At least you grew a pair and tackled it, which is more than I can say for most. This old man has atrophied over the years and no longer attempts such things. Better to leave it to the young bucks with eyes to see and guts for glory. Mind, your dad probably could have done it blind-folded. I’ve seen some of these fellows work miracles flowing flux and soldier and watching Louis Rossmann videos can get addictive.
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1.1.05
The fall begins what is often known as “baking season” and is a leading cause of Havinotimitis. So most of what I’ve been working on has been the strictly necessary things. Or necessary-adjacent. We’ve busy with lots of smaller projects, so!:
- Did a quick third-gen CPU swap to make a daughter’s computer substantially more useable (and ironically, she’s using it less! Woooo!)
- “Fixed” a CPU cooler using the “eh, zip-ties work” fan mounting mechanism (woooo!)
- Re-pasting a Quadro 600 (yes you read that right) to make a son’s computer more useable (and he actually does now, woooo!)
- Re-pasted a friend’s old gaming laptop (woooo!)
- A ‘real’ job: Fixed a non-functional Xbox 360. It turns out the power button was just…a problem, I ended up having to trim the plastic to make it where it would push right, I did a full teardown and clean, repaste (I know, I keep using that word…) and also ended up having to go back in and unjam the DVD drive. Luckily this was for someone who just wanted to see if it could be workable and didn’t need pretty, so I didn’t have to be pretty with the back clamshell.
- De-Chromebookified an Acer Chromebook for someone that bought one and realized it was not what they actually needed way too late to just return it. And WOW I suddenly hate. ChromeOS significantly more than I did before because that was some real BS. Anyway, it’s now 32 eMMC GBs of perfectly adequate Pop!_OS (wooogle!)
- Aaaaand swapped out the m.2 WiFi card on my main laptop, because the Realtek it came with had decided that it was just happy seeing networks, but that actually connecting with them was too big of an ask. And then I guess it it deleted Tindr and disappeared off the network dating market? Anyway no more Realtek WiFi 5 junk, hello shockingly cheap Intel 6e card!
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I apologize in advance but I can’t resist the temptation to comment:
—
1> Did a quick third-gen CPU swap to make a daughter’s computer substantially more useable (and ironically, she’s using it less! Woooo!)
- What is it with these girls anyway?? My “blondie” was having issues with an old X58 platform so I told her I’d give her an upgrade and she’s like no, no, no I want to stay with X58. So, we compromised and I got her a top of the line GIGABYTE X58 platform, switched everything over to SSDs, maxed out her RAM with what was then considered high end RAM, gave her a brand new PSU, and the thing now runs like a brand new unit. Plus I bought her a nice, new 27" monitor for her brand new graphics card. Well, she made me give her back her puny 19 inch monitor and now she hardly uses the PC. She says she misses her old computer. Same operating system, same computer case, but she misses her old computer. SMH
2> “Fixed” a CPU cooler using the “eh, zip-ties work” fan mounting mechanism (woooo!)
- No joke. If the side panel isn’t transparent only you will know what it looks like inside. You can get mighty creative with zip ties and sometimes they even work better than traditional approaches. I did this with a noctua cooler by running zip-ties through the fins to get to the “other side” to brace my RAM fans because the brackets on the fans were blocked by the heat pipes running to the VRMs. Nobody sees it but it’s good and snug.
3> Re-pasting a Quadro 600 (yes you read that right) to make a son’s computer more useable (and he actually does now, woooo!)
*We Dads do what works and that smile makes it all worth it. Good to know the son is using it. Just be ready for when he decides he wants a better GFX card. lol
4> Re-pasted a friend’s old gaming laptop (woooo!)
*Now that’s gutsy. Given my age and my eyesight I won’t be working on any friend’s laptops to that extent anymore. I’ll maybe replace drives, or RAM, or a battery but all that intricate work with ribbon cables and such can be a real PITA. I once built an Acer from four different Acer laptops and had to special order a keyboard for it from China. The crazy thing still works and my daughter (same one) uses it more than her newly rebuilt desktop. I give up.
5> A ‘real’ job: Fixed a non-functional Xbox 360. It turns out the power button was just…a problem, I ended up having to trim the plastic to make it where it would push right, I did a full teardown and clean, repaste (I know, I keep using that word…) and also ended up having to go back in and unjam the DVD drive. Luckily this was for someone who just wanted to see if it could be workable and didn’t need pretty, so I didn’t have to be pretty with the back clamshell.
*Ugh!! I won’t touch those things anymore. I have some brand new parts I ordered for one but the guy changed his mind and got a PC. I don’t blame him. Anyway, somebody’s gotta do it, right?
6> De-Chromebookified an Acer Chromebook for someone that bought one and realized it was not what they actually needed way too late to just return it. And WOW I suddenly hate. ChromeOS significantly more than I did before because that was some real BS. Anyway, it’s now 32 eMMC GBs of perfectly adequate Pop!_OS (wooogle!)
- Now you’re talking. During the big C crisis the school had my daughters bringing Chromebooks home and I was like “what’s this??” because my daughters were in tears over how slow those things operate and you can best believe our net speed is a whole lot faster than what they’ve got going over at the school. At first I thought it had to be something else. Nope. Chromebooks suck. They suck majorly. They should be illegal. Anyway, to make a long story short, that’s how all my daughters wound up owning real laptops that actually function. (And likely the reason they don’t bother to use their desktop PCs half as much as they used to.) Sadly, the school won’t let them plug into the network with their personal laptops. No, they have to use the abominations that the school provides them. The silver lining here is that all my daughters know Dad didn’t give them garbage to use and they really appreciate their laptops.
7> Aaaaand swapped out the m.2 WiFi card on my main laptop, because the Realtek it came with had decided that it was just happy seeing networks, but that actually connecting with them was too big of an ask. And then I guess it it deleted Tindr and disappeared off the network dating market? Anyway no more Realtek WiFi 5 junk, hello shockingly cheap Intel 6e card!
*Glad that worked out for you. I just smile when I hear stories like yours about WiFi in the knowledge that I am a living contradiction. I don’t use WiFi in my home but, at the same time all my PCs run on ethernet. I do not use cable TV because I have no TV and I don’t want one. So I’m a cord cutter who doesn’t use WiFi. People who want in on my network have to leave a foot print. It’s that simple.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this snippet of A Day In the Life of a Domestic End User Dad. Keep 'em coming.
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You know what makes it better? Not long after this upgrade she misplaced her phone; Somehow my fault because I was the last person to see it, of course.
And instead of working with what she’s got, she’s spent her days looking for her phone, watching TV, or stealing my wife’s work phone. Mostly that one.
I’m legitimately working on spinning up a side hustle business to do the laptops and game consoles that the bigger guys won’t touch basically because it’s not a phone.
I’m of the persuasion that there is some truth to this right brain/left brain thing. This is not to say that we knuckle dragging males don’t suffer from hormonal quirks and anomalies as well. :::shrugs::: I’ve given up on understanding female psyche decades ago. As for male psyche, well I’m pretty sure I still struggle with the ‘bigger is better’ mind set as I have no use for a tablet and I prefer a large desk phone. Because of these preferences I never lose my phone and my PC is generally easier to repair because access is easier. Typing on a full size keyboard is also a pleasant experience for me.
You likely have a good idea for that side hustle of yours if you can get the traffic.
1.2.01
Well we’ve made some progress! …Eventually!
Between the day job and New Day Job and the inexorable advancing undead horde of the ‘Holiday Season’ - Imagine This but they’re caroling and asking for PlaysStation Five - it has been…sporadic. But consistent. Constantly sporadic!
Part of the problem, I suppose, is that since I’m coming from this all primarily without a working experience base, I have to do things the hard way. With a lot of intense effort in concentration plus time in the overall experience. A lot more time in whole than I normally am allotted. Since this whole project has been getting the worst of me in a lot of ways, the moments I’ve had the time but not the mental wherewithal have…also…been…several… That’s really been the problem.
Thus, I have contended with Traefik and been utterly routed. But not the traffic. Just me. So we took a step back, and did some more looking at things, and we have a fully operational* and powered*** battle station, guys!** (*Editor’s Note: “Fully operational” is used in the most technical of senses, it might as well look like the penultimate form of the Death Star II.) (**Editor’s Note: Not remotely what would classically be considered a “Battle Station” seeing as how it features a CPU most members here wouldn’t subject on their worst enemy.) (***Editor’s Note: It’s powered!)
What’s really going on is threefold: First, we’ve migrated from a Proxmox VM to an LXC Debian instance because I didn’t know I could do that before. Considering what we’re working with, that might actually be a helpful performance advantage. I’ve also learned a lot about just doing file transfers through SSH in that process. Second, I came across Linuxserver.io’s SWAG which is basically Nginx with encryption and security all built in together. I did consider something ‘easier’ like Caddy but I nothing I came across worked with Docker and actually had what I was needing. And Traefik…I still don’t know what I was messing up for it to deploy but not actually work, so we’re chalking that one up under the “definitely missing something” column. Last, we got an actual webserver. I did experiment with Drupal, but when I came across Wagtail, which is written in Python… Well Python keeps coming up for me - I keep thinking I should probably learn that if anything - and being written in Python notably means that I don’t have to do any of the SQL database integration setup, which had been some of the sticking points.
Now all I really have to do is grab the two of these and Doc Brown plug them together. And make a website, of course. No big.
On completely different notes, I was able to take an old 1080p monitor and an old laptop and facsimile an actual desktop setup by duct-taping it and my normal laptop together with Mouse Without Borders which for the most part I’m actually quite happy with. It at one point got an SSD upgrade, so after dropping operating temperatures by 20°C by repasting it’s been just dandy.
I’ve actually been using that computer as a media library for music, nothing fancy on the software side, just brute-force using Bluetooth speaker mode of an Alexa that’s wired into speakers. Considering it’s Amazon devices, I’m not sure I’d even want a more integrated approach since it’s more my music than my wife’s anyway.
And speaking of “media libraries” we just recently acquired via estate sale a rather significant amount of physical media, to the point that actually doing a Plex is starting to make sense. So suddenly I’m going to need a lot more hard drive space. Especially since all the family’s normal streaming services are all spiking to ridiculous levels…well there might be some “Rated Arr” in the future too.
I’ve been doing work in schools, which have an absolutely absurd amount of blacklisting on their networks plus effective faraday cage construction, so I’ve been bouncing off of not even being able to use Tailscale or DuckDuckGo. It’s actually been basically necessary to use RealVNC into a local machine just to do some basic stuff, so that’s what we’ve been doing, and was the impetus for hauling out the old laptop.
So we’re over one hump and will hopefully be making more real progress from this point.
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1.2.02
…We’re not! Okay, let’s dive into the technical side of things, could actually use some feedback here.
So I got Wagtail running inside a Docker container using the Wagtail guide for doing so, and…discovered I was slightly off base after getting medium-deep into working through it. I don’t mind doing command line edits to add pages and modules in order to edit them, but I’m definitely not as comfortable or fast with it. So in the process I also ran across CodeRedCRM (a.k.a.: CRX apparently?) which is…just Wagtail but with a beefed-up admin so you can do almost all of it there instead of back and forth. And this time, starting a little more from scratch with a dedicated Debian LXC container just for running this and nothing else. Despite the start-up being literally identical, for some reason there’s nothing showing on the port. I even tried running it on the other LXC just to see if it was a configuration issue, but same issue of not showing up when it should be a simple setup, and other docker-based things are not being an issue the same way. So open highway/big roadblock.-
Edit:
1.2.04
Soooo this may be a “user error” by way of “blaming the documentation” because the installation might have been a local development testing only form. I did a WSL install as a sanity check and wouldn’t ya know it, localhost works. So we’ll take a second crack at the full deployment install now and see if that works better like it should.
Edit 2:
1.2.05
Further investigation, it’s actually a Django limitation, and you have to force the machine’s IP address and port to make it not only listen to LocalHost. And now, onward!
1.3.01
[Summoning the full mimetic power of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike’s menu selection:] Awwwright!
It took some particularly focused flailing and some slight misunderstanding of which section of Nginx configuration I was looking at. I was trying to use a manual Nginx configuration but inside a SWAG stack, so it…didn’t really want to play nice. Going deeper into the strictly SWAG documentation, I figured out how their setup is designed to make all ~their~ repo apps play nice together, dove into a Wordpress config and (used as inspiration/mutilated it horribly) and now we’re in business! A fully functioning subdomain website, there ain’t no roaches in here or nuthin’!
So I’ve been playing with the CRX site builder tools a bit, and there’s definitely a lot of genuinely cool stuff where I don’t think I’m going to kick myself for not just going Drupal or whatever. Not like big-hosting-site levels of easy, but definitely doable especially once I look up some CSS for colors & etc. I need to make this homepage actually be a page and not some random stuff I threw up there, so that’s up next. And this whole thing has been…how long now? Probably don’t want to think about that part.
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1.3.02 - Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Windows 11) - Depeche Mode
Teeth. Nails. Claws, even. “You can pry my OS from my cold, dead fingers.” All that sort of thing. And y’know what? I think it’s gotten there.
I’ve been honestly pretty happy with Windows 10 over the years, the old job where I was doing office work had just updated their systems from 7 when I started there, so I was the first one to discover that using Excel 365 had way better performance when you used it in Edge instead of Internet Explorer. I got pretty entrenched in a particular set of PowerToys, Winaero Tweaker, all the settings just so where I had a routine with new systems and new installs. The kids’ systems are all running 10… I’ve also had issues, though. OS degradation is still a thing, I’ve had to do a fresh install on my main laptop about once a year and change for one “things broke” reason or another. But I also have a firm setup: 10 for “desktop mode”, gaming etc., Pop!_OS for “laptop mode” pure office, productivity, server stuff. I flip back and forth on reboots pretty often, I’m not a “leave everything open and running” person so I don’t have any issues doing that.
For a couple months now the 10 side has suddenly started booting like it’s off a hard drive instead of NVMe, which has put a real damper on the quick reboot flip. I tried just about every repair and diagnosis and no dice, but I also didn’t want to do the FULL clear space off the secondary drive and move folders of everything over there, redownload all the installers and get everything back up.
So I overcomplicated it.
We cleared off all the bulky games and shrunk the partition as low as she go, and went for the triple-boot option by adding in 11 in the open space. So now we have rEFInd as a boot manager, which feeds into Windows boot manager between 10 and 11.
It turns out I may have shot myself in the foot previously, because my primary experience with 11 before this was on a kid’s laptop that we bought from the school when they were upgrading, which featured a 10th gen Celeron. So dog-slow and also wasn’t set up for me, that was basically Youtube and Minecraft and we’re done here.
I did not realize 11 would actually feel faster. The Ryzen 5 4600H - effectively a 45-watt 3600 with a moderate integrated graphics slapped on - is the one asset my laptop has that I’ve had only positive experiences with, and with actual threads for 11 to manage boy does normal use actually feel way better. That’s been the big shock so far. Otherwise, we did our usual full stack of personalization just like 10, and I have to say I’m thoroughly enjoying it, it’s actually inching Windows closer to Pop.
I knew 11 looked better, obviously, but actually using it now I didn’t realize - and I really don’t think it gets enough credit for this - that it’s actually designed to work together as a whole better. 10, for all its workhorse qualities, was ultimately a bunch of pieces stapled together when it came to aesthetics, taskbar features, start menu, window snapping, all that. 11 was definitely designed to make everything seem of one piece and that shows, I actually appreciate the ways it isn’t just legacy Windows carryovers and almost everything did get actual work. Like I could have sworn to you that the combined ‘control panel’ system icons I would have absolutely hated and even been a dealbreaker…but actually using it, it was absolutely the correct choice.
Anyway, unless there’s some big roadblocks, 10 might have a limited existence on my SSD, but enough about Microsoft products.
I’m really enjoying doing some web building with CRX, like I’ve actually really been enjoying figuring out the tools and putting pages together and making it all work. I’ve done plenty of Squarespace or similar Easy Mode builders, and there’s something more inherently satisfying about having to construct it instead of having it largely handed to you. It’s not like I’m even doing HTML or anything intense (although I do need to look into some CSS classes pretty soon here) but it’s really scratching that Lego-sort-of-itch. Build something, add something on, figure something out and rebuild it better. Also, I’m writing again? Maybe I’m just in a pretty decent place right now. Now if only the financial situation would match up!
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Sounds like you’re doing a great job keeping yourself busy. My 16 yr old has a yen for becoming a software engineer and she says Python is not optional. Myself, I wouldn’t know. I’m just the grunt hardware guy in the house. My job is to keep the network running and tend to anything hardware related. Oh yeah… And pay the bills. My job is to pay the bills. This includes purchasing hardware and paying the ISP. We run over half dozen PCs in the basement and a few more upstairs. This is a very PC oriented home.
Looks to me as though you’ve found your niche. Now it’s simply a matter of rolling with the punches as you upgrade your hardware. How do you eat an elephant? A: One byte at a time. You can do it! 
1.3.03
Windows 10 is dead. Long Live Windows 10!
Like right now, for example, this is being typed up on that software KVM secondary machine that is running 3rd gen Intel. So not that dead. But the partition is wiped off, and I’m more militantly keeping games off of that primary drive for responsiveness reasons, especially since it’s been in use for a couple years. I’ve discovered that having over forty games installed on the secondary 1TB SATA SSD is more than fine, especially since I do only play a couple at a time.
Speaking of KVM, I’ve moved from Mouse Without Borders to Barrier fully, because despite being a little more finicky about “picking up” it works on Pop! side too, and apparently MWB blocks Barrier so both isn’t an option.
So meanwhile, I’ve been doing more messing around with the website and getting it into a technically functional form, which has been satisfying in a building-with-Lego sort of way. Gotta do some form submission troubleshooting, but otherwise yeah it’s been steady going.
Also, I’m…still writing? It has been like a decade since I’ve actually written things on a daily basis. It’s actually becoming unnerving, but hey!
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Well, Windows 10 is the technology that got perfected in Win7 (trial run was Vista) with the ideas worth keeping from Win8.
The result may not be to everyones liking.
Careful, else you may break the words per minute speed record by accident
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1.3.04
The holidays have been der Schiezenfest.
The whole family probably got Secret Covid around Thanksgiving, which has manifested as basically the same seasonal allergies we always get…but with a bit more annoying persistence. Basically everybody has been Mostly Okay but wrestling with low levels of energy and engagement, and the remaining scraps of motivation got absorbed by what little there was of the seasonal baking.
I still like Windows 11 a lot, but I’ve actually been using Pop a lot more regularly since I figured out the Barrier thing. If only it weren’t for basically all the games I play primarily refusing to work on Linux for me, it would actually be way more.
I’ve taken my stupid little homelab web hosting setup and started using it for the Greater Good (a.k.a. ‘family’) by taking the Wagtail/CRX setup I have and duplicating the process into a new LXC with new subdomain routing for my mom to be able to make an extended genealogy site. She had ended up on some paid program where it was also request-only, so not exactly the public preservation for future legacy she was going for. Since I plan on doing this for the indefinite future, it seemed like a better idea to just run it on my hardware for something as low-intensity as that.
On the ‘fixing’ side, a different family member had me take a crack at data recovery off an older iMac. It turns out a hard drive was dead dead dead in classic Seagate fashion, so there was no recovery from that. Plus, it turns out that dead hard drives cause kernel panic engaging in sleep for MacOS, so that’s fun! I’ve got a couple overheating PS4s that I’m about to need to give the good ol’ blowout or maybe thermal paste, depending on how things go.
Lutris has simplified the process a lot. I have three pieces of software that only just work, everything else, no issues.
1.4.01
There’ve been serious health issues in the family, which put a huge stop sign on a lot of stuff for a while.
But we’re not gonna belabour that point, we’re makin’ an upgrade, awww yeahhh!
We have officially kicked to the curb our enthusiastic nonsense of a 775 platform, officially replaced by What People Typically Use for Their NAS. Eeeeexxxcellent… And now, to belabour this point, The Process:
The used hardware market has been pretty consistent for while I’ve been working on this whole thing, so the plan I had in the back of my head has been Used Workstation. Specifically, a lot of HP Z440s have been parted out, and the individual components are pretty cheap even though a whole workstation really isn’t a bargain, so re-assembling a workstation from parts seemed like a really good plan, especially since higher-core 2011 socket processors would be potentially on the table for effectively pennies. All proprietary OEM bull, but they were made to go together and I wouldn’t be using anything too crazy where I’d need to step outside that box. Obviously higher power usage, but cheap and capable.
And I got this (holds up tweezers) close to pulling the trigger on it. At eleven-fifty-two, while doing a Sanity Check search, I came across an actual honest-to-god combo on Ebay. AM4, R5 1600 AF, and even some Team Group RAM and m.2, an actual deal. A little more expensive than Operation Kraftwürkstation, but close enough that the actual power bill math might apply despite cheap electric. Plus, potential upgrade paths into both more serious higher core upgrades on the server end and gaming computer kickdown on the kid end. So suddenly we’re running the same kind of hardware as Like Everybody Else and I don’t hate it.
Everything I needed came in on the same day, I pulled the spare PSU out of the closet, hooked it all up…and had some serious concerned I’d been played when it didn’t boot. Idle lights came on, completely died when trying to power on.
Bad PSU! I guess it degraded in the closet over the past year sitting idle, but it wasn’t exactly good to begin with, so not a big loss, it just threw a wrench into my hot-swap plans. I had to pull apart a kid’s PC for the old Quadro it had for display out during setup, so I used that PSU for testing while I was at it. I plugged that one up and it fired up totally fine and it all checked out.
So we got Proxmox installed, failed to make a cluster properly and had to undo it, then did get it made right, and floundered for a bit. It turns out having multiple systems really opens it up a lot and gives a real “Unlimited Powah” impression, but also clearly I did not fully understand what a lot of it was beforehand, and I’m actually even more impressed. I’m not entirely sure why it hates snapshots so much, but I was able to just Migrate everything to the new system, all the IPs and everything stayed the same so everything just worked and I didn’t have to do any manual adjustment, just fantastic. After I ran into a no-quorum issue once I’d finished doing the hardware swap and had to separate the cluster because I forgot.
Now that we actually have more than 6GB of RAM to work with, we can actually start doing things again! The Minecraft server is now no longer taking up too much memory to run, and I can think about doing Vikunja and Mailcow and Jellyfin for real, now.
The fun/frustration can now begin anew!
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