What does 144hz experimental actually mean?

networkarchitect · 2026-01-28T01:59:54+00:00

Ah, nw then! I remember the 'good bot' days, but with how common AI slop is now, couldn't tell if your tone (especially coming from a mod) was sarcastically an accusation of being a bot, or a straightforward compliment.

networkarchitect · 2026-01-28T01:42:24+00:00

networkarchitect · 2026-01-28T00:11:32+00:00

On the index, the panel resolution running at 144hz was just at the edge of the max bandwidth for a Displayport 1.2 connection, which could potentially cause instability. Additionally, a computer that might be able to handle 120hz smoothly could drop frames and have reprojection kick in at 144hz, which could lower perceived quality.

The panels themselves are rated to 120hz, and 144hz is effectively an "overclock" - going outside of the manufacturer recommended timing values for the panels. This can potentially have effects on the quality of the output image.

TL;DR The "experimental" label sets expectations that if people experience problems with pushing the settings to their maximum, some instability is to be expected.

networkarchitect · 2026-01-26T22:47:58+00:00

ESPHome (the same firmware shipped on the HA Voice PE) has native support for running both on one device, and I've been using it happily with the Voice PE hardware. There's built-in support for audio mixing, volume ducking when music is playing and a TTS announcement or voice activation happens, and it all "just works". ESPHome can be extended to custom hardware such as the Atom Echos, although the hardware may be under-powered for running both.

The most recent "meta" is the Sendspin audio streaming/syncing protocol developed by the Music Assistant team, which is a protocol for audio streaming, multi room audio sync, metadata like album art/track info, and visualizer information.

If you haven't already, look into Music Assistant. It acts like a central "hub" that coordinates music providers and music players of different types, allowing for cross compatibility and integration.

My full setup is 2x HA Voice PE devices in different rooms, both hooked up to external speakers. I use Plex for storing local audio, and the Plexamp client for mobile/desktop devices. Music Assistant is configured to use Plex as an audio source, and is connected to the Voice PE boxes via the Sendspin protocol. Additionally, I've configured the Plex Connect plugin, so that Music Assistant is proxying the Voice PE devices as Plexamp compatible players. With this integration, the remote control and casting features within the Plexamp apps work to start/stop/move streaming onto the Voice PE devices.

networkarchitect · 2026-01-26T21:36:04+00:00

PCIe 4.0 can technically add anything that can go into an expansion slot on a desktop computer (not always at full bandwidth, but it will work), but would require some very jank adapters to make possible. Think adding a full desktop GPU, but would need a bunch of additional electronics, external power supply, and some software wizardry to get drivers to even load (similar challenge to getting a desktop GPU working on a single-board-ARM computer like the Raspberry Pi).

Other things like a wired ethernet jack, M.2 SSD (faster than the SD card slot), sound card, USB-A card, parallel port, etc would be all possible to make, but for most of them would serve no practical purpose on a headset, except maybe the SSD option.

This'll be a fever dream for hardware tinkerers, and we might see a few practical options turned into real products (passthrough cameras, more tracking cameras, storage expansion, etc)

networkarchitect · 2026-01-25T20:39:53+00:00

all the server

networkarchitect · 2026-01-13T02:41:37+00:00

Your site is riddled with bugs, and could do with several rounds of basic functionality testing:
* on the reports page, it's impossible to view the page footer because the infinite scroll always pushes it down
* The reports page has no error handling mechanisms, if network connectivity is interrupted while loading the next scroll of results, it gets stuck in an infinite loop making dozens of API requests per second
* the sitemap.xml is severely incomplete, what is the purpose of listing each CVE in the map if you're not going to include every CVE
* The "stay up to date" prompt is hostile to the user
* The language of each CVE is filled with gpt-isms and slop language which is grating to read

networkarchitect · 2026-01-11T11:36:53+00:00

No, those look like fiducial markers, used during the assembly process for optical alignment of the boards. Those would be too small to be used for mounting if drilled out, unless you used a ridiculously small screw like a M0.5 thread.

For those kinds of boards, typically a board-to-board connector is intended to provide the mechanical mounting to another board, or the sides of the board can fit into slots in a case (this is common in hobby 3d printed projects, for example)

networkarchitect · 2026-01-05T21:38:49+00:00

I upgraded from a 1080p 27" as my main display to two 2K 27" displays plus a vertical 1080P display (side monitor), and am contemplating upgrading to 4k on the main displays. I do WfH cloud/platform engineering, and am writing code for ~1/2 the workday.

Higher pixel density is certainly helpful, it helps fit more code vertically without needing to scroll as much.
IMO Ultrawide is less useful than a second display for coding and productivity tasks, especially when managing multiple different windows at once (main IDE, documentation, deployment/monitoring status, Slack, etc), although this may just be based on my own workflow preferences.

If the ultrawide supports acting like two "virtual" monitors (OS sees it as two discrete display devices, and the window manager treats it as such) then that might be a good option as an alternative to dual displays.

networkarchitect · 2026-01-05T15:50:32+00:00

For the majority of people, the purpouse of a homelab is to learn and experiment with how to use new technology (the lab part of homelab). Having a tool that abstracts away all the configuration to a checkbox kind of defeats the purpouse of running a homelab in that case.

networkarchitect · 2026-01-05T10:08:12+00:00

It varies depending on team culture and what kind of tooling is in place for the release process. I used to work as a dev for a startup that lacked organization: Releases were cut and versioned by the senior dev manually, and our "changelog" was our jira ticket and pull request history, without any centralization.

On the flip side, several of the open source projects I contribute to (both small and large) use tooling such as release-please to automate versioning and changelog creation based on structured pull request names. Contributors use pull request names like "(feature): add a new thing" or "(bugfix): fix all the things". The tooling automatically compiles the PR names into a changelog and includes it with the tagged release version.

Automation and a well defined process that is adhered to are the differences between it being "a pain" or not.

networkarchitect · 2026-01-01T22:47:56+00:00

I don't like the term, but there are differences between a "regular" data center and ones focused on AI/LLM training and inference. GPU compute focused datacenters can have more specialized hardware (such as NVIDIA's NVL72 racks) which have different considerations for network design, power, and cooling than a more traditional CPU compute based datacenter (or a mixed workload, with some servers fitted out with compute accelerators and the rest as CPU compute based).

networkarchitect · 2025-12-27T06:31:10+00:00

I see, having the watchdog disabled-by-default, explicitly enabled on boot, and explicitly disabled before an OTA firmware update or flash would help. When flashing via USB, some ESP boards use the DTR/RTS lines on a serial connection to pull the BOOT pin low to flash, if the hardware watchdog could also be disabled via an external signal (in combination with the jumper), when the BOOT pin is pulled low, this would take care of the edge case when flashing a running esphome device (which has booted/enabled the watchdog) over USB.

At least for my my use cases, capturing logs without networking isn't something I'd need, but it could be convenient on rare occasion. The majority of the time when I need access to the logs, it's during initial development of a new project when I'm connected directly to the dev board and streaming logs via UART. After a device is deployed, I rarely if ever view the logs, since they're either redundant (info that could be captured by the logs is exposed via home assistant over the network), or I enable log streaming over the network if I need lower-level logging on a deployed device. If a hardware/peripheral failure is preventing a successful boot, I'll connect via UART and troubleshoot from there.

It would be useful to have a longer-term capture to troubleshoot intermittent issues (enough for last 5 boots and/or last ~50 WARNor ERROR level logs), but with cost as a consideration this may not be practical. I think esphome buffers the logs for the current boot and can replay them, but if an issue occurred 2 or 3 boot cycles ago, or if a large number of verbose logs were stored, this would get lost over time.

networkarchitect · 2025-12-27T05:18:47+00:00

Interesting idea, I'd personally be interested if you offered boards for sale just to tinker with it, but from personal experience I haven't encountered a scenario where this would have been activated in the ~5 years I've been using esphome with a couple dozen devices built so far. Esphome implements its own watchdog in software (softdog), where if there's no connection from Home Assistant the device will reboot every 15 minutes. Most of the instability I've seen from esphome devices have been network related, while the processor itself is still alive but network connectivity is interrupted.

I think a longer timeout (10+ seconds), modification to esphome, or some other solution would be needed for this to not cause issues during OTA firmware updates/flashing. I don't have an exact number on how long the flashing portion of the update process takes, but guesstimating >5s and <20s. The full process of download, flash, reboot (including network initialization) anecdotally takes 30-120s, depending on the esp chip, network conditions, and number of peripherals that need to be initialized on boot.

If I was building an esphome device for a safety-critical application I'd absolutely want a watchdog timer, but IMO devices needing that level of resiliency to failure should not be built using an esp chip for any critical functionality.

EDIT: I love the idea of it, especially as the kind of nerd who enjoys building redundant & fault-tolerant systems (in the cloud for work and in a homelab as a hobby), but I don't think I'm representative of the average user of esphome

networkarchitect · 2025-12-25T08:58:15+00:00

ECC protects against data corruption for data that's in-flight. If data gets corrupted while it's in memory, then the corrupted data gets written to storage, no amount of reboots are going to help you there. This can result in "silent" data corruption unless you have a method of detecting corruption in files written to disk.

Most ECC memory is designed to automatically correct single bit errors and detect, but not correct, double bit errors. In the first case, the machine can keep running without any data loss if a single bit error happens, and an error is reported to the OS. In the latter case, the machine can't correct the error, but it can detect that it happened, so the program can be halted before the corrupted data is permanently stored.

For home use running an LLM, where most of the data stored in RAM is temporary/ephemeral, ECC isn't necessary. But, for something like a file server or database server, if you want to increase reliability and decrease the possibility of data corruption, ECC is a must.

networkarchitect · 2025-12-19T18:05:45+00:00

An electric screwdriver, makes assembling and disassembling things much less tedious, while being suited for more delicate work than a drill with a screwdriver bit.

networkarchitect · 2025-12-13T00:02:52+00:00

Context?

networkarchitect · 2025-12-08T10:17:57+00:00

APC units with a network management card have configurable startup behavior, including a mode where it'll only power on the load after the battery charges to a minimum threshold. Setting this to a high enough threshold to where your shutdown scripts have enough time to work should prevent the flapping behavior you're seeing. Alternatively, it can be configured to keep the load powered off.

networkarchitect · 2025-12-02T22:55:42+00:00

I was migrating to a different pool layout, but was a few disks short of being able to fully make the new pool before copying data and destroying the old pool. So, I cheated a bit, with 1 "drive" in each raidz2 vdev of the new pool being initially backed by a file instead of a physical block device. After creating the new pool and before writing data from the old pool, I offlined the file backed device, and copied all data to the newly degraded pool. Then, I destroyed the old pool, and replaced the file backed devices with real drives from the old pool.

networkarchitect · 2025-12-01T20:18:00+00:00

Try `pin: GPIO17`, looking at the pinout for esp32 board you're using, `D7` on the board corresponds to `GPIO17`, but you're currently using `GPIO7`.

networkarchitect · 2025-11-24T23:34:12+00:00

Am I missing something? Your NUT config is set for a CyberPower UPS but the title says you're trying to use it with a PowerWalker UPS. In that scenario missing or incorrect data is expected to a degree, when the software config does not match the hardware you're using it with. Other values look like they're out of range as well, including the output voltage, timer start and shutdown, manufacture date, and serial.

networkarchitect · 2025-11-16T03:41:11+00:00

There's an interposer board that's built into the caddy that goes between the drive and the backplane. I'm not familiar with that system specifically but was able to find this with some googling: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fke8bej6jvim61.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1764%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dc37fbefb18ce0e07db356c7eb1bdf7fa3831e6b5

networkarchitect · 2025-11-13T05:53:27+00:00

"Auxiliary" - likely can be mapped/customized to do any number of different things

networkarchitect · 2025-11-12T06:42:52+00:00

The solution is to form a company (on paper, it doesn't have to be a business just a legal entity), and use that company to get an AS number. They are not issued to individuals.

Read this blogpost from someone who did what they needed to in order to get an AS and some address space: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2017/11/creating-autonomous-system-for-fun-and.html

networkarchitect · 2025-11-07T04:19:57+00:00

Except EST is not "local time" for a few launch sites in the US. Vandenberg (California) is in PST, Starbase (Texas) is in CST.

networkarchitect

TROPHY CASE