⚠️ UNDER CONSTRUCTION ⚠️

The Parts The time has come to reflect on my misadventures in PC building. Last christmas I bought copmonents to build my sister a midrange AM4 PC, which included the following: MB : ASUS ROG STRIX Gaming II (WiFi) CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700G RAM: 4x8GB G.SKILL Trident Z SSD: Samsung 980 Pro 1TB Samsung 980 Pro 2TB Total spend, including some odds and ends (e.g. thermal paste, cooler, etc) was $589....

Lately on my new laptop I’ve noticed that after a reboot, or after waking from suspend, I will often have a “Software Reporter Tool” task running on CPU. There is one from MS, presumably part of Windows Defender, and one from Chrome which is part of chrome://settings/cleanup. Believe it or not this rant is not about “cloud enabled” antivirus protection being enabled by default. Instead this rant is about how fucking pathologically poorly these tools perform....

Introduction Somehow, it has come to be that I upgrade my computer every four years. It is purely coincidence that I happened to start that trend on a leap year, and so for the forseeable future I build a new computer roughly once per leap year. Though if I’m being honest hardware is getting to be so ridiculously fast that I have very little need for another upgrade. Of course PCIe and DDR5 are compelling updates, but I can’t say that it feels like I’m running into I/O or memory bottlenecks these days....

aqua is the stupid goddess in charge of managing my photo library. She’s a bit of an idiot, but she gets the job done: In general aqua is a codename for a suite of projects that aim to organize my files more efficiently. The unifying concept behind all the software is that: storing files (leaves) hierarchically sucks because in general there is rarely a single “path” to retrieving that knowledge....

Today I woke up and was immediately subjected to the following video: This is your one spoiler warning: I will be discussing this video below this imaginary line. Now I didn’t find this particularly funny, although it certainly has its moments, but I do patently disagree with the notion of this being “zoomer humor.” You see I recall being similarly inane as a child, as were my friends. This style of humor doesn’t “belong” to any one generation, it’s just the result of immaturity....

Following the cable misadventures I was in need of the ability to route at gigabit speeds on my home network. I had a venerable PCEngine APU2 that was able to do about 550-650 Mbit/s firewalled, but that’s just not enough. Exacerbating the issue is the fact that currently my main workstation has VMs that straddle multiple subnets, so bulk file-transfer traffic that should be switched (L2) is instead moving through the router (L3)....

The rich and powerful route packets however they want. We steal them back for you. I was contacted by a friend who was struggling with internet drop-outs at one of their business sites. Their router no longer had a functional WAN backup, mostly because Sprint ceased to exist, so internet outages led to an inability to take payments. Z was getting nowhere with support for this firewall appliance; however he was particularly confused by the guy saying there were “multiple ARP entries” on the WAN interface....

In May I decided to address some internet connectivity problems. For a bit of context: I play a lot of Final Fantasy 14 which uses TCP for its netcode. This basically means lost packets quickly turn the game into an unplayable mess. (Things like the client being completely unresponsive for 10s of seconds, and then quickly fast-forwarding to “catch-up” to the current state of the world.) Due to these quirks in my primary entertainment: I started to dive into some packet loss between my router and its default gateway....