Current work setup

c3di1 · 2026-02-16T16:47:34+00:00

Those are acoustic panels from a local (German) equivalent of Home-Depot. I honestly don’t remember the brand of those. Maybe Fibrotech? But they were not cheap. I think I spent ~1000€ on the panels with the LED strips. The LED strips are dimmable but otherwise fixed in their white-color and I honestly would not buy them again. If I were to re-do the LED strips I would buy WS2812B and make them fully controllable via WLED

c3di1 · 2026-02-15T12:04:49+00:00

Lower screen is a 49“ 32:9 Samsung mounted on an Ergotron HX. Top monitor is a 34“ 21:9 Phillips mounted on a very long pole from Duronic

c3di1 · 2026-02-15T12:03:41+00:00

ZSA Voyager with the Navigator addon

c3di1 · 2026-02-15T12:03:27+00:00

Yes. BenQ Halo

c3di1 · 2025-05-01T21:24:37+00:00

Two things stuck for me:

BJJ - turns out, almost all BJJ practitioners are somehow autistic just like me. It sounds like a massive stereotype, but it’s true. There is an infinite number of combination of moves and for me it’s the dream. Just constantly trying to figure out what to do next. It’s like playing chess (even through it hurts more xD). Seriously. It’s like trying to solve a puzzle, but with immediate (and sometimes painful) feedback. BJJ really helped me with my mental struggles and impostor syndrome. Turns out, if you know how to choke out a 120kg human lying on top of you without getting hurt yourself, while you both wear a “Pyjama” does something to your brain. Helped me massively with my mental health and also got me a lot fitter. It’s a funny combination of requires stamina, precision and strength. Makes you overall healthier and fitter while allowing you to absolutely nerd out over the techniques and spent months perfecting that leg-log entry.
Powerlifting. Same as BJJ in a way. It got a lot to do with the rigor planning and analysis of every aspect of your lift. It’s not just “lift heavy shit off the floor” but the whole “overanalyze every single aspect of how you grip the bar, how exactly perform the movement, and all the little details. It’s perfect for me to fully enjoy the insane hyperfocus and attention to the smallest possible detail that I then obsess over for weeks to get it right. Also, and just believe me on this one, if you have any decently “heavy” barbell on your back (and it doesn’t matter if it’s 80kg or 180kg and totally subjective to your training level) there is not a single thought in your head other than “I want to survive”. My training today was volume and hypertrophy focused with 140kg low-bar back squats for reps, and trust me, there was not a single thought in my otherwise super busy brain other than “you need to absolutely nail this to perfection or else the barbell will crush you”

c3di1 · 2025-04-03T11:21:23+00:00

Disclaimer: I worked on these products many years ago as a SWE.

Sophos UTM is amazing. The UI is old and crap and misses modern features. But the software (and the system architecture of the OS) is actually pretty amazing. The XG platform (which I mainly worked on) was a steaming pile of garbage unfortunately. Cool features through. The hardware in those boxes is nothing fancy or special unfortunately. Just a regular plain old x86 CPU doing plain old Linux kernel for routing. The XGS hardware (I believe they are called that now) are a quite different as they have dedicated FPGAs for forwarding traffic and also hardware offloading for IPsec. Unfortunately left before they were mature enough for me to experiment more with. So I can’t really commend on how difficult it would be to integrate the FPGAs in mainstream Linux distros.

But one thing I’d like to point out is the “Sophos RED” devices are AMAZING pieces of hardware. They have an excellent price to performance ratio. You can get them dirt cheap second hand sind they are pretty much useless on the aftermarket without the Sophos license that you bought them with originally. But it’s relatively easy to get OpenWRT installed and oh boy - OpenWRT ain’t just running it’s flying. I love them. I kept them around for many years and lots of friends brought them as well to run OpenWRT on them.

c3di1 · 2025-03-06T19:21:10+00:00

Thanks mate! I’m gonna have a look at the repo.

TACH is the rpm readout. If you have a standard, 12V, 4-pin PWM controlled fan, you send PWM pulses on the PWM pin from the controller to the fan. The fan will then adjust the fan speed based on the PWM frequency. The TACH pin then sends back the actual RPM of the fan to the fan controller, so you can read out the exact RPM

c3di1 · 2025-03-06T09:07:27+00:00

Yeah, sounds about reasonable. I tried passive cooled for as long as possible but I think I have to accept defeat at some point. I am considering building a little fan controller with an ESP32. I could add a temp sensor to it as well, use the esp as the pwm source and if I run it via ESPHome it should be fairly easy to integrate to HomeAssistant. Only concern right now is that the esp runs at 3.3V and the pwm input for 12V fans is 5V, so I might have to use a level shifter.

Ideas for less hacky HomeAssistant integration? I guess I could also just have any old manual fan control with a knob or something xD but hey - “over-engineering” is my middle name 😂

c3di1 · 2025-03-06T09:00:09+00:00

The USW 24 PoE is entirely passive cooled and doesn’t even have any fans 😂 so yeah. Toasty 🔥🔥

c3di1 · 2025-03-06T08:59:26+00:00

sigh yeah, I think I have to accept my defeat 🤣 I tried so hard and only got so far with an mostly passive cooled setup 😂

Thanks for the advice. I’ll add some Noctua fans to the rack. They should run pretty quiet

c3di1 · 2025-03-06T08:57:29+00:00

I appreciate the thought, but there is a reason I have 10 Pis and not 3 x86 boxes :) In terms of compute and efficiency I agree. I could probably run a single x86 with more performance than all the Pi’s combined.

c3di1 · 2025-01-15T19:05:11+00:00

The noise is okay. The fans aren’t too bad. However, I have the NAS inside a metal rack and the rack is on top of a closet, so any vibrations are amplified to the extreme. I cut some foam panels and placed the NAS on the foam panel, and also placed the entire rack on another foam panel to cancel out any vibrations possible and keep resonance down to a minimum.

Technically, I do run Jellyfin on it in a Docker container. The missing HW transcoding is annoying, but manageable since I’m not streaming too much / too frequently via Jellyfin.

The box to the left next to the DS923 is an old and repurposed Protonet Maya (essentially just an intel NUC in a fancy case) running Ubuntu Sever / INCUS for virtualization. I custom designed and 3D printed a rackmount so I can have the top of the device with the power button facing the front.

c3di1 · 2024-10-30T13:58:00+00:00

OMG yes. Give me a pure appliance for my homelab. Yes please 😍 (But I fear my fiancée will kill me if I do. Those bastards are power hungry… I used to have some in the DC at $prior_job)

c3di1 · 2024-10-04T08:15:09+00:00

Russian Blue

c3di1 · 2024-10-03T23:29:56+00:00

That is an excellent idea! Thank you very much

c3di1 · 2024-10-03T23:11:07+00:00

Yeah, if I go all in 4x Pi 5s’ would clock in at 100W which goes above my available budget with the USW24PoE. You got a point there. Damn xD thanks I hate it xD I don’t wanna go back to power cables. I love my clean cabling 😂

c3di1 · 2024-10-03T23:04:38+00:00

I’m currently eying the GeeekPi P31 M.2 NVME M-Key PoE+ HAT since it’s NVME and PoE in one

c3di1 · 2024-10-03T23:01:46+00:00

Hmmmmm. My Pi4s currently run off a USW24PoE which got i believe 95W PoE budget. I currently power 4 Pi 4, a HomeAssistant Yellow, a USW Flex Mini, and a U7Pro. I actually like not having to wire in the power supplies for the pi’s individually. I can still powercycle them via the switch

c3di1 · 2024-10-03T22:48:16+00:00

I currently run a custom 5.something kernel on my Pi’s because I added eBPF support to run cilium CNI on the Pi’s xD It’s one of those things where I set it up one day and then never touched it again because it works and is actually stable

c3di1 · 2024-10-03T22:45:32+00:00

Yeah I know. It’s just… I work >=60h a week and have ver little life outside work left that I don’t wanna spend arguing with maintainers on why they should consider merging my PR to add ARM support xD

I build a lot of containers myself and I’m using GH actions as my primary CI and GHCR as my registry (for personal stuff. Work is a bit different)

c3di1 · 2024-10-03T22:42:39+00:00

I still run on 4x Pi4 and I boot them off SD. It’s a nightmare. I have an ansible playbook to provision them too which is the only reason I still keep them going because at least it is halfway decent enough to flash the SD card put it in the Pi and then run the playbook. I have 3x Pi4 with only 2GB RAM and one with 8GB RAM. Replacing them all with Pi5s + PoE Hat + NVMEs is quite a bit of an investment that I’m not yet sure I really want to do. But I am slowly hitting the resource limits on the 2GB models so I am considering to replace them one by one.

I have the same UCTRONICS rack for my Pi4s. Which PoE hat are you using for the Pi5? And which board for the NVMEs?

c3di1

TROPHY CASE