2025–W52 #
I wrote up my annual retrospective. I just write regular HTML into a text editor, not even markdown conversion. It works well and I like the style of this year's (both visually and from an English perspective).
I am thinking about getting a Thunderbolt-PCIe adaptor, partly to put a real video card on this machine (sometimes) and then partly because I could have an external 10GiB NIC (or external HBA) on my laptop and that would just ... be cool, actually?
Somewhat computing related: I designed, CAMed and carved a complicated five layer CNC operation with (almost) zero problems. In one case I was trying to fit too much onto a sheet and there wasn't enough "meat" to hold down and a cut failed, but for all other operations it just ... worked. It's nice to feel like years of sketchy jobs and failures have resulted in me actually getting better. It doesn't hurt that working with whole sheets of plywood is much more efficient than trying to pocket things out of maple or oak.
I recabled the homelab to just fibre. It's functionally equivalent to the version using 10GiB DAC cables, but easier to route fibres than stiff co-axial cables and it looks nicer. I even have a patch panel coming, to really gold plate it.
I did some RADOS stuff with Rust (wasn't great) and then with Go (slightly better). My homelab setup performance has tanked and I don't fully know why but I notice one of the NICs (in bottom.h.insm.cf) is performing weirdly so I'm going down the rabbit hole of upgrading its firmware.