From Rimuru to Ranga

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Increasingly, I’ve been turning my mind to what will come after Rimuru; a machine that was originally built in 2021 using the COVID-19 stimulus as its foundation and the same general design of its predecessor, Centauri. Since then, it has undergone 6 refits between Rimuru experiencing a motherboard failure in addition to ordinary tech updates.

Simply put, the status quo for the last few years has been that only one slot on the board is still functional, and the intention was that there would be no third motherboard if it fails. Combined with what is now a 5-year-old Core i7, the single slot of RAM has proven to be the key bottleneck. Ironically, getting Oblivion: Remastered to run was more an exercise in getting the GPU load to a point where the CPU isn’t pegging out.

It’s also been a downside that between the old CPU being well loaded and the Big-Assed-GPU both cranked up practically turn the machine into a space heater. I decided the machine to handle sustained load while keeping system thermals under control. The catch-22 of course, is I can easily find myself sitting in a room that climbs towards +10 degrees after a long spell of gaming, like playing Silent Hill f over the weekend.

Following Maleficent, I considered swapping the GPU and NVMe drive over to Zeta, and converting it from a file and virtual machine server over to Rimuru’s successor. That actually was how Centauri had become my previous desktop. Of course, breaking down and cracking the case revealed roughly what expected to be with that plan: I could fit the PSU and the cooling system, or I could fit the GPU. Zeta’s PSU would be able to handle ‘technically’ fitting and powering Rimuru’s RTX 4070 Ti, but would require removing the liquid cooling system to accommodate the PSU. So, that plan failed.

One of my long-term plans over the past lustrum or so has been that Rimuru would likely be my last conventional “Desktop PC.” I’ve never really been a believer in gaming laptops, but it here we are.

Christened Ranga, since its job is to blow Rimuru away. Amusingly, using Oblivion: Remastered as a point of reference it delivers similar performance but the opposite bottleneck. Rather than being CPU bound, Ranga is GPU bound, but still firmly lands in the realm of pick your frame rate. Closer to 30 at Ultra/4K or closer to 60 at Medium/4K, and a pretty slick 40s-50s at High/4K.

A bit of rewiring all the things, and my dock is now situated underneath the monitor rather than within a passive Thunderbolt 3 cable length of the desktop. Somehow, the part that bothers me about this arrangement is that a 2 meter long active Thunderbolt 5 cable cost about the same as my shorter TB3/TB4 cables did, while being rated for 80 Gbps/240W, far higher than my dock can handle. On the flip side, for cooling purposes a small stand was necessary to ensure proper ventilation.

In tests so far, I’m finding that the Zephyrus G14 is a sufficient match. Its RTX 5070 Ti mobile just can’t match the horsepower of the RTX 4070 Ti desktop, but it comes close enough that no loner being bottlenecked on the Core i7-10700K and single slot resolve that pickle. It’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 both represent a major generational leap in performance, and while the RAM remains comparable, it isn’t so limited: so yay for being back to dual channel memory!

As an added benefit, when putting Shion in place to be my primary computer, I no longer have the problem of not being able to see where the fuck the port is, since it’s no longer facing the wall. I kind of liked having my laptop off to the side as previous, but the occasions where I actually use my laptop as a notebook PC make it grumble some to reconnect. More so than swapping between TB cables at the dock. Now? It’s simply swap laptops in the stand, a single cable running to the dock.

Another benefit is proving to be the heating. The Zephyrus G14 is very rapid to crank its fans into high-gear when gaming, to the point that one might want noise canceling headphones rather than speakers for some content. But it doesn’t raise the room’s ambient temperature as drastically as my desktop, and frankly, the late generation MacBook Pro 16s had louder fans :-P.

One of those beautiful things

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After being teary eyed thanks to NCIS S18E9 Winter Chill, I decided this was a poem worth remembering.

When I die

Give what’s left of me away

To children

And old men that wait to die.

And if you need to cry,

Cry for your brother

Walking the street beside you.

And when you need me,

Put your arms

Around anyone

And give them

What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,

Something better

Than words

Or sounds.

Look for me

In the people I’ve known

Or loved,

And if you cannot give me away,

At least let me live on in your eyes

And not your mind.

You can love me most

By letting

Hands touch hands,

By letting bodies touch bodies,

And by letting go

Of children

That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,

People do.

So, when all that’s left of me

Is love,

Give me away.

— Epitaph by Merrit Malloy

That truly is a beautiful epitaph, if I’ve ever heard one.

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In my continued adoption of MiniDisc, I’ve done been experimenting with my N707‘s record function. Dealing with analog sources, it works about the same as I remember cassettes without a deck.

The interesting thing of course is the optical support. Synchro-recording doesn’t really shine without using a mini-TOSLINK connection and S/PDIF for input. I’ve also figured out that, amusing to me, using a USB-C to TOSLINK dongle on my MacBook is far more consistent than using my desktop’s optical port when it comes to controlling the LED. But in the end, I’d say that incorporating intentional silences into the playlist is ideal, at least if you care about track marks.

One of the things that I’ve found rather nice about MD as a format is it combines everything useful about CD in a more compact form, and it avoids the problem of self-contained devices. In the later case, while devices like my Rockbox’ified iPod and H2 offer greater storage capacity, they also have their own sufferings.

In the iPod’s case, it’s simply slow as fuck. Likewise, the SD adapter board inside couldn’t handle 128 GB cards, so it’s rocking a 64. The H2 can easily swap cards, if you account for the firmware and system data being stored on them, but that’s a pain and MicroSD is tiny-as-fuck. Contrasting of course to less purpose built devices, where the storage tends to be both fixed and having to share with all the other data on tablets, phones, etc.

The funny thing of sorts, is I’ve never really minded physical media–so much as I’ve tended to be network centric. My main issue with physical media has usually been the storage requirements, and MDs are nice and compact!

One of those random backlog of things to write my thoughts about

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Bumping into “Apple found clever iPhone Air innovation for a thinner USB-C port” a few weeks ago, made me rather do a double take.

Also, it made me rather try to imagine what the engineers that worked on the F-14 Tomcat must have suffered. Electron beam welding a wing box from titanium, along with the more general “How the hell do we even build that” problem, were among the challenges back in the ’60s. A time frame where these solutions were more revolutionary than antiquated. We mostly remember those planes for the swept wings and cool movies, but I bet the engineers who worked on that wing box remembered it as a challenge of a lifetime 😅.

And then fast forward about sixty years, and we have people talking about 3D printing titanium.

Gundam Wing 30th

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There are times when I’m scrolling, and my response is just, “What!?” and it actually makes me happier.

From a little Googling, sounds like Endless Waltz will also be getting a theatrical re-release among other goodies. Ahh, man, I can hardly believe it’s been that long. The first time I saw Gundam Wing was when it aired on Toonami circa 2000, which was already some years after the original Japanese release.

While I always had a soft spot for the classic Universal Century, it was Gundam Wing that served as my introduction to the series. In the years since, I’m less of a text book on the One Year War era than I once was, but I never would have gotten into any of that nerdistry without Wing. Also, Robotech, which in the late ’90s I could only find on Cartoon Network, lol.

Ahh, fond memories.

When you name a server Maleficent

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Recently, I’ve been having a good bit of grumbling more than usual where Zeta’s bridging of VMs into the local network segment gets borked by package updates, enough so, that pulling the trigger on my migrate to AlmaLinux 10 plan was accelerated. Rather than waiting for ELevate to consider this upgrade ‘not beta’ I went with the reinstall process.

In debating whether I wanted to go ahead and set up the libvirt environment again and keep grumbling, or perhaps just go with my original plan of using Docker, I opted to take a different tactic. The master nameserver being a VM, was mostly because hosting virtual machines was added to the expectations list when Cream was replaced; and some readers might recall, that the ol’ NUC7 got unretired into becoming nameserver 3 as part of the Asus->Eeero transition.

So, I decided on Plan B—bare metal. A MINISFORUM UN100L and a drive to MicroCenter later, and I had decided on two things. One, is that $180 on sale would be damn worth nothing having to screw with the virtual network bridge again, and secondly that I would name it Maleficent because I was pissed off at solving these problems.

The real question is stability. It’s been quite a while since I last edited the zone files (December), and more than a few incidents of the “Why the hell is ns1 not reachable again!” since Zeta’s inception. If Maleficent serves as the new name server 1 until Christmas without any fuckery, I will call that a solid win.

In unboxing the new hardware, I also considered a third alternative that may be for a longer reaching plan. The issue of lacking Thunderbolt aside and whether or not both Rimuru’s graphics card and the machine’s power supply can both fit in the case, Zeta’s hardware would actually be a great replacement for Rimuru. The issue of cramming a RTX 4070 Ti into a tiny ass case aside.

With Cream and my spare Raspberry Pi Zero W functioning as name servers 3 and 2, it would actually be simple enough to convert Maleficent into the central server. The bind instance functioning as the master / name server 1 for my internal domain is locked down, other than domain transfers, all the traffic actually goes through Cream and the Pi Zero. It’s existence as a separate entity is largely administrative, and in fact, the two name servers serving my home network are running a configuration designed so that either of them can be swapped over into becoming the SOA for the local domain. So, I wouldn’t feel too bad if bind and samba lived on the same machine. In fact, it would be quite effective since Zeta’s storage array is connected to a 5 Gbps USB-A host port, and Maleficent’s N100 is far faster than my old laptop’s aging Core i5.

That however, is a tale for another time. For now, all hail maleficent.home.arpa !

The MiniDisc Experiment

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After discovering that there’s modern software that supports NetMD, I found myself acquiring something few people want anymore. Also, it’s my first Walkman since portability had more in common with books than floppy disk. I was always fascinated by MiniDisc, but they were never really a thing where I grew up–and now they’re basically thrift store material.

In terms of audio quality, at SP, it’s definitely close enough to CD quality that I can’t complain. In LP2 mode, it’s certainly no worse than the older MP3s in my music collection. While I don’t consider LP4 to have enough bits for more than a Bluetooth microphone (and an old crap one at that), I’ll admit that the few samples I’ve encountered sound just fine. Being second hand, several of the discs had music already in various SP/LP2/LP4 combinations.

The battery life is also pretty impressive. Playback time is forget about it off one of my eneloop AA rechargeable, most of which have about 4-years of charge cycles between game controllers and other small peripherals. Only thing that really seems to put a real ding in it is recording, since SP record uses the recorder’s own ATRAC3 codec rather than the PC.

Using LP2 may actually be worth it, since that appears to do the encode on PC, resulting in a lot more write speed. The Walkman’s codec is probably a higher quality than what comes bundled with ElectronWMD, but it is still a twenty year old chip.

Encoding at SP seems to run about 2/3 to 1/2 of real time, which isn’t great since we’re talking about 20-40 minutes an album. Minutes per track. By contrast, throwing my laptop’s processing power at the problem, it’s seconds per track. In terms of disc runtime, 74-80 minutes at SP is on par with CD and the 140-160 minutes or so at LP2 will usually fit longer albums this side of ‘not made for physical release,’ but I’ll admit, encoding time seems to be a bigger factor than audio quality. ATRAC3/LP2 is actually a lot better than I expected.

In any case, I do have to admit, it’s a lot nicer to do File Server -> Laptop -> Walkman than it ever was dubbing to cassette on my mom’s stereo 🙂

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Today I learned it’s possible to combine packing tape and erasable markers. Now, I can’t help but wonder, how well this can be applied to floppy diskette in place of erasable pencil. E.g., a bit o’ tape over the label.

There’s also the obvious problem that 20-year-old CD-Rs don’t always hold onto their sharpie markings, but that seems like a less stellar idea for rotating media. But I think the answer to that still largely remains archive and digitize.

The difference between imperial and metric

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I have to admit, this makes me want to look up the series. While I suppose blaming the issue on the French is a bit inappropriate today (but still amusing for those in non-metric countries), I can’t help but enjoy the clip’s finish.

Ahh, dramatic adaptations of history… there are so many opportunities there.