Author: Tom Kern

It’s amazing what a bit of new hardware will do to change a setup.

Like finally buying monitor arms and damn it’s a difference.

The end of a third football season in not Arizona, and at somepoint the local team does start to infect you… I mean I still bleed red and white, but there is a drop of blue in there above 5k feet…

So yeah… I still have this… space… I guess until I truly let it go… which since it’s been 21 years since I first started posting isn’t going to be anytime soon. Things really haven’t moved that far from the old geocities and frontpage site to this. Well there was the whole migration to GoDaddy and then to the current provider but that’s not something we talk about.

Anyway… since May of last year things have changed but haven’t?

• I finally got a proper Mac Desktop (Mac Studio) that I’m very happy with… and have finally come to terms with the fact that I only use my Mac for office work and web browsing. So hopefully the M1-Max is supported for a good while.
• The Mac in the closet from 2012 finally was retired has a home server in favor of a Synology NAS. It was a good move on all fronts.
• Solar Power and batteries are awesome.
• I’ve made some changes to the home office setup as I’m now fully “hybrid” but that’s another post.

Since it’s the new year one of the things I’ve decided to start doing is to try and post on here like it did back in the day. Once a week on just whatever…. I’ve given up on most social media. I haven’t been on facebook since the summer of 2020 (and haven’t missed it), I deleted twitter on my phone after Elon bought it, and the others I was never into except for instagram. And with IG I rarely post.

So here we are, back in circa 2002 tech… just way better processors and connections.

Still running WindowsNT though.

Weather report for April is 0% wet stuff from the sky…. so so much for it being the second snowiest month…. and so much for the skye cracking

This site has popped onto my radar as the domain associated with it has email and an office suite that are about to be charged for. I have a plan for the email portion of the backend services… I’m still on the fence with the rest of it. Since it’s really just burner email addresses I’m thinking that is all that needs to be done, but part of me says I must maintain.

That’s the funny thing about mid-life, you feel that you must maintain but it is the ideal time to start anew… you are not lacking for resources or knowledge. Just lacking for direction.

The turning of the seasons in Colorado is still a new and wondrous thing to me. While I did “seasonal” weather in Kingman and Flagg in the 1900’s and early 2000’s it wasn’t as dramatic as it is in Colorado in terms of weather. In my mind the fall starts in September but in actuallity it starts somewhere in October… this to my desert rat mind does not compute. The days being almost 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night in september tells my brain that things are turning, but the green leaves and the mostly green grass tells another story.

I think this is a side effect of a throughly western mind that must categorize and classify everything presented to them, and it’s a bit of a disconnect. On the flip side my birthday is in early April, and it’s always pretty good weather around then in Arizona. In Colorado it’s dealer’s choice.

it’s the little things of getting used to in the second winter in Colorado, knowing that there is time. But it will still come sooner rather then later but there will be days of sunshine and days of cloudy it’s all a crapshoot.

The thing that still boggles my mind is that March is the snowiest month and April is number 2…. W. T. F. ?

Did you just read a entry about the weather… yes. yes you did. And I make no apologies.

What’s most interesting about having a AIO water cooler on my gaming PC? Is it gurgles on the regular…. like whatever water is in there has collected and it now “gurgles” to clear it out… it’s weird and unexpected and its done this since day 1. I don’t know if it’s an AIO thing, or just the AIO I have.

Anyway I thought I would put up a couple of updates from things over the last few months.

1. I did buy an office chair for the standing desk… it’s quite nice and is very comfortable for sitting in for about 1.4 hours… and then I want to stand. So mission accomplished.
2. The Unifi Dream Machine has been replaced by it’s big brother… and I have download speeds off the router of 1.3Gbps. 10Gbps networking is on the horizon film at 11ish.
3. No workspace updates, as it turns out having an office for work and an office for “fun” works out really nicely to get you to stop thinking about how to make your office less office like.
4. Once back to the office office full time, the “pay the bills” office will most likely be slowly migrated into some sort nerd knick knackery of some sort.
5. I have become the thing I hate… (see bit about knick knacks, and reference any house that my family has a hand in that has been decorated by my mother)

So I’ve recently moved into a new house… and one truth over the years is your neighbors WiFi network names can tell you something about them….

In the case of me… I have “OpenThePodBayDoorsHal” as my main network and “GlaDoSS” as my IOT/Guest network (which I detailed in another entry on my whole vlan and home security isolation thing).

So one fo the neat things about the Ubiquiti gear is it will also scan in the background to optimize your wireless network(s) performance. I popped open said log and found this…

Well played random neighbor… well played.

I really need to not pull titles from the music I’m listening to it rarely works out well for the entry.

Anyway it’s been a minute or two since the last entry, and well I’ve moved (again) and this time I write the check to a bank and not some faceless person that I only email with. So with the move comes the new shiny, or more like a refitting of the exiting shiny and figuring out where to put those maintenance dollars.

Well the good news is outside of some very minor things there is nothing that needs dealt with right away, there are a few things I will have to deal with in the not distant future. So until I have to deal with those things, let’s talk about the other plan. I’m on the record as being a smart home person… while I should be in the realm of “no internet connected things that run the home” I’m not and I’m ok with this. I did make a couple of decision changes on smart home re-fit 2.0

1. I’m going with a platform that supports multiple device vendors (i.e. not Nest)
2. I’m not going to be be-holden to the one platform rule, if something works outside of that platform and works well for me I’m going to use it (i.e. Sonos)
3. Everything. Must. Have. Manual. Controls.
4. If I’m home and the internet goes out, shit still works (the internet going down is a bigger issue then it should be… THANKS XFINITY/COMCAST!)

So with those in mind I’ve already got a foundation in place in the form of an IoT vlan via my Ubiquiti Dream Machine. On the human interface layer I’ve moved to mostly HomeKit, I know shocker. It makes sense though, I need automation based on location (phones), I want flexibility if I decide to leave the Apple eco system (if it works with HomeKit it works with Google or Alexa typically). And HomeKit has a hub centric architecture vs a cloud centric architecture. Which takes care of point 4 very nicely. Point 3 seems to be the sticky wicket right now, but I’ll get there.

Oh also the only exception to all of this is appliances, don’t get an internet connection… there is no earthly reason why my toaster needs to be on the internet… there isn’t a better way to make toast…. toast the bread and go away.

Oh also there is a whole new workspace for the offices, but that will be another day. Maybe….