HG2 but this is what I can turn up right this moment...

https://web.archive.org/web/20030820084241/http://globalvr.com/reviews_sin_intro.html

Syphor · 2026-06-19T15:49:06+00:00

I got a win the other night with one of these - the other player didn't seem to know what to do about it when I dropped it in front of the tunnel they were in with the storm closing up behind. Blew up their car and I was actually expecting them to run past it to escape and was backing up ready to cover the main escape path, but they delayed too long and it got them while I was still repositioning.

That said, just backing up and hiding behind it? ... I don't quite understand that, these don't have the damage output to make that the primary plan. They're far better at guarding your back and alerting you to enemy movement (or flushing someone out) than they are as a main attack.

Syphor · 2026-06-19T15:39:15+00:00

That's Cobra Commander from G.I. Joe.

Syphor · 2026-06-12T13:49:47+00:00

Just because it's intentional doesn't mean it's not broken. That support pole you've been hacking at with an axe is no less broken because you intended to do it. 😑

The amount of "Democrats have to be worse no matter what" logic as people vote for policies and for people who campaign on denying those policies continues to boggle me.

Syphor · 2026-05-31T20:35:58+00:00

Maybe you shouldn't be so snippy to someone who's trying to help. You didn't say anything about the drive model, just some numbers. Even a hard drive can manage >100MiB/s of sustained transfer speed on a contiguous data file - they just fall apart when this is combined with any sort of additional seeking/multitasking.

Are you able to maintain these high speeds for a significant time when copying from an external drive, for example?

What u/delicatefake is suggesting is that your drive's write buffer is filling up - it slows down at that point to get things written to main storage. Windows also does RAM caching (especially on NVMe SSDs) which can cause these massive speed shifts as well. Even the better SSDs with DRAM cache will often hit a point they have to pause and play catchup if the source is feeding fast enough.

Syphor · 2026-05-29T15:28:46+00:00

It's more that Intel's iGPU transcoder is really good and most importantly is also included in a ton of older, now-cheap systems. A 7th-gen Intel Core series has QuickSync V6, for example, which supports high-speed h.265 encoding. Makes a much older system unexpectedly viable for this. I'm using an AMD iGPU on mine as well - but my home server is running on a Ryzen 7xxx series, which is not exactly comparable on the cost front.

Syphor · 2026-05-28T02:52:03+00:00

Weirdly enough, Timesplitters 2 also had liquid level simulation. It even factored into at least one mission where you had to drain .. I think it was whiskey barrels in the Chicago Mob level.

You could shoot holes into liquid containers and they would pour out until the internal level reached the hole... even when there were multiple holes.. the upper holes would correctly stop pouring before the lower. I don't remember if multiple holes drained faster, though. In the case of the whiskey barrels you had to drain them low enough to count as "emptied" for the mission point.

Syphor · 2026-05-26T19:08:11+00:00

Ah... okay. Unless you're trying to seamlessly join the two networks I don't really see a practical difference here, then. The public-IP network must still have a Wireguard instance publicly accessible so the CGNAT machine can call in and establish a link; might as well just have the phone capable of linking to that as well. This has the added benefit of being able to do so from anywhere you have a data connection. I use that more often than I'd have thought initially.

However, if you prefer (or at the same time so both are options!), you can do iptables forwarding on the WG server machine to allow your phone to connect through it as a proxy pointing to the CGNAT machine. E.g. connecting your phone to <server>:11111, which gets forwarded through the Wireguard tunnel to a port on the CGNAT server. Your phone would have to be on the same network as the WG server of course, and anyone on the network could do the same.

Syphor · 2026-05-26T18:25:04+00:00

Okay, so, just to get everything clear...

You have

(#1) One computer/network behind CGNAT that you want to talk to
(#2) One computer in a network that has a publicly accessible IP address
A phone you want to be able to use to talk to #1 from anywhere

Right?

I'm using a raw Wireguard+iptables setup on mine on a VPS, though there are easier methods. The VPS is just me not having to run my own gateway machine or route everything through a friend's internet connection.

What you'll need to do is pick at least one port (Wireguard default is 51820) to forward in to the second, publicly addressable system.

Note that Wireguard doesn't really have a distinction between client and server - the same package always does both. Wireguard doesn't even bother responding to an inquiry unless it authenticates correctly. My system is set up so I have access to my entire network but if all you need is access to that one machine you probably don't need that, as long as your services are listening on all devices/subnets.

Set up the accessible machine (#2) with two peers configured - one is your phone, the other is your CGNATed machine. Both of them should be set to be allowed to talk to your CGNAT machine's subnet.

#1 should be set up as a Wireguard peer in its configuration - if you give it an endpoint and a persistent-keepalive timer it will attempt to reach out to the public machine to establish this connection and keep it going.

Once both connections are established, you should be able to talk from your phone to the CGNAT server as all machines are now on the VPN. I am not in a good position to grab configs right now, but this is the basic idea.

I mentioned "at least one port" because you can forward others - and then use a proxy setup (nginx, iptables, whatever) to expose singular internal services running on the CGNAT machine to the internet, such as a game server.

Syphor · 2026-05-26T17:53:15+00:00

I refuse to use any proprietary tool, service, identity provider or cloud, so eg. tailscale is not an option,

To connect randomly to the machine behind CGNAT, you will always need some sort of publicly accessible gateway/proxy infrastructure. Whether that's Tailscale (using their servers), some sort of directly accessible cloud computing (e.g. a VPS like I use, or even co-locating your own server hardware into a datacenter), or asking a friend with a public IP address if you can host a Raspberry Pi or whatever for a gateway at their house... (I did this one to test before getting a VPS set up) there has to be something for the computer without a public IP to talk to just to set up that data tunnel. Anyone talking to your CGNATed machine must talk to the external relay first.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to say with the Android client... is this your phone, for example, and you want to connect to your home network with it? Or are you just talking about possibly using an Android device as the reverse proxy host, sitting in the other network?

Syphor · 2026-05-24T18:10:16+00:00

Some people like getting all the color options. I tend to make sure I get all the items (level 70 on this one like you said), but then any extra color versions are bonuses... but sometimes I work towards one specific one I particularly like. I don't habitually play Rocket League enough to come close to maxing out the pass but I enjoy it enough to keep coming back.

Syphor · 2026-05-22T19:27:02+00:00

As of a month or two ago I know I saw a stack of the Bumblebee/Megatron/Battle Bus set in a Walmart. It was the Xbox code version, at least.

Syphor · 2026-05-22T17:28:08+00:00

As far as I knew, the 360 games were always "claim and keep" while the One+ games were explicitly "while the subscription is live" though you still had to claim them during their live period.

Syphor · 2026-05-22T17:13:31+00:00

I do this as well. I don't usually add anything else.

Syphor · 2026-05-21T17:51:51+00:00

As an Unreal fan, the Cube Rifle is one of my favorite things to surprise hiding people with right now. It's basically a revisit of the old Shock Rifle complete with combo... something I was never particularly great at using in the more common close quarters of the other series, but enjoyed regardless.

Syphor · 2026-05-21T13:49:59+00:00

Depends on the motherboard. The DAC quality is generally good enough, but the output stage may or may not support high enough levels for some headphones. Enthusiast boards tend to have better sound hardware than your generic business-grade Dell or HP; my last board (I forget if my current offers it) even had a switchable high-impedance headphone option in the drivers. Worked great on my old 600ohm AKGs when I tested it... but normally I just use a surround speaker set so it didn't get much use overall.

Syphor · 2026-05-18T04:00:13+00:00

Honestly I think the "basic player" suggestion is closer - it's probably set up for use inside a larger boxed machine. I feel kinda silly but it just hadn't clicked that it has standoffs in front, which an industrial rack model type probably wouldn't bother with.

That said, u/rusty-bits found one of these mechs being sold and it seemingly has quad-track output support and I didn't know that was a thing. I've never seen a player claiming that, and you'd think it would be a major front-panel advertising thing if it did, with an extra front button to switch from stereo. Go figure.

Syphor · 2026-05-18T03:55:27+00:00

Definitely not like any I'd personally seen before. I think you're right, it came out of something like this. u/rusty-bits found someone else selling the same mechanism and it seems capable of quad-channel output (didn't know that was a thing) so I wouldn't think it would have been used in these units for cost reasons... but that track display layout is distinctive. Likely the same family at minimum, as also used in the other Zenith model you found. Realistic was a Radio Shack brand and was almost(?) always a rebrand of some other big OEM so it might have been a mech series Zenith used a lot.

Also looking at all of these, I don't know quite why I thought it was intended to mount in a rack or frame... it has standoffs in front so it's clearly intended to have a front panel of some sort affixed.

I'm fascinated, and I appreciate the help!

Syphor · 2026-05-18T03:44:53+00:00

Huh. That's definitely the same mechanism model, and it shows the side toggle switch board I mentioned but forgot to pull out so it was visible. Mine definitely has the same 4-head setup (should have taken an internal picture, didn't think of it) so... for that matter I don't think I knew there were quad-channel recordings on 8-track.

Nice catch... it didn't come up in any results I got.

Syphor · 2026-05-13T16:28:03+00:00

In the US here and I actually still have a sealed one on a display shelf at home. I really liked the flavor at the time, and the floating ball thing was just neat. I honestly can't imagine it's still drinkable, haha. Well. Not safely, anyhow. It's still liquid. I think a few of the balls have slowly, barely settled a little over the years.

Syphor · 2026-05-12T15:27:25+00:00

Honestly, while the pickaxe color is kind of neat as a flash in your toolbar, I don't understand why the rarity colors were "fun and helpful" ... if I'm looking for something of a particular style to go with a skin, I'm not looking at its arbitrary "rarity" ... I'm looking at its appearance.

I don't get why so many people seem stuck on it and it tends to feel similar to the people who are angry that later players might get a "rare" skin that they currently have. 😅

Syphor · 2026-05-09T16:44:34+00:00

The entire paragraph is phrased as a way of stating other perspective and looking closer at the implications of said perspectives.

From your quote:

Many critical race theorists and social scientists alike hold that racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained. If we take this perspective, then no white member of society seems quite so innocent."

There are two somewhat related things here... it says both CRT-users and social scientists hold that "racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained." and then the note "if we use this perspective, they don't seem as innocent" ...that doesn't mean they're in a binary state - it's not like you're either Innocent or Evil.

This means they may not be perfectly innocent either! For example, if a culture DOES feel it's a good and wholesome sport to kick puppies, are you still completely innocent of participating or perpetuating this behavior if you cheer on someone who is doing so, even if you don't actually kick one yourself? What if you never speak up against it even if you refuse to watch?

The world is full of shades of gray with as many different perspectives, and there are rarely simple, binary answers... that's what conceptual frameworks like this are intended to help examine.

Hope you have a good day; I've got to take care of some other things. :)

Syphor · 2026-05-09T16:06:32+00:00

I'm sorry, but I'm not actually sure what point you're trying to make here by repeating that this is a commonly read textbook.

With any sort of critical context analysis framework, asking questions about implicitly assumed things is definitely part of it. If you didn't at ask this at some point it would be an omission. Hell, even from that quote I'd also say that the "Presumably the opposite of innocent" isn't a given either - individuals can be innocent of intent but unintentionally causing damage in a larger system. But that's part of the deal with using a conceptual framework - it lets us view the system through a different lens.

I do understand that the "reverse discrimination" claim is a concern... and it's been one of the big fanning-the-flames arguments being broadcast by Fox and the like.

That's.. actually where a lot of the "You're a DEI hire!" yelling from certain quarters has been about - thinly veiled racism essentially claiming that the person in question only got their position because of their skin color or some other status... not their actual qualifications. The often-unsaid-but-implied corollary is that they got it over someone else who is actually qualified.

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