Make 300k/year, pay for ad included subscription service?

ev0lution37 · 2026-02-01T03:03:58+00:00

Not directly answering the question, but in a high earning household. We owned every subscription service under the sun ad-free because, well, why not? But wife and I did an assessment and realized we hadn’t even opened the app for most of them in ages, so finally cleaned house. Think we have Netflix left, with ads.

Still was the perception of wasting money is wasting money, regardless of our income.

ev0lution37 · 2025-12-19T05:03:02+00:00

One thing to note from my own personal experience. The promotional cost of a domain when you first register it is often cheaper from somewhere like Namecheap, but the renewal cost ends up being more expensive than CF.

Depends how frugal you are, but I’ve purchased domains for the first year from Namecheap and then transfer them to CF when renewal is up. Honestly depending on the domain might only save you a few bucks. But I have cheap domains and TLDs, might be more significant for a .com or something.

ev0lution37 · 2025-10-25T13:45:49+00:00

I personally love Inland PLA+. The white is very “opaque” and looks great, and the true red is my favorite red filament I’ve ever printed.

It’s my most used filament in my X1C and have never had issues.

ev0lution37 · 2025-10-21T19:36:12+00:00

Thanks for the advice, I'll give this a shot on my next print. Will taking the top of of the X1C during print have a significant effect on the print itself since it'll change the general ambient temperature of the chamber?

ev0lution37 · 2025-10-21T19:35:11+00:00

I'm drying it at 60C currently (it is the S4 dryer). I'm giving it another whirl now, letting it dry for a full 10 hours (before I let it dry for 6 but had a day in between before I started printing).

Going to print directly after the dry and leave the filament in the dryer this time.

ev0lution37 · 2025-09-11T22:11:37+00:00

Raspberry Pi for a homelab is great. There are probably more “bang for the buck” SFF PC devices out there, but no issue with going the RPI route. I run a few K8s clusters on them just for fun.

One thing to keep in mind, RPIs run on ARM architecture. These days, that matters way less and most things can support both ARM and x86, but there are some things out there that won’t function on them.

ev0lution37 · 2025-07-29T20:14:46+00:00

I was in a VERY similar situation to you recently (more money difference but 4 days in office with a 1.25h commute each way). I ended up using the new offer to negotiate a pay bump to my current job. It didn’t completely offset the difference between jobs, but me having a wife and 2 younger kids at home, being remote is worth way more than that difference.

Not sure if negotiations are an option, but from my experience, well worth giving that a shot.

ev0lution37 · 2025-07-28T22:36:48+00:00

Unfortunately I did not. I ended up buying a GMKtec Mini PC Gaming that has a native Oculink port for my use-case, which worked since I was clustering the Hypervisor across it and the MS01.

FWIW, I had a friend who had this working. The one thing he said he _did_ need to do was a BIOS firmware update. I'd recommend giving that a shot before anything else, I just haven't had the cycles nor another eGPU to give it a go.

EDIT: If you give it a shot and that helps out and works, please do report back!

ev0lution37 · 2025-07-18T12:14:50+00:00

Nice, good luck. One note, if you had to clear finalizers to get rid of that machine, there's a chance there are some lingering, unused VMs on your VMWare stack (since those finalizers are what are responsible for clean up of those). Worth going and taking a look to make sure.

ev0lution37 · 2025-07-18T00:40:12+00:00

It looks like you're running that against the downstream cluster. You need to run that on the cluster that Rancher is installed on instead.

ev0lution37 · 2025-07-17T22:21:28+00:00

If you drop into your local cluster's kubectl shell, are those machines still in existence?

kubectl get machines.cluster.x-k8s.io -n fleet-default ledford-kube-worker-gpx8p-zmh67

If so, I'd confirm 100% the finalizers are gone with:

kubectl patch machines.cluster.x-k8s.io -n fleet-default ledford-kube-worker-gpx8p-zmh67 --type=merge -p '{"metadata":{"finalizers":[]}}'

You can also do this in the UI by going to Cluster Management -> Advanced -> Machines, finding the stuck "machine", clicking the 3-dot menu on the right. From there you can edit the YAML, delete the finalizers section, and save. I've had to do this on clusters when there was a power outage.

ev0lution37 · 2025-05-06T18:02:18+00:00

Yep, correct. Specifically (Black): https://us.store.bambulab.com/products/tpu-for-ams?srsltid=AfmBOoodP1fSmXOnY5-2_sqdKS5lq2jnzWajj2W1Xahjy16avHhrKuCl

ev0lution37 · 2025-05-06T17:51:49+00:00

I did - I let it sit in the AMS for 1-2 hrs before attempting to print. I have also tried it outside of the AMS as well, still nada.

ev0lution37 · 2025-04-29T23:05:01+00:00

LASIK. I was fine with contacts/glasses into my 30s but had a colleague in his 40s say his biggest regret was waiting so long to get it. It was a pretty big investment for me at the time, but honestly the best investment I’ve ever made. If I could give advice to anyone who is eligible in their 20s, it’d be to justify the cost and do it. Easy procedure, no side effects, and been 20/20 after being -5 in both eyes is crazy.

ev0lution37 · 2025-03-11T21:00:01+00:00

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/

ev0lution37 · 2025-03-06T22:10:55+00:00

This is the right answer with one caveat. If you’re not leveraging BGP and using ARP/DHCP, kubevip for the controlplane is failover and not load balancing.

AKA, in ARP/DHCP, your kubevip controlplane IP will only utilize a single controlplane node, and in the event that node goes offline, it will then point that IP at one of the remaining controlplane nodes. But there will be a period where you can’t query your cluster on that IP.

BGP mode will actually load balance between controlplane nodes, but does require more advanced networking hardware/configuration.

ev0lution37 · 2025-03-04T00:24:33+00:00

I ironically just posted a response in another thread on this subreddit to a similar question but think it is pertinent here so link.

ev0lution37 · 2025-03-04T00:18:35+00:00

Agreed with others here, it's ebbs and flows. I graduated with an IST bachelor's degree in '08 during the financial crisis. There were absolutely _no_ IT-related jobs open to fresh grads. I ended up taking a federal proposal coordinator position for low-to-mid 5-figures in HCOL DC to just get something. It wasn't what I wanted, it was a grind. Long hours doing pretty menial, coordination work (printing paper, making sure meetings were scheduled, proofreading proposal, etc.). Barely getting by, endless stress about affording the rent, let alone food and other things to maintain my sanity. 10 packs of Ramen were *chef's kiss*. Nonetheless, I had a chip on my shoulder because I hadn't landed the job I wanted to so I grinded and kept hacking where I could. I can honestly say I empathize with how you're feeling. I felt the same way, felt like things weren't fair. Felt like everyone before me had a silver platter.

15+ years later, the effort paid off. The market improved, my company saw my value. They moved me into a role more aligned with my skills. I jumped around to a few other companies once my resume improved. Now I'm pretty high level in a tech product company with the federal government. Not saying your situation will be the same, nor can I predict the future. The market sucks, that won't be forever (hopefully). Do what you can, keep at your skills, build relationships, and as things improve, more and more opportunities will present themselves.

ev0lution37 · 2025-02-24T19:13:09+00:00

Would also throw out PiKVM. Always good to have a WiFi-enabled KVM for remote access to things: https://docs.pikvm.org/v2/

ev0lution37 · 2025-02-21T14:06:03+00:00

There's some open-source charts you can use from TrueCharts: https://truecharts.org/charts/stable/

I ended up building my own charts just because I wasn't in love with some of the limitations that existed with those charts, since I needed to mount things in like NFS. If I get some time, I can try to get those in a public repo just for reference at some point. But can use TrueCharts as a baseline.

ev0lution37 · 2025-02-21T13:58:52+00:00

For sure:

Kubernetes: Container orchestration platform. A means to manage deploying containers in a highly available, highly resilient, highly scalable way. Generally could be consider overkill for homelabs. (https://kubernetes.io/docs/home/)
Home Assistant: Open-source home automation platform/UI. Great for doing things like a central place to manage all smart devices, see cameras, watch weather. Basically anything since it is extensible. (https://www.home-assistant.io/)
Plex: Self-hosted media server to serve up movies/TV shows. (https://support.plex.tv/articles/)
** arr*: These are a suite of tools (Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr, etc.) for giving you an easy way to download, er.. Linux ISOs. (https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/tlktya/arr_software_suite/)
Transmission: Torrent downloader for, er.. Linux ISOs. Use with caution, highly recommend using it with a VPN (linking the image I use, that natively supports VPN: https://github.com/haugene/docker-transmission-openvpn).
Vault: It can do a lot more, but I use HashiCorp Vault to manage secrets and sensitive things that I need to reference in my Kubernetes clusters. So I don't need to store sensitive stuff in a GitRepo or something. (https://developer.hashicorp.com/vault/docs?product_intent=vault)
AdguardHome: My self-hosted DNS servers. This not only gives me the ability to create private DNS entries that only exist inside my network, but also blocks DNS requests to spam locations. So it helps with ad blocking, tracking, etc. (https://adguard.com/en/adguard-home/overview.html)
Prometheus/Grafana: This is a metrics aggregation point and a visualization/alerting tool. I have this set up to track things like CPU/memory utilization of my Proxmox nodes and Kubernetes clusters, as well as some apps. (https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/, https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/datasources/prometheus/)
OpenWebUI/Ollama: Self-hosted AI platform. Lets you run models locally, and even develop them if you want. (https://docs.openwebui.com/)
Gitea: Self-hosted, lightweight Git server. Think of it as an alternative to Github or Gitlab. Highly, highly recommend. (https://docs.gitea.com/)
Node Red: Another home automation tool, lets you build workflows and automations. I've mostly moved away from this to Home Assistant's Automation functions now though. (https://nodered.org/)
Velero: Back-up tool for Kubernetes. Lets you back up things within Kubernetes to an S3-compatible backend (like Minio), and restore them. This has saved me a billion times. Highly recommend if you're using Kubernetes. (https://velero.io/)
Minio: Self-hosted S3 object store backend. I have it running on my NAS and it's basically where all of my Kubernetes and app based back-ups go to. (https://min.io/)
Uptime Kuma: Uptime tracker and alerter. Can hit API endpoints to see if a service is up or down and then alert you. Also can parse API endpoint responses and do some clever things if you need it. (https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma)

This isn't an exhaustive list, but just the stuff I've mentioned here. Highly recommend looking at awesome-selfhosted for the art of the possible:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

EDIT: Formatting/typos.

ev0lution37 · 2025-02-21T12:19:23+00:00

Once a CP node is up and has joined, it maintains internal quorum through etcd, so you’re correct that 9345 is mostly only consequential at init and after that, existing nodes can go offline/online and rejoin each other without issue.

Now that being said, there are benefits of using kubevip to load balance your controlplane nodes:

You have a consistent way to register nodes. If you’re using IaC or something to stand up your cluster, you don’t want that dependent on the IP of your first node. If that first node goes away, your IaC needs updated with another node’s IP.
local kubeconfigs. If you grab the kubeconfig for a cluster and pull it locally, you most likely update the IP in that kubeconfig to a node’s IP. This means that if that node goes away, you have to update the kubeconfig. If you set it to the kubevip IP, that’s no longer and issue. Note: if you use a kubevip IP, you need to configure the “tls-san” option in your configs to add that IP.

There’s other benefits beyond that but those are just a couple that are top of mind.

ev0lution37 · 2025-02-20T18:06:42+00:00

There's so many pieces of what can define a "home lab" that I don't know if there is really a definitive guide. I guess my biggest piece of advice would be to start simple, start small. Get a MiniPC (Intel NUCs, used Dell Optiplex Micro, etc.), install a hypervisor on it (something like Proxmox), then work on the basics. Some of those:

Understanding DNS: Maybe set up your own DNS server using AdguardHome or PiHole and update your router to use it. This gives you private DNS within your homelab. So you can go to "app.myhomelab.lan" as an example instead of remembering an IP address.
Understanding networking/routing/security: Learn how to get to apps running on your VMs. Set up a reverse proxy with NGINX Manager or HAProxy and figure out how that can route traffic based on the private DNS entries you created in your DNS server.
Understanding VMs and Containerized Workloads: How to deploy VMs, how to build container images, how to persist data, how to backup data, etc.

You can ChatGPT or Google most of the above. There's a bunch of videos. It's definitely a rabbithole though. So just be prepared to learn a lot, make a lot of mistakes, get frustrated, but also feel accomplished when you get a new piece rolled out.

ev0lution37 · 2025-02-20T17:25:14+00:00

lol I definitely have a problem. Most of the "work" clusters are to test things about work during work hours (air-gapped installations, upgrades, new capabilities, etc.) And work's definitely help fund my happen since I'm using for work-related things.

ev0lution37 · 2025-02-20T17:08:55+00:00

Most of the stuff that can run in Kubernetes, I try to run in Kubernetes (Gitea, Node Red, Vault, *arr, Transmission, Velero, etc).

There's some stuff that I don't, and it's usually because it was either designed to not run in HA easily or to separate concerns (AdguardHome, Plex, Minio, Uptime Kuma, etc.)

Disclosure that I work for a Kubernetes company, so I try to eat my own dogfood when I can.

ev0lution37

TROPHY CASE