zilliax.ca

Author: Adam

  • It’s tough being interested in tech now.

    So someone in the extended family is looking at getting a new PC, and normally I’m all in to helping with that. I enjoy browsing parts, looking for deals, and otherwise just sniffing around and seeing what I can find.

    However the situation with RAM and Storage just has me shaking my head.

    I bought this same kit of RAM about a year ago for less than half of what it’s going for on Amazon right now.

    Even smaller kits are just getting stupid in price. So this time around digging into parts kits something that I would have easily been able to do for around 1000$ is suddenly looking like a 1300$ affair. And god help you if you wanted something with a GPU in the thing.

    It’s just dissapointing that for the first time in as long as I can remember the amount of computer that you can buy for a given price has dropped significantly.

  • Interesting projects and their use of AI

    I came across a video about a neat looking project today;

    https://pegaprox.com

    I run a pile of Proxmox clusters at work and home for various reasons and while they work well and the IU is functional I still have eight different clusters that I’m logging into to manage devices on.

    Yes, I know we could just put all the servers into a single cluster but there are reasons that we aren’t doing that I’m not going to get into here.

    What I did find interesting was that this presented as a open source option for consolidating the control of the hypervisors in a single location. And after watching some reviews I was looking at setting this up, but some of the reviews online were insinuating that the entire project was vibe coded by AI. I’ve played with some of those tools and while I’m not a coder/developer for a living playing with those tools has given me a distaste for vibe coded applications.

    Generative AI has a place in software development – it’s going to be able to review for common problems, audit for common security issues, and stuff like that faster than a person can read through the code. However every time that I was playing with tools that generate code they are super literal if you ask them to build something. For example I was looking at using one to build a web app to handle checking out loaner equipment for my team, and the first run of the application built out a way to check out equipment, but no way to check it back into inventory when the loan was complete. Now any of the human developers I’ve worked with would have made the jump and figured that if the device was being checked out that it would need to be checked back in – but the AI tool didn’t.

    To be fair, it built exactly what I asked it to, so you can argue that the fault here is that I didn’t prompt the tool correctly and technically you are right.

    But let’s go back to PegaProx and have a peek at their website;

    So they don’t hide that they are using AI assisted development. Points to them on that I suppose, and they do then explain their view regarding the us of AI. They classify Vibe Coding as getting into a cab and and telling the driver to take you someplace with good food, vs picking a place and using a GPS to get to your destination. In both cases you wind up getting something to eat, but in one case you aren’t deciding where you are going or how you get there at all, in the other you are the one picking the route and making the turns.

    In the end the developers of this project are saying that all the code is reviewed by humans, throughly tested, and they are taking full ownership of what’s being put out. And that’s something that aligns with my view on these tools. If what they are posting on their website is accurate then this might be something worth having a look at. However I don’t know the people behind this and this is a pretty new project – the first “release” was only back in January of this year so there’s not a lot of history here to look at.

    So, while they are saying the right things they haven’t been around long enough for me to just toss this into production right now. And when looking at one of the documents online they implied that the authors recommend using the root account for your Proxmox servers to set this up.

    Yep, that’s what they are recommending. And honestly that’s more of a red flag to me than the use of the AI tools is. Root accounts are not things that you just toss around, integrations like this should always be done through API’s or service accounts, much like how Proxmox does this with their Datacenter management tool. Handing over the root account for my servers to any other tool is not something that I’m really comfortable with.

    I think that this project is definitely worth watching to see where it goes. Hopefully they are onto something good and can keep building something useful here.

  • Why are supply chain attacks terrifying?

    Ok in my post on the whole situation with routers in the US I mentioned something about supply chain attacks and as someone who works in the software world those things are absolutely terrifying and I think that it deserves a bit of a deeper dive.

    So, for people that work in software, probably going to be a bit boring here, but for people that aren’t in software for a living you need to understand how software works when people are building products for you to use.

    Software can be complex, so complex that in a lot of cases people will re-use code to prevent having to rewrite things from the start each time they go to do something. This can come in a bunch of different forms but it usually winds up as being a dependency that comes into play when you go to use a product.

    So let’s say that I’m building software that tracks inventory. Details don’t matter much but at some point I’m going to have a requirement to store data for use of the product, and chances are that I’m going to be using some type of database engine to allow that to happen. So I can go and write my own database engine from the ground up and go through all the work of getting that developed, performance tuned, and ready to go.

    Or I can just install PostgresSQL, a FOSS project that already does this. It has solid documentation, community support, and a history of being able to scale in a way that’s probably in excess of what I’m going to require.

    The same thing applies to my user interface. I can build my own from the ground up, or I could use something like Gradio that provides me with a lot of building blocks to make building my UI quicker so that I’m not having to reinvent the wheel.

    Now here’s where things start to get messy. While our application only has two dependencies each of those products have their own dependencies, and each of those dependencies have their own dependencies, and each of those dependencies have potentially more dependencies that come into play. How deep is that rabbit hole?

    You can get to the bottom of that rabbit hole, and I’m sure that there are companies out there that will spend the time to do so. However I’ve worked around software developers for a long time and as sure as I am that there are companies that handle this properly I’m just as sure that there are many that do not.

    So why is this important and how does it become an attack vector?

    Let’s say that my inventory application becomes something crazy good, winds up getting used all over the place, even to the point where it’s now in government systems being used to track things that are considered very important. Let’s even say that whatever the application is tracking is important enough that there are people who are now very interested in breaking into those systems and getting access to the data that they contain.

    So now my little application is a target. Potentially one that’s worth some money to somebody who is able to break into it.

    So now that I’m a target people are poking at my software, looking anything that would allow them to get into my product and mess around. However, let’s say that for purposes of this post that I’m reasonably competent and that my app is solid enough that attackers can’t get in by going after my code. So now what do they do?

    Well my product has some dependencies, and those products have dependencies, and lets say they walk down that chain and eventually come across something used by one of my dependencies – and now by extension used by my product. Now the objective is to get control over whatever that is and try to bend it to their will.

    Perhaps they submit some helpful bugfixes that hide some malicious code. Perhaps they bribe or buy the control of that dependency from the person who is in control of it now. In either case they now have control over that dependency and by extension can now get into my chain of dependencies and start looking at ways to cause problems for my product. Perhaps they write code that steals passwords and other secrets. Perhaps they find a way to build code that lets them copy data out of my product. In either case the attacker has managed to breach my product.

    Now let’s say that I’m really good that what I do and I maintain a full software build of materials and I know that this dependency exists and is something that I have to keep track of and watch out for problems with. In a lot of cases dependencies are just used by the people building the code without a huge amount of review of the actual code involved. That type of review is something that’s fairly labor intensive. So even if I am crazy good and willing to put the time in to review the code there’s still a chance that it might be outside of my area of expertise and I might not catch what was being done and flag it as being malicious.

    Let’s say that I’m as good as possible, and I’m paranoid as hell and decide to fork whatever I’m using and freeze things so that I’m not pulling in the changes from the products once I have things working. At some point there’s still going to be some problem that I run into that will require me to update the dependencies that I’m working with either because of a vulnerability or functional bug that needs to be fixed. At that time there’s still a chance that things that I don’t want get into my product.

    The software industry as a whole has processes in place to try to catch this stuff, but there’s still a lot that just seems to run on trust, and some programs pull in a lot of libraries for simple things. Hell, a few years ago a small utility (11 lines of code) in NPM was pulled from their repository over a dispute and managed to cause enough chaos in the course of a couple of hours that NPM wound up restoring the thing from backups to keep the world working properly. In this case the supply chain attack wasn’t being done to break into systems or steal data, it was a protest of sorts but the end result was very disruptive.

    So, even doing everything right, and being very good about the security of my product there’s still a very real possibility that I’m getting breached, and if I’m not paying attention and happen to catch what’s going on this type of breach could run for a very long time before it’s caught, patched, and no longer a threat.

    That’s why these supply chain attacks are terrifying. And if you have coworkers or other folks who don’t seem to see this as a issue that’s a pretty big red flag to watch for.

  • Sure, you are banning them for “security” reasons. Right.

    So a couple of days ago the FCC updated a list of banned telecomunications equipment to include, and I’m quoting here;

    Routers produced in a foreign country, except routers which have been granted a Conditional Approval by DoW or DHS.

    If you want to read it’s all linked on the FCC site linked here.

    Now, from what I’m aware there are no domestic manufacturers of routers in the USA. So what they have done is ban the import and sale of any new equipment that does not already have a FCC approval tagged to the device.

    If there was a legitimate concern about the security of routers that are deployed in the world why are only new devices being targeted? I would assume that the decision to ban these things is based on some legitimate history of security issues or a history of operating in bad faith on the part of these manufacturers. So if that is the situation why are the existing devices not getting flagged as a problem? Why are we not being told that it’s time to replace those devices?

    So if there isn’t a history of bad behavior what is this about? The argument as I understand it is that there are concerns about the security of the devices and their potential to be used as an attack vector rather than any indication that they have been used as such.

    Is that legit?

    Arguably yes, but without a history of bad behavior this is either the US Government pressuring the hardware vendors to move manufacturing back to the US or it’s a breakdown in the chain of trust that has allowed us to take advantage of offshore manufacturing for as long as we have.

    If you look at it every device that you use establishes a chain of trust, regardless of if you realize it or not. Let’s look at your phone, say a iPhone of some generation.

    First of all you are trusting Apple, since they built the device and the operating system that it’s running. Implicit in that is that you are also trusting everybody that Apple has trusted as part of their development and supply chain on both the hardware and software side of things. This includes the folks that manufacture the screen, storage, and the developers that write the software that makes up iOS – including any libraries or tools that they use to build the operating system.

    You would think that this is fairly simple but the supply chain for software and hardware gets really complicated, really quickly. If you look at the news there have been all sorts of supply chain attacks showing up in the news recently like the one below;

    https://snyk.io/articles/poisoned-security-scanner-backdooring-litellm/

    The general idea is to look at software libraries and service providers that your providers make use of and attack those instead of coming after you directly. The impacted software library that I linked above is downloaded somewhere around 3.4 million times per day, and this attack was live for about three hours. Assuming a even distribution of downloads that would mean that the people that got away with this hit 500k downloads while this was live, and who knows where they were able to get from there.

    So obviously we have to draw a line and work on the assumption that Apple is doing what’s right our example and that they have done their due diligence on things further down the chain.

    So if we take this new ban at face value the US Government has some trust issues with the router manufacturers and is taking steps to try to address those by forcing manufacturing of the devices into the hands of domestic companies that they can regulate and mandate some level of security. However the cynic in me is wondering what hardware vendors – if any – are already going through the process of greasing palms to get exemptions for their hardware in place under this program.

    And to be clear it’s going to have to be some level of exemptions going through here – it’s going to take a long time for someone to gear up to build out routers domestically in the US for consumer use considering the number of these things that are sitting in peoples homes, offices, and in datacenters.

  • Choosing a Storage Server for home use.

    One of the things that I have spent some time playing with is storage solutions for deployment at home. My primary use for a storage server is to store backups from my other systems, media for streaming in my house, and a general dumping ground for files that need to move around machine to machine.

    The obvious solution was to go pickup something from Synology, Qnap, or one of the other vendors who build solutions purpose built for this type of thing and deploy that. However a lot of those solutions were at the time priced more for business use rather than deployment at home. As well I got bit in the past with a Western Digital MyCloud that had somewhat lacklustre firmware updates over time resulting in my decision to go shopping around for something a bit more robust for a solution.

    Ruling out a purpose built device means that I’m building my own server and the choice comes down to what software is going to be backing the thing once it’s deployed. The only package that I found at the time that would handle the mix of random drives that I had sitting around at the time was Unraid. Unraid’s method of data protection uses a non-standard type of RAID that uses the largest disk in your array to provide protection in the event of a disk failing in the array. Unraid has a good description of the protection they have in place in their user documentation.

    Looking at TrueNAS the ZFS pools that it uses have advantages with from a data resiliency standpoint, from a performance standpoint, as well as the ability to pull off some neat tricks with snapshots. However it doesn’t really handle the mixed pile of disks that I was working with at the time, something that was fairly important since I didn’t want toi go out and buy a pile of new disks when I had plenty sitting around collecting dust.

    Another thing that people will probably be quick to point out is that Unraid is not a free solution. When I bought the software it was a single purchase based on the number of drives that you are looking to attach to the server. Pricing is similar now but unless you purchase the “Lifetime” version it doesn’t come with lifetime updates, so that’s something that you should be aware of. From my viewpoint I personally prefer free solutions wherever possible however paying out for Unraid got me up and running quicker than I would have been able to if I was going to try to roll my own solution.

    Getting Unraid installed on a USB key is fairly straightforward and once you boot the machine that you are going to use as a storage server from the USB device you just select the drives to add to your array, setup your shares, and you are basically up and running. You can get more stuff running as you start bringing containers into the picture but for basic file services it’s not much more complicated than that. Swapping out drives to increase capacity or when one dies is dead simple, provided that your parity devices are working properly.

    I’ve run this Unraid server now for a number of years and it’s done pretty much everything that I have needed for a long while, however there are a couple of things that might be nice to have that TrueNAS does do out of the box. The ability to replicate snapshots between two servers, as well as the ability to upload copies of the data to a cloud storage provider makes backing up things much simpler than what’s in place in my Unraid server right now. And yes, there are a number of plugins and other things that can make this type of function happen on a device running Unraid, but none of them are things that have been baked into Unraid by the developers at this point, so I’m reliant on somebody else maintaining and keeping those plugins updated and functional as Limetech does their thing.

    So now to the question of what someone reading this blog should do. That’s kind of going to depend on what you need the storage to do for you and what you happen to have laying around.

    If you don’t have a existing system that you can reuse as a server then I would have a look at a pre-built solution like what Ugreen, Synology, or Qnap offer. The pricing on the 2 and 4 bay solutions has dropped over the years to a point where you could potentially get a cheaper system to act as a host but it might not really be worth it given the extra work in stuffing the disks into a used machine that wasn’t meant to take them.

    If you have a spare machine sitting around with enough SATA ports and NVME sockets to make a usable server and you are going to be purchasing new drives to work with I would be looking at TrueNAS, if you have a pile of mismatched drives that you want to reuse then I would still go with Unraid as long as the drives that you are working with are large enough to offset the price of the Unraid license that you have to purchase instead of putting that money towards a matching set of drives.

  • AI, and some griping about it.

    The last several years the news has all been about AI and how it’s going to completely transform the world. And over the last couple of years I have had a really hard to pin down feeling of foreboding about all these advancements that have come out using these new tools.

    Recently I came across a book that kind of put some of my feelings into words. And I think that anybody interested in the subject of AI should be looking at this book. It’s definitely not the sunshine and roses that some people paint AI to be so be prepared a bit when you dive in.

    The thing that I think is interesting about the state of AI right now isn’t so much what it’s able to do but what some of the people who work with it have done in the last little while. A big one that you might have seen was Mrinank Sharma who was the head of AI Safety at Anthropic. He posted a note on X with the contents of his resignation letter.

    https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421?s=20

    In reading through that it kind of sounds like the folks at Anthropic were being presented with a bit of a moral quandary about the use of their AI agents. And I wonder if that might have had something to do with the recent news regarding the concerns about the use of Anthropic’s tech by the US Department of War?

    There’s a pretty good write up on this here;

    https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5739/anthropic-and-us-government-conflict-larger-you-think

    That points out a lot of interesting things. The one that bothers me the most is that a lot of the companies have been rolling back commitments that prevented the use of their technologies in weapons and surveillance applications. Using a AI tool to generate stupid memes of cats is one thing, using an AI tool to automate the surveillance of an entire populace, or using that tool to decide where a bomb should be dropped?

    As much as I am not a fan of people getting killed, I’m even less of a fan of people being killed because a machine pointed at them and said “this one”.

    I think that the authors of the book I linked above kind of have it right. We are playing with things that we don’t really understand and that we don’t have the tools to handle safely. For the most part people are using it for things that aren’t going to end the world, but how long before somebody hooks one of these things up to something that is life safety critical and causes things to go really off the rails?

  • Ah, now that’s interesting.

    So, now that the MacBook Neo is starting to get into peoples hands and they are starting to tear into the thing there are a coupe of interesting things about this device that are starting to make me think that it might be something that I would be interested in putting my hands on.

    The biggest surprise to me was the repairability scores it was given by iFixit during their teardown, notably;

    • The battery is screwed in and can be replaced.
    • The keyboard is screwed in and can be replaced without replacing the entire top cover.
    • The ports are all on separate daughterboards that can be replaced if a port goes bad.

    Granted the use of a Phone CPU and the limitation on the amount of system memory that the device can address is still a concern but having a device that doesn’t require major rework on the motherboard when a port on the side of the device breaks is definitely a win.

    Reparability is one of the reasons that I’ve been a fan of Thinkpads for as long as I have. Parts for those are relatively easy to get hold of and unless you have really mangled the device they are generally worth repair. Apple’s stuff has been a little more difficult because they have generally glued batteries in and in many devices the keyboard can’t be repaired without replacing the entire top shell of the laptop because the keyboard is riveted into the case.

    I’m sure that some of this is coming up because of regulations in the EU that are going to require user replaceable batteries in devices by a specific date, just like the move to using USB C charging over all the bespoke connectors was driven by legislation in that market. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come as Apple refreshes their devices in the coming years, since I really don’t want to have to pry old batteries out of a device if the only thing that I gain is a 1mm reduction in the size of the device.

  • A long term review of what is now a old camera.

    In around 2004 I finally got around to looking into and purchasing a updated camera to replace my film camera. I had been looking into digital cameras for years at that point and while they were neat they where either too expensive or didn’t take good enough photos to make it worth looking at using one full time. 

    I did have a couple of smaller ones over the years, a Olympus that I don’t recall the model of and a A75 that was good enough, but they were all missing the controls and handling of a “proper” camera. 

    When looking at options I was initially looking at a Canon option, however since none of my older film lenses would have been able to be used I did start looking into other options and at one point I was handed a Nikon D70 and the feel and ergonomics of that camera basically sold me on that specific piece of hardware. 

    I initially purchased the device as a part of a kit with a 18-70mm lens and eventually added a 55-200 AF-S VR, a 50mm, and a 100-300mm Sigma Lens into the bag. A Nikon SB600 flash head was added at some point along with a pile of other random accessories that were bought to fill out the bag. 

    The camera body itself worked great and I shot with it for almost 20 years, the camera handled weddings, kids, vacations, and all sorts of other events over the years without giving me any huge issues or problems on it’s own. Even after almost 20 years of use the only thing that’s really an issue with the body is that the rubberized coating that is on the high touch parts of the body degraded to the point where it was sticky and unpleasant to touch. That was fixed by simply scrubbing it off the plastic with IPA, but aside from that the camera still works to this day. 

    As far as the lenses, none of what I bought over the course of using the camera was what would be considered a “professional” lens, but that 18-70mm and the 55-200mm gave me great service in all sorts of conditions without any problems. The 50mm lens was, in retrospect, something that I should probably have held off on, but I wanted a prime lens and I had been shooting with a 50mm on my film cameras for years, but I didn’t take into account the crop factor of the camera body when buying the lens. Given that the body has a 1.5x crop factor that makes that 50mm lens a 75mm effective field of view and that wasn’t a lens that I had shot in the past. What I should have bought was a 35mm lens since that would have worked out to be effectively a 52 mm lens with the crop factor. 

    While the camera did work well for me there were some gripes that I had; 

    • The D70 never did release a battery grip, I’m not sure why but the camera didn’t even have a external trigger for the shutter and from what I can tell they never did put the appropriate connectors in to support a remote shutter on a vertical grip. 

      There were some 3rd party ones but they mostly just added battery capacity, nothing else since there was no way to trigger a remote shutter from the grip. I did see one that seemed to use a piece of optic cable to redirect a IR signal into the body but that never sat as a great solution. 
    • The camera didn’t work really well with larger compact flash cards, leaving me having to mostly rely on smaller 512mb cards, and even with the smaller pictures from the 6mp sensor I would still burn through all my smaller cards fairly regularly. 

    In the end the camera still worked 20 years down the road, however a few other things gave out. The autofocus screw on the Sigma 100-300 telephone lens eventually stopped working, making that lens a manual focus only one. The SD cards started showing problems with being read and mounted – and larger ones just didn’t really work reliably. And the batteries were basically burnt out to the point where you can’t really shoot for long with the ones that I have. 

    All of these things are “fixable”, the replacement batteries aren’t horrendously expensive, provided you don’t get the Nikon branded ones. The CF cards can still be bought in sizes that should work, but either they come from a vendor that I’ve never heard of or cost as much as cards that are significantly larger. The Sigma lens was not something that I used enough to really be terribly upset about loosing autofocus on it, and it was cheap enough that getting it repaired would cost more than I spent on it in the first place. 

    Eventually I wound up replacing the camera with a newer Nikon late in 2025, and that’s still a work in progress. 

    The D70 is still around and will remain in the collection along side my film cameras, and it may get trotted out from time to time. I can’t however complain about a piece of technology that I’ve gotten 20 years of use out of though. 

    It does kind of reinforce the idea of purchasing something, paying once, and crying about it once rather than picking up cheaper solutions over and over again. 

  • New laptops, same(ish) as the old.

    So Apple has announced some new laptops and I’ve seen a couple of reviews about the MacBook Neo that’s coming out and I have some thoughts about it.

    Some folks seem to be really critical about the device having a CPU that was previously used in the iPhone or about the amount of memory and storage space on the device. Some seem to be thinking that this device is going to be the ChromeBook killer given the relatively low (for Apple) price. 

    Honestly for me the device isn’t something that is that interesting, not because it’s not a good device. More because it’s simply not targeted at me. 

    This type of device is the laptop that someone who just wants a “laptop for school” but doesn’t care about the specification will pick up. They will wind up grabbing it from the Apple store withe AppleCare and will probably walk out the door just around 1000$ out of pocket with a device that should last them through the next couple of years of school or basic email and social media. 

    As far as it killing Chromebooks, I don’t know about that. Chrome OS devices have a whole ecosystem that they live within and the macOS devices are not going to live in that same ecosystem in the same way I can’t see them completely displacing Chrome OS in an organization that has already heavily invested in them. If the organization is one that’s currently sitting on a bunch of late model Intel MacBook Air’s or first generation M1 devices this device gives those customers a price point to move over to newer hardware that’s hopefully going to be faster. 

    The storage options and memory options do irk me a bit, but again I’m not the target for this thing. What is interesting is that Apple has a pretty good track record of providing reasonably long support windows for their devices. If they are still releasing a device in 2026 with only 8gb of system memory that kind of indicates that they intend to support that as a viable configuration for some time to come. For the rest of us out there that bodes well since they will probably have to avoid adding in bloat and garbage into the OS while these devices are still in production. 

    The lack of a backlight on the keyboard, the difference in the speaker setup, the difference in the camera setup, are all things that a lot of people who just need a laptop to work on probably won’t care about. And frankly those limitations make sense since it’s going to prevent Apple from driving the people who would have normally bought a MacBook Air into the MacBook Neo. The people picking this up would be the people who are price sensitive rather than the people that care about the specification of the device. 

    I honestly can’t recall the last time that Apple had a laptop at this price point. From what I can recall the entry point for any Apple laptop has always been around the 1000$ mark. Seeing them getting into the mix at a 600$ entry point is interesting and I would love to see what happens to the higher end iPads during this time period. I know more than a few people who picked up iPad Pro’s and keyboards for them instead of doing a laptop to save a few dollars.

    Unfortunately for Microsoft I think this is going to eat more of their lunch than anybody else. Unless you wanted or had to use a ChromeOS device Windows was the option at this price. Given all the crap they are bundling now with Copilot, and that Recall feature in Windows 11 some folks may just elect to move over now that there is a cheaper option to get into the ecosystem with. 

    Would I buy one? 

    Nope. 

    But I’m not the person this device is aimed at. You could be, and if that’s the case it’s definitely worth a look. 

  • So who am I and why should you care?

    Frankly, I’m nobody in the grand scheme of things and you probably shouldn’t really care what I have to say about anything posted here. This blog is going to be a place for me to toss down random comments on things that I’m interested in and anything here is my opinion, nothing more. 

    Feel free to read through as I’m posting things here and if something that I post makes sense or resonates with you that’s great to hear. Keep in mind however that I’m just another random voice on the internet and anything that I’m posting here should be taken with a grain of salt and you should be doing your own homework to make sure that I’m not completely off my rocker. 

    That said, I’m interested in Technology, Photography, and I have been trying my hand at learning Brazilian Ju Jitsu for the last several years. 

    On the technology side I like playing around with different types of technology, but I also don’t get super excited about things unless there’s a actual reason or application for the technology that I can make use of. So while I’m really interested in 3d printing the current excitement over the sate of “AI” stuff does not really catch my eye as much. 

    That whole AI thing is a discussion for another post since I can rant about that specific piece of tech all day long. 

    I have spent a lot of time playing around with networking equipment, servers, laptops, desktops, mobile devices, and the management of all those devices. I have opinions on all of them, some more informed than others, and I’m sure that we will get into the topic of managing hardware at some point. 

    Photography is something that I’ve been doing off and on since I was young. My first Camera was a Canon T60 that I was given as a Christmas present in high school and I’ve been taking shots ever since. Around 2006 I made a switch over to using a Digital SLR and transitioned away from shooting film. As much as I liked shooting film I don’t really miss the work in the darkroom or the cost of getting film processed if I didn’t feel like doing it myself. 

    Most of what I shoot winds up being scenery, landscapes, things like that. I’m not huge on taking photos of people since people can in many cases object to having photos taken and I try to respect that. 

    On the sporting side I do find myself taking part in Brazilian Ju Jitsu – it wasn’t something that I sought out but I wound up taking some classes and it’s stuck with me for a bit. A bit being long enough for me to get my belt awarded last year and for me to start the process of training for the IBJJF worlds with a eye to going and actually trying my hand in competition this year. 

    So I’m no expert, and I wouldn’t call myself a competitor but I’m probably a bit more than what you would consider a casual player in the sport if that makes any sense. 

    As far as politics or religion, I’m going to try to keep that out of this space. I did used to try to talk through this type of thing with people but the current situation in the world makes that difficult to say the least. A lot of people are just taking the stance that if you don’t have the exact same views they do that you are their enemy. So In general I don’t actively go looking for that type of conversation any more.

    Anyhow, that’s a bit about me. Stay tuned for more as I get around to typing up stuff here.