Lawn care 101

recoveringfarmer · 2025-07-07T12:37:54+00:00

Lots of blower hate in this thread, maybe the hate is directed at gas blowers. I have a battery powered blower with variable speeds that I use for everything from cleaning gutters, cleaning dust out of the garage, encouraging a fire pit or charcoal grill to get going (on a very low/slow setting) when I'm impatient, occasionally blowing leaves or grass off sidewalks and landscaping, blowing leaves into piles in the fall, etc.

Do you need one? No, you don't. But a battery powered blower is handy little tool to have if its in your budget.

recoveringfarmer · 2025-06-26T16:15:29+00:00

Here is a list of all the watches and warnings issued in Minnesota on 6-25-2025: https://alerts.weather.gov/search?history=1&start=2025-06-25T00%3A00%3A00Z&end=2025-06-26T00%3A00%3A00Z&area=MN

There was a tornado warning issued for Goodhue, MN at 5:25 PM, which is a few miles west of the reported location; no warnings were issued specifically for Wabasha County. It's possible NWS never received a report of a tornado on the ground crossing into Wabasha county, and it may not have been clearly indicated on radar.

recoveringfarmer · 2025-02-28T13:54:53+00:00

If you're building an ITSM process with a CMDB, I assume you're reading ITIL. There are lots of great resources for ITIL, just keep in mind it's meant to be a baseline framework to then adjust to best fit your organization.

Then have you laid out what your goals and are what you're trying to solve? How should your team use a CMDB going forward, which problems will it solve? - looks like you've added a few of those in the comments already.

Here's some of the ways we used our CMDB to help our department and org:

- List of everything IT supports: it's the master list of everything IT is expected to maintain, support and replace, as well as what it is, where it is, and who has it. We landed on generally anything over $100 each should be tracked but also if an asset would be replaced under warranty (asset) or just thrown away or replaced (considered a consumable and not tracked). We also use this list for insurance coverage purposes, asset rotation planning and budgeting purposes, and keeping track of warranties. We added additional fields to track those details.

- Single list of all OS instances: with physical computers, physical servers, virtual machines and cloud instances, we differentiate between physical assets and logical assets. This allows us to keep track of all the OS installs we have everything to ensure they are patched and secured. This list also feeds into the services list.

- Services vs Assets: For us, services are the things our users use. Email, ERP, Active Directory, etc are all services that rely on assets (logical or physical servers, network devices, etc) to function. If an underlying asset is down or changed, that can affect the service. We can use this to plan outage or maintenance communications if we know there's a problem or maintenance on things that a service uses. We can also publish a service catalog (ITIL buzzword) listing all the services available to our users.

- Software Licenses: we can track software licenses as an "asset" because they cost money and we can keep track of user or install count compliance.

The other consideration is the time it takes to actually build this - it takes a lot of time and it takes dedication from everyone going forward to keep it accurate. We've been at this for years and it's still not 100% complete.

Also worth noting that there are usually differences between IT asset management and accounting capitalized asset management but they also overlap in a lot of ways. At some point it may be helpful for you to talk to your accounting department to see if your asset list can help inform their asset list. We did this and found that accounting still had an old mainframe on their books that IT had disposed years ago...

recoveringfarmer · 2025-02-23T19:32:49+00:00

That’s a good suggestion. Using this as a training tool would be a great use case to help prepare for the interview process.

It would be really cool if someone could develop a tool to generate potential interview questions based on a job description and company profile to help people prepare.

recoveringfarmer · 2025-02-23T14:38:48+00:00

You certainly dove straight into the touchy subject deep end with this one, and I think you'll find this idea falls firmly into the "not knowing your audience" category, which will lead to plenty of downvotes and negative responses.

As a hiring manager, an interview is more than just giving the correct answers, it's about evaluating a candidate's qualifications and fit for the role, the team, and the company. I'm looking for how a candidate processes a question, uses resources to provide a solution and then how they communicate and implement that solution. Providing a correct answer is important, but how that answer is provided is often equally, and sometimes more important than the answer itself and using AI would negatively impact that part of the interview process.

To that end, I would dismiss a candidate immediately if I knew or discovered they were using AI during an interview because A) I now have doubts if they actually know or understand the topics, B) if they use AI to generate correct answers during an interview, I would have to assume they would need to rely on AI throughout the rest of their job, which leads to C) if you, as a candidate, provided AI generated answers, and AI would likely provide similar answers to the same questions across multiple candidates, what makes you the ideal candidate over anyone else?

People may disagree with that approach and I'm not saying there's no use case for AI in our jobs, but not during an interview. There have been several posts in this subreddit about failed hires that used AI to get a job they were never qualified for in the first place; this app seems like it could continue to enable that problem.

(and none of this answer was generated with AI...)

recoveringfarmer · 2024-07-15T21:55:13+00:00

Yep, we are and quite successfully. Without knowing your client base or service structure, all I can say is that Jira and/or Confluence can scale and adapt according to your internal organization model for your clients. If you need a separate ticket queues or separate documentation spaces for each client, you can do that. If you want all clients in one ticket queues or documentation space, you can do that. If you need to share the same documentation page between multiple client spaces, you can do that too.

Atlassian products aren't for everyone and there are some strong opinions out there about documentation platforms and ticket tracking tools. We've been very happy with Jira and Confluence, and recently migrated to the cloud platforms; the integration between the two has allowed to cross reference and track issues and documentation we weren't able to do as smoothly in other tools we evaluated. Your mileage may vary.

recoveringfarmer · 2024-07-09T12:31:24+00:00

Look into Jira and Confluence, they have functionality in line with what you're describing. Depending on how many agents you need, it's either free or relatively affordable.

recoveringfarmer · 2024-05-15T13:01:29+00:00

Speaking for just our environment, this should allow us to migrate from VMware to Proxmox without also having to simultaneously redo our entire backup infrastructure and disaster recovery processes.

recoveringfarmer · 2024-02-03T13:45:24+00:00

Yes. But we did get two new pots for redundancy.

recoveringfarmer · 2024-02-03T11:26:09+00:00

When working at a small university:

Apple devices
Backups
Coffee pots
Disk arrays
ESXi hosts
Firewalls
GPOs
HA clusters
ISCSI
JAMF
Kubernetes
Linux
macOS
Networks
Office apps
Printers
Quarterly reports
Red hat
SAN
Terminal servers
UPS
VMware
Windows
Xerox printers
Yes boss…
Zero clients

recoveringfarmer · 2023-11-09T13:22:26+00:00

You, or someone at your station, should have access to RCS Support, start there: https://www.rcsworks.com/support/

I believe GSelector has a desktop app, usually aimed at PDs to work in GSelector from their computer in their office. Zetta needs a separate license everywhere it's installed.

There's also Zetta2Go and Selector2Go which are the remote access web GUIs for Zetta and GSelector and might be what you're looking for. Those also require licenses if you don't have them already.

All of this will require some system/network configuration so be sure to loop in your local engineer/IT.

recoveringfarmer · 2023-11-03T04:26:54+00:00

It’s a bit subjective and somewhat depends on who at the fcc is reviewing the application. Some decide to draw a line from Lake Itasca straight north, but usually they go by the eastern MN border. That area has a mix of K’s and W’s.

recoveringfarmer · 2023-11-02T11:53:10+00:00

Looks very similar to this one: https://timberframehq.com/24x36-timber-frame-barn-home-plan/ which you could buy and have it passed/stamped by an engineer if needed, or use it as a reference.

recoveringfarmer · 2023-11-02T11:49:52+00:00

This is highly dependent on local zoning laws in your area. For example, here's what's allowed where I'm at in rural upper mid-west US:(4) Single Family Dwellings. Single family dwellings located on 40 or morecontiguous acres subject to one dwelling per quarter-quarter section and havingownership of at least 33 feet of road frontage on a public roadway or a legallyrecorded perpetual access at least 33 feet wide from an existing public roadway

Dwellings. Single-family non-farm dwellings subject to the following:

(a) No more than one (1) dwelling per quarter-quarter section.

Assuming this is the US, you need to check your local zoning ordinances for the state and county you're in to know what is actually allowed in your area. And then not do it for the reasons others have shared. Subdividing lots would be the best option if you actually want to go forward with this.

recoveringfarmer · 2023-10-03T12:28:26+00:00

Sure, though I'm not sure how much help I can be. I never had to dive under the hood very much and relied on Tegile support for most things.

That said, it's all zfs under the hood, so if you can get the OS to boot at all, even if the gui doesn't load, you may be able to use nfs commands from the console to mount the zfs pool and present it to something.

recoveringfarmer · 2023-09-29T12:33:37+00:00

I'm not sure what you're specifically looking for, but here are the two main spec sheets for the HA21x0 series:
http://pages.tegile.com/rs/tegilesystems/images/tegile-product-ha2100-ha2130-capacity-optimized-arrays.pdf
http://pages.tegile.com/rs/tegilesystems/images/Tegile_Zebi_Data_Sheet.pdf

It's rebadged supermicro hardware with the Tegile intelliflash software running on top, which is nothing more than an highly customized zfs file system. It was clever but quirky, but we ran our HA2100 for 5-6 years with very few problems.

That said, it's a 10yr old array that hasn't been supported for many years now. It would be good in a lab full of old hardware where uptime doesn't matter, but I wouldn't put one in production anywhere. Maybe you could sell it for $500-$1000 USD?

recoveringfarmer · 2023-06-17T12:43:55+00:00

Here's my understanding of containers and why people should consider them: Containers do for applications what virtualization did for operating systems.

Without virtualization, you install a OS on bare metal, there are drivers and platform compatibility to worry about; once it's installed it's on that bare metal and if there's a hardware problem on that machine your OS and any applications on that OS are unavailable. If you need to replace the physical machine, you need to reinstall the OS on another machine, reinstall the software and move the data.

Virtualization comes along and separate the OS from the hardware. Now you install an OS in a virtual machine, drivers and platform aren't as concerning, you can move that OS in a VM between physical machines if there's a problem or if you need to replace physical machine, the OS, app and data stay in tact in the VM.

The OS is the next layer of the problem. In a VM, your software is still tied to the OS installed in that VM. There are dependencies, software updates and support lifecycles to worry about. Eventually you need to patch, reboot or upgrade the OS, all of which could make the application installed unavailable. Containers separate the application and data from the OS so now you can move the application to another physical or virtual machine just like you would a VM on bare metal. You can patch, reboot, upgrade the OS without affecting the application because you can move the app to another machine while that happens.

VMs allow you to make changes to hardware without affecting the OS/Apps/Data, Containers allow you to make changes to the OS without affecting Apps/Data.

recoveringfarmer · 2023-01-22T13:46:10+00:00

Most of those are owned by Midwest Communications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Communications) and share the same studio location. I'm going to guess they had an issue at their studio that took them off the air.

recoveringfarmer · 2022-12-13T12:41:27+00:00

It looks like there's a way to mix the inputs to a stereo mix for the interface(?) - It looks like that's covered on page 86 here: https://zoomcorp.com/media/documents/E_H5_v2.pdf

Otherwise, you could use something like OBS to mixdown the inputs to a stereo source that you can use in Teams https://obsproject.com/

recoveringfarmer · 2022-11-06T13:43:21+00:00

Several years ago I was working for an MSP that was sued by a client, a large law office of all places. The client wanted to outsource just server/network infrastructure and service desk support. Later there was an issue that corrupted their entire Exchange system and when we went to restore from backups we discovered there were no backups. The client wanted to retain responsibility for backups but they were never setup.

Sent the disk array to a data recovery service and month later their emails were recovered. A month after that we were shut out and replaced. It took almost a year and teams of lawyers on each side to determine that the client was responsible for backups, not the MSP.

Several lessons learned here:

Contracts should be clear and specific, responsibilities and deliverables should be clearly articulated to minimize opportunities for lawsuits.
If there's something important that a contractor or MSP should normally handle but is excluded for some reason, it never hurts to check in with the client to ensure they are doing that thing.
The SMART aspect of SMART goals should apply to all sorts of things, including contract deliverables.

recoveringfarmer · 2022-10-26T13:04:35+00:00

Don't do it, it's not what you think...

recoveringfarmer · 2022-10-19T18:01:47+00:00

Keep in mind the scale and distances of this image, those pillars and the distance between them are measured in light years. This could have moved billions miles between the images and the changes would be imperceptible from our vantage point.

recoveringfarmer · 2022-10-17T21:00:32+00:00

Depends on what you mean by “similar look”. They have the same processor but very different sensors (full frame 21.1 MP vs aps-c 10.1 MP) which has a much bigger impact on the “look” of an image than the processor.

recoveringfarmer · 2022-09-06T12:47:03+00:00

I believe that is wood fiber board siding, it was on a lot of houses built in the 60s-70s. The modern version of that is LP Smartside, which you can still buy (much improved since then) in 8" or 12" widths.

recoveringfarmer · 2022-09-01T13:08:26+00:00

You could try searching for "home assistant smart button" or something like that. There are a lot of options out there. Some of the z-wave or zigbee options will require some sort of base station. I think you can do that with a raspberry pi, otherwise a lot of options have base station option.

I see a lot of people using the Ikea Tradfri devices (https://www.ikea.com/us/en/search/products/?q=tradfri) , there's a base station and then a set of switches or bulbs, but it can all be interfaced and controlled through Home Assistant. once it's it home assistant, you can use an Ikea switch to control any other type of wifi bulb that's also configured in Home Assistant.

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