Recently I’ve been on a bit of a kick building out my home network. I finally took the plunge and switched most of my home network from Linux Mint to pure Debian. My home server is running Debian 13, my 3D Printer server is running Debian, even the laptop I’m typing this on is running Debian. I chose Debian because I wanted a lightweight-ish distribution, that was batteries included. Neither my print server or my home server needed a desktop environment, so I just installed it without, and enabled the sshd so that I could administer it.

The fact that 10 years ago is only 2016 is mindblowing to me. I remember going through school and thinking about how everything seemed to move so slowly. The 12 years I spent in school felt like such an amazingly long time, but now it feels like I blinked, and it’s been 13 years. I’ve officially been out of school longer than I was in it, but the last 10 years have screamed by at such an amazingly fast pace.

A few years back I build an ultra budget workstation desktop. It is a lenovo P300 workstation. It’s based on an old Haswell Xeon V3. It’s no ultra performer. The machine only has DDR3 ram. Doesn’t support ReBar… not particularily useful for any sort of modern gaming, but luckily I’m not a modern gamer :) I bought the workstation itself for about $60. For the longest time I was running a GTX 960, which I powered using a 2x SATA power connector to a 6 Pin ATX power cord.

Forgive me for not being all up on the latest AI news. I find it rather exhausting to think about. Perhaps it’s my advanced age that is slowing me down, but I don’t have time to sit and read about all the comings-and-goings of the latest tech bubble, So I apologize if this is already known, but this is my experience working with it. Over the last few months I have been playing with self hosting my own server.

As of late, one of my nasty habits has been browsing a small tech recycler in my province called retail.era. I keep finding some new bits of used hardware that I can’t help myself from getting. MicroPC to run my print server? add to cart. 1gb switch for $10? Add to cart. IBM x3650 m5 2u rackmount server for $25? HELL YEAH. As with my latest kick on putting linux on everything I own, I’ve been getting some of these commodity devices and throwing debian on them to serve single use purposes.

As I open my email I notice that a domain renewal is coming up. This time it’s for a project that, this time last year, I was extremely excited about. That project was a website that I was calling ‘modmod.fun’. I picked a nonsensical name, because I couldn’t really think of something that encapsulated the idea that I wanted. The general idea of ModMod was to create a system that encouraged the use of “build threads”.

Today I opened up my reddit feed mindlessly at lunch. The first post that I saw was from the subreddit for my old Alma Mater: This was the post in question: Before university everyone told me that I’d have to go out of my way to make friends and talk to people and first semester I did just that but it seemed that nobody was interested in engaging in conversation at all.

Although i’ve been a linux evangelist for quite a while now, I do truly feel that something has fundamentally changed in the OS landscape. My first introduction to linux would have been around 2006 or so. I installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my Pentium 4 and I was impressed at the speed when compared with Windows XP. However, it was not very stable. Audio was a constant issue, wake from sleep was an issue, hiberation was an issue, and updates seemed to break things often.

I recently made a comment on HackerNews that went something along the lines of this: Why do I bother to post ‘content’ on the internet, when the main purpose of posting on these platforms fundamentally is to provide free labour for the mega tech companies? The thing is, the platforms themselves like to incentivise people to post as much as possible, and that’s simply for the fact that the more content on a platform == more money for the platform.