Computer Technician, IT Professional, Geek

Hello, Old Friend.

So it’s been a while, yes. I know, I really should blog more – a fair bit has happened.

I lost another close friend of mine back in late 2023, that hit me hard. Someone I talked to, almost daily for literally hours on end, would often visit and hang out with suddenly passed away while at work, she felt unwell after leaving the bathroom and collapsed. That left a very big gap in my life.

Late June 2024, I upgraded my server, I was using a Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny, a tiny AMD system running Debian as my “server” – I upgraded it with

I got the processor amid the 13/14 th Gen controversy with recalls and such and users having failed cores and oxidation issues. They appear to have been only related to the K series – I didn’t need a K chip and I just needed a good solid server.

Some humour in the fact that my server is a bit better than my desktop. My desktop being an 12700K which is still a good solid chip, even still. I could swap boards since the 12 13 14 Gen processors are the same family.

I just recently upgraded the 5TB “data” drive to a 16TB drive, moved the 5TB drive to being a replacement location for junknas which is now called “JunkDrv” since the NAS I was using totally failed – which wasn’t a total lose, considering it had random junk data.

Last year I did put in a NVIDIA RTX A2000 6GB graphics card. Now that brings me to the servers new upgrades this year – honestly the upgrade was moved up due to the President Trumps tariffs and the possibility that the gear would or could cost me far more later on, rather than right now.

So I purchased these,

I plan to install the hp DVD-RAM GH82N optical drive in the case too, which means I may have to have fabricated a bracket mount for the 3.5” 16TB sata drive, and the Seagate 5TB drive which is 15mm thick.

I plan to install the hp DVD-RAM GH82N optical drive in the case too, which means I may have to have fabricated a bracket mount for the 3.5” 16TB sata drive, and the Seagate 5TB drive which is 15mm thick.

I plan to buy an identical LG BH16NS55 for my desktop, since the DVD-RAM drive is in my desktop which will be moved to the server and I’ll buy a portable slim drive for my laptop bag.

I also was lent a CPAP machine recently, a ResMed AirSense 10 and I picked the ResMed AirFit F20 mask.

I was provided it back in February and I’m still getting used to it. Well having nothing over my face for 40years, you kinda get used to it. But I am progressing woth it, using it for more and more nights, although I stupidly didn’t register the MyAir app with the device so I could keep track of the usage, but I did eventually register it so now I can access usage data, keep score and improve my sleep.

I’ve also started to save up for a new car – I sit at 3.5k currently with Kernel Invest, I borrowed some money from it to purchase the Silverstone server case so I did have $4k, but since most my savings sits in ETFs – they’ve gone down by 20%, which sucks so my savings are kinda down by $234 and some change, but they will go up – I’ll be saving for a while.

Kernel also started allowing us to invest in the US stock market, so I put $30-50 on NVIDIA, Intel, AMD & Apple.

I’ve also started to use GitHub a bit more – as you can see, I’ve played with Jekyll, developed a new theme – Im slowly trying to learn git, well trying, still struggling with it, but I’ll get my head wrapped around it.

I’ve also played around with ffmpeg on linux, since I have that RTX A2000 card to use, soon with a AV1 capable card, I’ll be able to (hopefully) to reduce some of the rando tv media on my NAS, maybe save a few terabytes of space – who knows.

Late 2023 about Christmas time I got a Plustek Film Scanner 8200i Ai to process my fathers negatives & slides, sadly we lost a tonne of negatives with one of our house moves, I think it might have been from Rifle Range to Pihanga St, where we last lived – that move was far too co-ordinated and monitored for anything to get dumped like a bag full of negatives – who knows what we lost.

But alas, we some photos did survive. Im trying to get them processed and put into a book using Affinity Publisher.

I’ll back them up on Blu-Ray when I get my server upgraded.

I should stop putting stuff down on “paper” and I could write out a bunch more stuff about what happened in my life over the last couple of years, seriously, pages! But that would be TLDR, so I’ll leave it here.