I have been taking a break from tech. I am starting to do things again. Yesterday I solved a long standing issue I had with slow speeds with torrents. The issue was with the program I was using, Transmission. I switched to qBittorrent and no more problem. While I was away have been doing a lot of reading. I have read 7 books this year, most in the last 1.5 months. I usually only read a 2-3 a year.
What I have read in 2026:
Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
Stardust - Neil Gaiman
The Silent Patient - Alex Michaelides
Just Friends - Haley Pham
But Everyone Feels This Way - Paige Layle
Wild Dark Shore - Charlotte McConaghy
Forest Gump - Winston Groom
I am currently reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson. I am open to any suggestions. I have ~550 books in my Library, most unread.
I realized last night that Ubuntu 26.04 is using Linux Kernel 7 and Fedora 44 is using Linux Kernel 6.19. I have never known Ubuntu for having the latest kernel. I also like the changes they have made and plan to make in the future. I am tempted to try it again on bare metal and not just in a VM. Also hardware backed encryption available in the installers. Iâm truly amazed at the progress being made in multiple Linux Communities.
Kinda late in the game, but I remembered my browser (assuming you use firefox) has an option that is disabled by default on linux.
layers.acceleration.force-enabled=true (in about:config)
This can introduce tearing (but for me, sway fixed any tearing and for x11 I used compton to fix it in openbox and jwm - if youâre using gnome shell with wayland, youâre probably fine, you shouldnât see tearing).
This morning I finally started to rebuild my VM library. I have completely abandoned gnome-boxes. It just cannot handle it. I tried virtual machine manager again and itâs been great. I also tried to use VMware workstation pro but ran into so many issues. It is free but it was a process to just get to a download and I could not get it to work with Fedora. Iâm not surprised. I do find it amazing that I can have 8 VMâs running in the background and it not bog down the host system. I was still using ~60gb of memory.
I have a few projects that I have decided to start working on. I am going to try to document them.
I need a new firewall. I feel that the community version of PFsense is slowly dying. Its last update was back in September. There is OPNsense but I have not had good luck with it. Need to do some research. Also want to get new hardware for this one.
I want to migrate my NAS away from TrueNAS. I have nothing against it, but I feel that my hardware is not being utilized to its fullest, I feel that the VM options are limited and I have strange issues with them, and GPU support is OK, but sharing that GPU amongst things does not work (At least for me). I will likely use Ubuntu or Debian. My NAS has a Xeon E5-2640 v4 (10 Core) and 128gb of DDR4 ECC RDIMMâs. I also have a 12gb RTX 3060 sitting in storage that I want to add with this change.
I want to do some AI agent stuff. I have a few ideas: Help me apply for jobs (if companies want to use AI to look for people, I should be able to use them to apply), Network monitoring stuff, and I want to try running one on basic low power hardware (Mini PC/Thin Client). These would use small models. I donât really see much on it. It is always the big models.
If anyone that sees my blog has any recommendations, suggestions, or ideas I am open to them.
Perhaps IPFire? Although in terms of appearance and capabilities, itâs a bit archaic compared to the other two.
But I always believe that whenever possible, separation should be used, and the FW should be just the FW, not a multi-function server with thousands of services.
Unless youâre thinking about something more commercial for $$$âŚ
Perhaps proxmox and NAS as VM⌠OpenMediaVault 8?
I have 2 x 32gb Optane drives sitting in storage. I wonder if I can put those in my desktops extra m.2 slots and use them as swap space. I do believe they would run at pci-e 3 x 4. The slots would be pci-e 4 x 4. I donât really need it but I have been noticing a few gbâs of swap being used on my desktop when running lots of VMâs and doing AI things. I also donât know if it would really make a difference. My desktop does have 96gb of memory. If memory prices wouldnât have gone through the roof I likely would have upgraded to 128 gb or 256 gb.
I am open to any ideas on what to do with these drives.
I installed my Optane modules into my desktop this morning and setup them up to be used as swap. I now have 70gb of swap. While researching how to do this setup for swap I learned that I could just add it without needing to re-install , which is cool & I learned that the 8G of swap that I had by default is actually ZRAM (Compressed Ram). I want to think I am better off at this point. It is not often that I run low on memory due to having 96gb of it, but I now have more than I will probably ever need. The next time I put a heavy load on my desktop I will take a few screen shot, take some notes, and share the results.
I also made a few purchases. I have bought 3 Sony Mavica Cameras, x2 FD73 & x1 FD71, along with a new battery. Two come with a charger and one has the original box. The camera is terrible by todayâs standards, but I remember these from the late 90âs and always wanted one. Hopefully at least one of them works. They use 3.5â Floppy disks as the storage medium and I have a nice cache of floppy disks in storage that I can use.
I am currently experimenting with OpenBSD on one of my old Dell Latitude E7450âs. Itâs really slow to setup. Hopefully it gets there! With the basic install memory usage was 26mb.
This was after I had been in nscde and xfce. The next time I will see what it is after I log in before opening a desktop environment. I still have some things to figure out. I have not been able to connect to WiFi but the radio is working. It also will not sleep/wake from sleep, shutdown, or reboot.
