Category: Uncategorized

So I have a pile of computers on my desk. Seven in total, and that presents some concerns regarding the piling of the hardware on my desk. Some of the machines are not really that big, one’s a Dell Mini PC that’s not much bigger than a decent sized paperback book, however the storage server is a full size tower stuffed full of hard disks that takes up a lot of space under the desk.

Currently I’m trying to figure out better ways to keep these things organized and I’m coming up a bit blank.

The Dell Mini PC is easy enough, that just gets hung from the bottom of the desk in a 3d printed bracket. The others though are all just large enough that I can’t really rely on something 3d printed to keep them in place.

Now a racked based solution seems like a obvious way to go, however I had a 1/2 rack in the house for many years and honestly it was more of a hassle than it was really worth for what I was doing. I’m into the machines frequently and unless I’m willing to spend a fair bit of coin on rack mountable hardware it’s just a fancy cabinet that’s a pain in the ass to move things in and out of.

I’m kind of eyeing some proper under desk mounts for a couple of machines, those are getting to a point where they are actually fairly inexpensive but all I’m getting from that is keeping the computer off the floor and away from the carpet and I’m not sure that it’s worth the money just to keep from having to clean the machines every couple of months or so.

Well, bound to happen. I managed to pop something in my calf training today. Not really 100% sure how I did it, my and my partner were working some takedowns and guard pulls and as I was being pulled into guard my partner swapped over into a sweep and that was it.

Not that he did anything wrong during the sweep, at this point probably just a combination of fatigue and bad positioning on my part resulting in this specific situation.

Injuries happen during training all the time. Not six months ago I was at the gym when someone managed to get their knee dislocated while working with a partner. He got really lucky and wound up with no permanent damage from what I’ve heard but as much as I try to make sure that I’m not doing things that put me in jeopardy there is still a inherent risk in any martial art.

So that bring up the question – what now.

Well I don’t really want to stop training, and this specific time doesn’t feel like anything more than a pulled muscle so I’ll take some anti-inflammatories, make sure that I keep it iced for a couple of days, and keep moving it so that nothing locks up and hope for the best.

I have been sitting here over the last couple of days really thinking about the idea of doing a upgrade on my network to move towards running something faster than 1gb networking on my machines.

The thing is that 1gb is actually fine for what I’m running on my local network right now for the most part. Occasionally when moving large pools of files around something faster would be a nice to have but generally speaking nothing that I’m doing requires anything faster. This puts a network upgrade solidly into the nice to have side of things.

In either case none of my devices have 10gb interfaces so the first thing that I have to look at is some cards for the desktop machines in the house. I’d be looking at cards for my Proxmox Server, both of my Storage Servers, an Application Server that’s sitting on my desk, as well as potentially my main computer.

Looking at it there’s lots of options out there with the stuff being pulled from servers but almost all of them are a 4x PCIe card and some of my devices only have 1x ports left. In either case I’m looking at about 400$ CAD for the cards that I need to get things all connected up.

Switch is another thing. Regardless of the brand I’m looking at at least a six port switch, five ports for the devices that I want to be running at 10gb and one for uplink to the rest of the network, assuming that I’m not wanting any more expansion for other devices that need to be running at a faster pace. Mikrotik and Ubiquiti both have options around the 400$ CAD mark that would work for what I’m looking at. The Mikrotik has an extra 1gb port that would work for uplink to the rest of the network, however if I wanted to double up with a trunk that port wouldn’t be something that gets leveraged anyhow.

Last thing that I’m looking at are cables. If I’m using SFP based cards then either I’m picking up transceivers and optical cables, or I’m looking at getting direct attached copper cables. The DAC cables seem to be the cheaper options, but I’m still looking between 25-30$ per cable, so another 200$ CAD in the pocket.

All in I’m looking at spending about 1000$ to get everything in place for this. So unless I come across some NIC cards or a switch for basically free, or I need to replace my existing network switch for some reason I’m probably going to have to sit on this one for a while.

The last couple of years have seen a number of books and games that I am fond of converted into movies and television shows. Some have been really good, and some have been somewhat lacking in their results.

Let’s start with one that didn’t do well, and it’s a bit older but a good example of when things don’t sit well. The Dresden files is a series of books about a wizard in Chicago who goes around fighting supernatural forces trying to keep the world from going to hell. It’s not like what you get when reading something like the Wheel of Time or the Lord of the Rings, but it’s fun. The show that came out in 2007 didn’t really have the same type of fun to it and honestly the folks writing the show took a lot of liberties with the materials that I didn’t particularly like.

One of the things about Harry that is interesting is that any time he gets near something high-tech, computers, phones, even electrical lights, he winds up shorting them out. It’s written into the books as just something inherent in his use of magic not playing nice with technology. It’s used as a plot point in a number of places since he can’t use cellphones or computers, and electric lighting isn’t reliable around him. Even in his own home he generally has candles laying around instead of electric lights because of those issues. This point is just missing from the TV series entirely.

As well in the TV series instead of a staff like he carries in the books he’s shown walking around with a hockey stick instead.

All in, I just didn’t enjoy the TV show like I do the books.

However, looking at the Wheel of Time, that’s almost the exact opposite. I’m a huge fan of the books, and when the TV show was announced it was something that I was somewhat worried about since there’s a huge pool of material there over a large number of books.

So when I started watching it I was a bit concerned about how things would be portrayed during the course of the show. And while there are some things that they tinkered with from the base material that didn’t follow the books it was stuff that either I could understand due to the need to compress the timeline and move the story on or were things that where honestly just buried in other aspects that were done really well. Overall I really enjoyed the series and I’m kind of disappointed that they won’t be doing more seasons of it.

Back into side of things that I didn’t like was the adaptation of Halo. It was really well done, the visuals were good, but I didn’t really enjoy it. I think the problem there is that in the game John 117, the Master Chief, is played as a silent protagonist that pretty much walks in and causes havoc for the Convent in many case saving the situation single handedly. Given that we are used to seeing the Chief as a walking god of destruction they would have to have changed things to make for a interesting TV show, but in doing that the people writing things can’t leave the main character as a walking force of nature.

However when you look at what was done with the latest interpretation of Lee Child’s Reacher novels that showed a way better way to handle situations where your main character is basically a walking force of nature.

And the Fallout tv show, I mean that’s about as good as you get for something that’s taking a video game and making it a TV show. It’s good enough that the folks at Bethesda have stated that it’s considered cannon within the Fallout universe.

Realistically with any fandom that has a dedicated following you will find people who will pick apart any adaptation of their beloved material and find fault with it. Personally as long as whatever is being done is being done well and stays inline with the spirit of the original material I’m going to be willing to give it a chance.

Doesn’t mean I’ll like it, but I’ll give it a chance.

As part of my camera kit that I just upgraded I picked up a 24mm f/1.7 lens for the camera. Now for folks that don’t know photography can be a very expensive hobby. It would be entirely reasonable to walk into a camera store and spend thousands and still not have enough gear to be able to actually take a single photo.

I’m not a huge purchaser of gear – I’ve only ever purchased a handful of cameras myself and only two of those were something other than a decent point & shoot. However I’ve been using equipment for decades now across a couple of different manufacturers and the quality of the stuff that you can get – at least from a optical standpoint – has taken huge jumps from the stuff that I was using that was made back in the 1970’s or even in the 2000’s.

Case in point is this 24mm f/1.7 lens. It’s under 300$ when I bought it on sale. And it’s fantastic for what I paid for it.

Personally I like to shoot with Prime lenses, ones that don’t have the ability to zoom in and out of a subject. They are lighter, generally sharper, and force you to be a little more creative in the framing of your shots since you are limited to what you are able to do by the lack of a zoom on the camera. On my older film cameras I have a number of lenses ranging from the low 20mm range up to I think a 135mm lens, but my favourite was either the 35mm or 50mm lenses. Due to the way that the sensors work on the new camera this 24mm lens works out to be the same rough field of view as a 35mm lens, and that one when bought new would work out to be “worth” around 650$ CAD when you factor in inflation from the 1970’s when it was made up until todays date.

The 24mm I just picked up? That cost under 300$ CAD before tax.

The older lens is all metal, but the quality of the manufacturing of glass between the 1970’s and now means that this new lens is light enough that a metal mount isn’t required, and the reduction in weight makes this thing disappear on the front of the camera.

At the end of the day would the 1300$ NIKKOR Z 24mm f/1.8 S produce a “better” image? Sure, is it worth spending another 1000$ on the lens for something that’s effectively a hobby for me that I don’t make any money off off?

Yea, no. I’m good with the cheap fun thanks.

Hopefully the 40mm F/2 I just picked up is at least this good.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been fighting some performance issues with SMB shares on my Macbook. After trying a pile of things the solution was to create the following file.

/etc/nsmb.conf

And then toss the following contents into that specific file;

[default]
mc_on=yes
mc_prefer_wired=yes
signing_required=yes

I gave my machine a reboot and now I’m copying files into the file server at an appropriate clip instead of hours to move a gig or two up there.

I’m posting this here for my own reference more than anything else. If you happen to be looking at this some time later down the line and it’s of help you are more than welcome. Otherwise – message to future me, do this to fix the performance issues on your system(s) running macOS.

So as I mentioned earlier I picked up some new camera equipment and that means I had to pick up some accessories that you need to get things working properly. One of those things is something called a step ring.

When shooting photos I like to use a polarizer on my lens, it helps make some colours more vibrant and lets you play around with reflections when you are shooting. The problem is that these things screw onto the front of the lens and different lenses can have different sizes for these mounts. While these filters aren’t especially expensive they aren’t cheap enough to be disposable. So what Iv’e done is picked up a larger polarizing filter and use a set of adapters to step the smaller mounts up to the larger filter size.

So while the filters aren’t cheap enough to be considered disposable you a get those step rings for a price on Amazon that’s getting into that price range.

So, after picking up a new lens this week with another filter size that needed another step ring to adapt things properly I just ordered one up off of Amazon and after a couple of days I wound up the proud owner of the wrong item.

And not wrong by a little bit, I had ordered a 52mm to 67mm step ring and was shipped a 72mm to 72mm extension.

The extension would be useful if I was trying to space the filter out for clearance purposes but I have absolutely nothing with a 72mm mount on the front of the lens.

So obviously I started a return on the Amazon side of things and after a short delay I now have the correct item in my hands, however the interesting thing is that they didn’t want the original item sent back and basically told me to keep it. I’m guessing this item is actually cheap enough that the cost to ship it back to the warehouse exceeded the actual price of the item in the first place.

So I guess that I now have a 72mm extension tube in my inventory in the event that I have need of one.

So from my viewpoint there are a few things that I own that are basically perfect for what I need the device to do and there is really not a lot of point in improving them.

And the funny thing is that is really a subjective viewpoint.

Take TV’s for example. I don’t watch a lot of TV, and all the TV’s that I have in the house are pretty basic 1080p devices that are all several years old. They have a few HDMI ports that I can plug into for various devices, and that takes care of everything that I need them to do.

Would a 4k TV be cool?

Sure, but I don’t have much 4k media, and I don’t sit in front of the TV long enough for it to really matter. For movies and such I still do like hitting a movie theatre for “big” movies so having a huge TV to watch stuff at home really isn’t a priority for me.

TV’s are generally upgraded when they die off, not because they have become obsolete by some standard.

I’m sure that some people would look at the Panasonic TV sitting on my wall and consider it a relic but it’s working for what I need it to do.

I know that there are a lot of folks out there that are always chasing the latest and greatest tech, tool, toy, or thing that they can get their hands on. I guess I can understand some of that but I also don’t agree with that mentality. Unless there is a reason for the upgrade, either performance improvements or new functionality, I tend to pass on upgrades.

Take the laptop that I’m working on right now, it’s a couple of years old at this point but it is still a decent machine that does everything that I need it to and more. Yes it’s a M3, and the M5 based devices will run laps around it, but how much time would that M5 save me when writing a post here, or when rendering a photo that I’ve shot?

About the only thing that would make me push for a upgrade would be a upgrade in the storage on the device, and given the cost of storage right now that’s something that’s going to be on hold for a long time.

Now if there’s some shift again, like we saw with the introduction of Apple silicon, sure I might be enticed to look at something more. However we are probably several years away from that happening again unless there’s something huge under wraps from a existing CPU manufacturer that’s not been released.

In either case it’s kind of relaxing not to have to be worried about picking up the newest thing every time that something’s announced.

Something that I’m struggling with over the last couple of months is learning to train for competition instead of just training recreationally.

Training recreationally I don’t mind getting swept or submitted. It’s all just learning and trying new things. Training for competition however is showing me that there is a lot of work that I need to do in my game. My focus has been obtaining and then maintaining a top position for so long that I’m very comfortable when I’m in control over the roll. However, get me on the bottom and things change a lot – I’m definitely not as strong there.

Given that I can’t be sure that I’m going to get takedowns in competition I have to have a game for when things fall apart.

This means that I’m going to have to invest in failure.

And that’s not going to be pleasant. The folks who I train with who are able to put me into bad positions are generally either way higher on the food chain, or have physical advantages that I am not going to be able to overcome. This means that I’m either going to get manhandled or crushed for the coming months of training.

Yay.

Alright, we got a MacBook Neo in at work and after playing with it for a bit I have come to the conclusion that it’s fine.

The built quality, keyboard, trackpad, and screen are all good, and when compared against a lot of the options in that price range they are downright fantastic.

Is it as good as a MacBook Air? No, the Air is slightly better across the board and if you care about the specifications of your device at all that’s probably a better choice for you. Is it as good as a MacBook Pro? Again, no, the Pro’s have active cooling, better performance, better screens, and nicer keyboards.

It’s fast enough to handle basic office stuff, basic media consumption, and it’s cheap.

And it should terrify the folks who churn out cheap crap laptops.

In the long term I hope that this thing is going to raise the bar for what those vendors are churning out. Hopefully we can get the plastic e-waste out of the way and start seeing devices that will live for more than a year before folding up and wining up in a landfill.