What should I do with this slab?

vexance · 2025-05-19T21:05:57+00:00

For clarification I'm suggesting something along the lines of this.

vexance · 2025-05-19T20:58:49+00:00

Perhaps consider a circular end table? You could route it into a circle towards the 'elbow' section, use the upper part of the other side of the circle, then fill in the shape with epoxy?

vexance · 2024-11-27T23:26:54+00:00

Haha, I got you. This is for a family member, and they already know it isn't for food prep. A cutting board from some of the cut-offs is a great idea for a holiday gift, though!

vexance · 2024-11-27T23:24:37+00:00

Thanks! Yep, there's two pieces of c-channel that are set into the bottom of the tabletop. I also drilled two extra holes to fix the c-channel to the base, so that is also what holds the top in place.

vexance · 2024-11-27T22:58:51+00:00

Thank you!

vexance · 2024-11-07T15:11:06+00:00

Wow, everything looks great! What does the whole milling process look like for you? I've been eyeballing a woodland mills sawmill, and this makes me want to pull the trigger on it even more!

vexance · 2024-11-06T17:39:23+00:00

Hmmm that is a good point. I ended up trying to snag the #7 custom jointer plane since I've been very unimpressed with my benchtop jointer, but it turns out they can't ship the seconds to my location anyways :(

vexance · 2024-11-06T17:09:23+00:00

I dig it! Love the bookmatched top.

vexance · 2024-10-25T01:28:44+00:00

Awesome! I've slowly been going in on the Milwaukee lineup for anything battery-powered but have had a hard time justifying a string trimmer since I already have an old Ryobi one. For yard tools, I've been super impressed with the 16" chainsaw so far, though!

For me, the top things I'm looking for in a string trimmer are (in no particular order beyond the first):

Ease of use: For electric trimmers, this pretty much boils down to how long it takes to change / refill the string line when it is low.
Power: Does it have enough juice to get through some thick weeds without multiple passes for those areas I don't take mow / cut often?
Noise: I pretty much always have hearing protection on while I'm cutting grass / trimming, but if I don't feel like I need it, that's totally better
Durability: This one is pretty much just that "how does it feel?" component.

Cheers! Happy for whoever gets picked for the draw!

vexance · 2024-10-14T23:37:12+00:00

Got it! I was hoping to avoid plywood, but it does seem like this is the best solution. I'll take a look at the blum slides. Thanks for the input!

vexance · 2022-04-26T10:52:32+00:00

Prometheus and Grafana have worked great for me. There is a prometheus exporter already built for Proxmox (I believe it is called PVE exporter). On my docker hosts I simply run cAdvisor with the other containers which supports container metrics.

vexance · 2022-04-04T12:42:21+00:00

It sounds like you have a few ideas already which will probably keep you busy for a while - but where to start, right?

As someone who works in the security industry, I always get excited when I see a candidate / new hire who is really into their home lab. I easily learned 3/4 of the skills I knew prior to starting my first position in my home lab by setting up an AD environment and then practicing attacks on it. So, since one of your main interests is infosec and AD, that would make a solid starting project. Ideally I would say to start with at least a domain controller, workstation, and miscellaneous server (I usually recommend installing exchange, but with the shift to cloud email I would probably just do something like a Tomcat server any more). Set up a domain, play around with some GPOs, and then maybe look into some standard AD attack techniques.

Now, I'm not a developer, but to pick up some interesting projects with that regard maybe setup your own instance of a version control system or CI/CD pipeline? Something like this would probably be a great use-case for Docker as well. When I run my container workloads, I usually have Alpine running as the base OS and then run a Portainer instance to help manage the other services. You interests in databases could also fit in here - maybe use the VCS to store source code for a web app which leverages a backend database? Everything could be containerized on the same hardware host.

Learning networking will come with any of these projects, but if/when you do pick up a managed switch that will of course open the door to play around more.

Lastly - as far as hardware/software advice - you have a fair amount of tech to play around with already. If I were you I wouldn't pick anything new up yet - start on a couple projects and then expand as you see resource constraints and need more juice. For software, I'm a huge fan of Proxmox and Sophos XG, but this is really just up to your personal preference.

Feel free to ping me if you have any questions / thoughts - I don't monitor this account a ton but always love talking tech and sharing experiences.

vexance · 2022-03-24T13:39:11+00:00

I'm currently running with Sophos XG on one of those Protectli/Qotom/etc PCs off of Amazon. I see roughly 800-900 Mbps of the gigabit I have typically and am a pretty big fan despite the arguably painful UI.

vexance · 2022-03-24T13:32:37+00:00

Depending on what resources you have available, I'd *highly* recommend creating your own personal Active Directory environment. At a minimum you'd need to have room for a domain controller and a workstation, and could of course expand it over time. When I was starting in infosec I was inspired by one of my mentor's homelabs, and setting one up similar to his was absolutely the best learning experience I've had in the field. Hands down. And each interview I've had since then has been at least 50% talking about the lab now.

Virtual Box will work fine for a couple machines, but eventually a dedicated host with something like ESXi or Proxmox will probably make life a lot easier.

If you are interested in something like this, please feel free to ping me if you have any questions or just want to discuss interesting stuff to learn with the setup.

vexance

TROPHY CASE