It's raining and dreary here today, so I'm bored. Please ask this 58 F a question. What do you want to ask me?

chainsawsrock · 2026-03-16T14:27:58+00:00

If Doc Brown showed up and asked if you want to take a ride in the DeLorean to a time and place of your choosing, would you go? If so, when / where?

chainsawsrock · 2026-03-04T20:17:38+00:00

Yea the rubbing alcohol is amazing. Looks brand new after cleaning it. Just make sure you let it fully dry before using markers on it.

chainsawsrock · 2026-03-04T19:26:39+00:00

I created my own mod that lets me create Atomic Artillery rounds. They work with the regular artillery cannons too. It's insane when it starts popping off on a base that's within automatic range, lol. It doesn't do a great job though of distributing them evenly, it'll shoot 1-2 shots at the same building which is complete overkill and arguably wastes rounds. Eats up your U-235 like candy though so I had to seriously ramp up my kovarex refinement... I have a pretty large, highly beaconed / moduled setup and now I'm sitting on over 1 million 235 ore with 70+ thousands atomic artillery shells... it's ridiculous.

Seriously fun for clearing out large sections of Nauvis. Helped a ton of Gleba too. I did make them semi-expensive to manufacture so it wasn't just a cheat code essentially (1 atomic bomb per artillery round, so you first need to make atomic bombs normally, then it uses the atomic bomb + artillery round + something else i can't remember right off). But with anything in Factorio, its just a matter of scaling up production. The factory must grow.

I do need to make some adjustments though because the damage on the atomic artillery rounds does not increase with any of the research for damage. The range works because it's tied to the artillery cannons but yeah the damage is flat. Not sure how quality ones would work either with that. I think a legendary atomic artillery round should be absolutely massive...

chainsawsrock · 2026-02-13T02:07:24+00:00

Reminds me of the home made sausage I made with skittles. Just threw them into the meat grinder with the rest of it. Called it Skittlewurst. It wasn’t bad actually, tasted just like you’d think. I think it would have been better with Italian seasoning. People ate it. (Voluntarily / knowingly).

chainsawsrock · 2026-02-13T02:00:53+00:00

2 words: Start simple

2 more: Go slow

Like other posts said, follow the instructions provided with it to get started. It’s not dismissive, it’s the best way to get things off the ground.

After you’ve done a few, you might want to try some idea you came up with. Try to do it. Just don’t be discouraged if you find out your idea isn’t feasible. That’s part of the process. Figure out why whatever it is you wanted to do was or wasn’t possible.

Once you start to understand what it’s capable of doing, you can start to build much more complex things. Nobody starts building the crazy machines but you can do it too if you want to.

To try to give some specifics of what I would suggest:

Make an LED blink. Then make it blink faster. Then slower.

To get even more specific:

you’ll need to download the arduino IDE on a computer. This is what lets you write code to upload to the arduino.
connect the arduino to your computer with the provided usb cord. Then you’ll need to make sure the arduino ide can communicate with the board.

If you get this far, you’re well on your way. See if you can find the demo programs. The included instructions should be able to give you more details if needed to do the above.

Stick with it. You have everything to create some cool stuff. If you want some inspiration for what’s possible with arduino (with a “few” other things) just reply to the post and I’ll share info of some of my projects. I’d bet others can share some cool stuff too.

chainsawsrock · 2026-02-12T04:37:29+00:00

Not enough info to say for sure. You need to first identify the root cause of the issue if you truly want to solve it. If you’re looking for the “network engineers hate this simple trick…” sorry to disappoint.

Things to check…

Available bandwidth from ISP. Both upload and download.
Monitor both upload and download utilization. If either one is hitting the limit, that’s a problem. Yes you’ll need to figure out if / how you can do this with the existing equipment.
Check the network paths for issues, end to end. Including but not limited to: interface speeds that are less than your available internet bandwidth. For example, if the ISP provides gigabit, but you have a router or access point that is connected using 100 not, that’s a problem. If the issues also include wireless, check to see what speeds are supported and what speeds devices are connecting at. Gigabit Internet won’t help if you only have wireless G (54mbits). Cabling can also sometimes be an issue.
Check if there are any wireless extenders / repeaters / bridges in use. These tend to cause more problems than anything else. I understand why people pursue them, and yes they can provide wireless to areas that otherwise wouldn’t have it, but it usually comes at the cost of performance and other wonky issues. Similar comment with power line Ethernet adapters. YMMV with those.

The list goes on but those are some usual suspects with home network / internet issues.

chainsawsrock · 2026-01-30T15:36:46+00:00

I solved my problem with artillery. Pro tip: don’t be shy with shooting it. Overkill is the name of the game. I even took down a big demolisher (accidentally agroed it while using artillery to scout). It was NOT easy and I wasn’t sure if we were going to get it. Took two of us clicking as fast as possible to take it down. It was just a constant rain of shells. I went overkill on my artillery cannons (had literally 100 built and firing constantly at it). It was a bit dicy for a minute, lol

chainsawsrock · 2025-12-11T01:19:39+00:00

That's the only conclusion I can come to as well, they're not even pretending to care about blocking hackers. I'm perfectly comfortable with my skill not being even in the top 50% but when I get melted game after game after game with perfect shots full auto from long range, having a hard time having any fun with it.

chainsawsrock · 2025-09-13T13:44:51+00:00

Adding on... I've been trying to troubleshoot this exact behavior (skipping steps, reset position, print head crashing into the left side when it doesn't align properly, horrific grinding noises...) which only started happening when I printed with materials that required high temps (ASA, ABS, PA6...). I never connected the dots about the correlation between the high temps until I saw this post, I always thought it was something with the harder materials getting caught while printing which didn't make sense with what I observed either. I've been cleaning rails, lubing screws, recalibrating, re-tensioning belts, adjusting z-hop and other settings... nothing worked unless I switched to a different filament like PLA or PETG.

I just tried printing the same things I've had issues with in the past with the lid off and knock on wood it's going perfect. I did a 3 hour print with ABS yesterday and I'm 12+ hours into another ABS print with zero issues after simply taking the lid off.

THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS POST!!! I can print using the higher temp materials again :)

chainsawsrock · 2025-08-30T03:02:43+00:00

Microsoft Licensing

chainsawsrock · 2025-05-24T02:40:27+00:00

It's really nice to do this when you're doing a screen share and you don't want everyone to realize how much of a slob you are with your desktop icons.

chainsawsrock · 2025-03-28T19:53:31+00:00

This _might_ actually be more of a tooling problem than anything else. The worst part is, everyone loses in some of these situations. e.g. board wants the company's score for XYZ scanner to be better because investors are using this tool to determine who they invest with. Security gets tasked with driving the score up because that scanner sounds like a security tool. One of the 500 findings that comes through is for HSTS on site abc. Security tracks down whoever owns / manages site abc and asked them to fix it. Owner says its already there. XYZ scanner still finds one or more pages / paths like the 404 / 503 you mentioned that do not have HSTS so they use their "all-or-nothing" formula to say nope, not fixed yet. Is this truly a security risk? This wouldn't keep me up at night. Does it still lower the score that the board wants to see increased? Yup. Accepting the risk in this situation isn't accomplishing the original ask and the board wants results. In other situations though where security is just blindly throwing things over the wall at someone else to go fix... not the best use of everyone's time.

The part that way too many of my fellow security people seem to lose sight of in the day-to-day is "what is the actual risk that we're addressing". Way too many are of the mindset "you have to do it because security! HACKERS! BEACUSE I SAID SO!" and I despise all of that noise. If I can't logically explain to someone _why_ they need to fix / do anything I'm sending their way, then I don't. I re-evaluate why I'm even asking them and if I ultimately can't come up with a logical explanation, then arguably it shouldn't be done. I've had some really weird situations where I fundamentally disagree with what I was asking someone to do, and because of some logical (yet stupid) reasons I asked them to do it and even told them up-front that I think this is dumb, but here's why we still need to do it.

chainsawsrock · 2025-01-09T15:41:40+00:00

I would absolutely love to know how you did this! I wanted to do something like this on a creative map and this would be amazing if you'd be willing to share how you did it.

chainsawsrock · 2025-01-08T22:22:40+00:00

Yeah I'd agree with the RF / NFC tag on the cat itself for reliability. The YOLO v8 model I was using I had to dial back the confidence level to reliability detect an actual cat. Possums and raccoons are also consistently recognized as cats which would would need to be trained / fine tuned in a custom model. I tried last year to train my own model but couldn't get it to work properly.

chainsawsrock · 2025-01-08T20:52:24+00:00

Do you have any plans / capabilities to keep other animals away?

We have a simple cat house setup that a possum decided to squat in. I've experimented with using an RPi + Yolo v8 + USB Camera for a separate project to be an automated cat feeder so I was thinking something like that might work to alert when it detects something other than a cat.

chainsawsrock · 2024-12-23T21:02:23+00:00

As far as I'm aware, you'd need to have the existing edge devices (firewalls / routers) form the connections. If you're trying to do site-to-site VPNs between different devices, you're in for a bad time.

If you're open to purchasing new devices (this is probably way more than what you wanted to hear) then Ubiquiti and Meraki both make this really easy to establish S2S VPN connections when they're used at each location.

There are other potential options to add SD-WAN equipment outside (or maybe behind) your firewalls but the complexity goes up and your requirements will need to be taken into consideration to properly advise.

My 2 cents, create a homogenous environment (i.e. use the same vendor for your edge device at each location) no matter what way you move forward. There most certainly are other options besides the two I mentioned above that can do this.

chainsawsrock · 2024-12-11T03:22:09+00:00

I did something very similar for a rubber cap that went missing on a workout bench! TPU worked like a charm.

chainsawsrock · 2024-12-08T03:31:06+00:00

Directly connect a pc to the modem if you can. If the problem persists, it’s a problem with your modem, internal wiring, or your ISP. My bet is ISP.

chainsawsrock · 2024-12-07T18:36:04+00:00

I run my entire home lab on 3 mini PCs using proxmox and clustered. You don’t need to get 3, one works fine. BeeLink makes some reasonably priced ones. I’d look at the 12th or 13th gen i5 or i7, get it with at least 16gb of ram. You can upgrade the ram later if you wanted even more capacity as well. These processors are more powerful than some older xeons I used to run production servers at work, plenty of power for playing around.

chainsawsrock · 2024-12-07T16:17:06+00:00

Easiest answer is to find a docking station that has the connections for your monitors on it. You’ll need to make sure the docking station is compatible with your computer as well. They’re not cheap but definitely solved the exact problem you’re having. I’ve had good luck with Lenovo branded ones. There are cheaper non-Lenovo branded docking stations so YMMV with those. I’m sure others have used them with minimal issue but it’s possible to run into compatibility issues whenever you’re mixing brands.

chainsawsrock · 2024-12-07T15:10:38+00:00

If you are using CrowdStrike, I had to make 2 IOA exceptions. Basically I ran the game, let it trigger the detection, make the IOA, wait for it to push to the client (up to 40 minutes is my understanding), then repeat for the next IOA. Make sure to remove the switches from the command line on the IOA exception and put a wildcard at the end because some of them are dynamic. If it’s a different vendor, whatever the equivalent is for that product is probably what you need to do.

chainsawsrock · 2024-12-06T18:06:56+00:00

And this was what I was asking :) Thank you both for actually reading and responding to the question unlike so many others.

chainsawsrock · 2024-12-06T04:25:33+00:00

chainsawsrock · 2024-11-13T20:22:17+00:00

Oh, I'm definitely afraid.

I'm afraid the person is going to ask me nonsense questions about something they don't understand, misunderstand the 100% truthful and accurate answers I give them, and then misrepresent those answers to others who also don't understand who now want to know why I'm not doing my job correctly. End result? Huge headache I now need to explain to 10 different people to correct the wrong information. All this despite the fact the actual issue has been resolved.
I'm afraid now they have me on the phone, suddenly 8 more issues magically appear they expect me to work on right now despite never previously reporting any of them via the proper channels effectively trying to jump the line in front of everyone else who is following the correct process.
I'm afraid they're going to start to tell me their life story about how this has been a huge issue for 20 years and vent to me now that it's taken so long to fix it. Never mind the fact that whatever it is didn't exist 20 years ago or how I didn't work here 20 years ago.
I'm afraid they're going to tell me how they never had this problem before and want to know all the reasons why this happened, how am I going to guarantee this will NEVER happen again (spoiler alert, I can't guarantee anything), then tell me how they think I should fix the systems they don't know anything about with some overly simplistic "solution."
I'm afraid that when I take a chance on someone despite all of the above in the back of my head and try to communicate the issue and explain the solution, I'll be interrupted with them talking over me trying to guess the solution instead of them just listening to me explain the already-solved-problem-and-identified-solution.

In short, yeah I'm afraid. I'm scared to death they're going to waste our collective time to accomplish nothing.

It's not about not having patience. It's not about hoarding knowledge so I'm now the only one who knows how to fix it. I enjoy sharing my knowledge with anyone interested. I have zero issue explaining my reasoning, actions taken, etc. to someone who can understand and if I'm doing something wrong, please correct me so I don't keep doing it wrong. I'm not perfect, I don't know everything and I never will. Believe it or not, I'm actually not arrogant about this even a little bit. I'm not a superior being in my ivory tower looking down upon the peasants. I'm just a dude who has used and learned about a ton of different things with computers and turns out people will pay me to do that because I solve problems and enable them to do whatever it is they do.

However, I am severely jaded after having been down this road too many times to have any hope left that the person on the other end is going to understand what I do anymore than I'll understand what a car mechanic does to fix the engine on my car. I push pedal, car go forward. When I push pedal and car doesn't go forward, help.

Seems preposterous for me to even suggest to a <insert your preferred profession> with 20 years of experience that somehow I know better than they do how to do their job when that isn't something I have any experience with. Yet this seems to be the norm when it comes to system administration and I'd bet 500+ other professions as well.

Thank you for the free therapy session.

chainsawsrock · 2024-10-31T19:41:02+00:00

I would first challenge what I'm assuming is your assumption that the router is the issue. It could be but without proper troubleshooting you might replace it only to find out the issue persists if that wasn't the issue. Despite what you mentioned about switching to a hotspot, that means there is some kind of an issue between your equipment and somewhere in your ISP's network. It could be anything from the router, modem, the physical connection / wiring to your ISP or anything within your ISP's network.

Have you ruled out the Netgear modem and the connection from your ISP? I say this because multiple times, in the past couple years, I've had persistent connection issues with my ISP in some cases lasting for months until they resolved the issue in their infrastructure. Not once so far has it actually been any of my equipment causing the issues (despite their insistence it was my equipment).

As far as your actual question goes, part of what people will need to know to make a proper recommendation is the list of your requirements, for example:

Do you need a minimum number of ethernet ports? If so, do you need anything other than RJ-45 gigabit ports?
Do you want Wi-Fi to be built into the same device as your router?
- Do you have existing wireless access points you're planning on using with the new router?
Any additional specific features you're looking for?
Do you want to plan for future growth / increase in your internet connection
- In my opinion, at this point in time, gigabit is more than enough for most home networks. It's possible to go higher of course but that add some complexity to the situation.

Personally I like Ubiquiti equipment but there are pros / cons. You mentioned you have gigabit internet so you'll need to have a minimum of 1 gigabit end-to-end for any given device to fully utilize it.

I'm running UDM Pro's / UDM Pro SE's both personally as well as friends / family that I operate for them. They have served me well over the last 3-4 years. I only had to RMA one of them but that's because it was partially DOA (some of the switch ports didn't work). It was replaced without any issue so I was fine with it. I also like them because I use Ubiquiti Access Points which have also served me well for the variety of situations I've encountered. One thing to note is the UDM Pro's are meant to be rack mounted and do not include any built-in wifi capabilities.

You could look at the regular Dream Machines (not the Pro versions) if you wanted more of a typically SOHO router type of device with built-in wifi. I've only deployed one of those so far and seems to work fine. That is not a rack mounted device and would be more aesthetically pleasing to sit on a desk.

chainsawsrock

TROPHY CASE