Uncategorized – GypsyNet-W

2025-09-30

The homelab is always a moving target. Just when I think I have something down, I either break it, or I am let in on a product that makes me completely rethink. So, I’ve done some rethinking; and now I think I have the bones of a good project.

At the architecture level, not much has changed. 4 pancake Dells with some ram and an SSD, all running Docker. Rather than go with Nomad, or Kubernetes, I’m sticking with Swarm-mode. I couldn’t fully wrap my head around storage interfaces in the bigger orchestrators so rolling back to my roots. This time I am adding in a few Raspberry-Pi 4B+s in the mix. Also running docker, and Keepalive.d for virtual IP. The tiny boards are running docker as well, configured as manager nodes, with the Dells configured as worker nodes. Some changes to the Jellyfin software dictated that I had to update out of my old AF gaming rig that’s easily 15+ years old by now. It served me well, but I think I’ve fully outgrown it. In its stead I took a gamble on one of those tiny PCs from Amazon, more on this later.

So, I have Swarm up and running. Dropped in Portainer for management, cause GUIs work. Now I’ve got the same problems I ran in to before. This time I brought reinforcements.

For storage, I’ve had a Synology NAS running and it’s great for large slow media files. but I really don’t want any of my container configurations sitting on spinning disks. Earlier in the year I spent some money on a FlashStor from ASUS, it’s sharing up 6 NVMe drives and has the ability to run TrueNAS scale. This took a little learning but I bonded the NICs and got it configured with an available share that all my hosts can talk to.

Rather than use the Synology’s application portal. I instead took another jump at Traefik, hopefully this time I could figure out how to make it work. It turns out that when I was initally trying to make it happen, I was putting the labels in the wrong place, so that it was deploying to the container, rather than deploying to the service. With that out of the way, I was prepped and ready to get stuff deployed.

I initially began with some of the Dumbware.io stuff, little single container things with a single JSON file in the back end. From there it was like falling off a bike, Commafeed, Mealie, and Dashy, n8n, then on to bigger things: Immich, and the *arr stack. Immich is going to be more involved as I want to bring all my data out of google photos, which is going to take a while. As far as the *arr stack, I was able to re-use a lot of my original compose file.

With the Docker stuff up and functional, I needed to address the media streamer, Jellyfin. The tiny pc I got, a Beelink SEI with an AMD Ryzen 5 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD, was far and away faster than I expected it to be, especially with the sub $300 pricetag. About the only problem is, my instance can’t transcode the AV1 codec on the fly. Everything else, works swimmingly.

Next on my list is to fully build out Immich to replace google photos. Play a little bit more with Affine (my replacement for Obsidian) and work on putting together some more AI things to learn the technologies in use.

2025-03-07

Well, that didn’t work according to plan. I was supposed to start writing more and then this fell off the radar. I’ve never really been good at making things that improve me work regularly. I do enjoy writing, but I have so little time to do it. Maybe if I put it out in the world, I’d do better at trying to remember it.

Since the last time I was here I made a huge change to my everyday; a huge sea-change as it were. I made the switch from Android to iOS (apple). While this wasn’t a spur of the moment change, it does all feel so sudden.

As a frame of reference, I have been in the android ecosystem since 2013, I switched from Blackberry to the HTC One M7. I was very anti-apple, and everything it stood for, I couldn’t stand the concept of their “walled-garden” and loved the freedom provided by Android. I stuck with it, device to device replacing once every other year and eventually landed on first-party Android devices (Nexus and Pixel devices), and I was even more hooked. It really felt like the Android ecosystem was following what the users wanted.

After the Pixel 3, I started having complaints about the device that I couldn’t dismiss… Battery life is terrible, I frequently have to restart, call quality is garbage, et cetera. It finally got to a point when a call was delivered to my phone, should have triggered the preferred Caller ID ring rule and turn my device in to an alarm clock for the neighbors. It continued to be silent, for multiple calls. Suddenly every gripe I had with Android in general took center stage and it was now unforgivable. I needed to change, and since my infatuation with first-party devices was something I wasn’t going to compromise on, it meant I had 2 choices. Get the newest Android, or switch sides.

I killed all the suspense, I switched sides. I tried to get in to it slowly, first replace the phone and then work on peripherals, but once I set foot in the “walled-garden” it became really tough to bring my old toys with me. The Fossil watch (Android Wear 3, another gripe for another time), The Pixel Buds, and then the unlikely change, chargers.

First, the phone. I didn’t need latest-greatest but did need capable. So previous generation’s pro model, satisfied initial requirements; One handed operation, USB-C, Wireless Charging. I didn’t, really, care about the AI capabilities, or any of the other bells and whistles. It needed to be a phone first. For a 12 year Android veteran, there was a lot to get used to. Ultimately the features I use were all there, and I was able to transfer quite a bit of data** and applications over to the device pretty simply, it just took more time than I thought it would.

After about 2 weeks I started running in to integration issues. My watch would show notifications, but clearing them on the watch didn’t clear them on the phone. So it was the next thing to go. Once I received the Apple Watch, that part of the puzzle just fit together. Everything synched up properly and the Apple device is exponentially lighter. Still not completely happy with the face results but there’s only so much tinkering I am going to do.

Some time after the watch, I ran in to some issues where integrations with the Pixel Buds wasn’t working as intended. At the moment I can’t fully recall but it was just the better answer to get the AirPods. This particular choice didn’t really yield a clear benefit** other than it just works with the phone, and the watch.

Then it came time to look at everything else I do, and the tablet came up. 1st party Android tablets have been lackluster at best in my opinion, but the iPad has a lot of momentum holding on to user base and development. Which means it should be worth the purchase, I was able to trial it risk-free, and came to enjoy** the intermediary between my phone and laptop.

It’s not all a success story though: While the core functionality has been there and so far I have not had any dropped calls, or poor call quality. Messaging has been on point, Apple adopted RCS to talk better with the Android pool, and I got to experience the silly blue bubbles. iMessage has some really great features, but not game changing. There are some things that Apple just falls flat on.

While I was able to transfer data, the device did it wirelessly rather than over the provided Type-C cable, I feel like over the cable would have been a significantly faster experience, this was a terrible first impression.

Alarms (as in alarm clock) are far and away better in Android. If I wake up before they are set to go off, I can dismiss them from a pending notification. There’s also a ‘vacation mode’ in Android, I can set a date range to dismiss scheduled alarms. These show quickly that there is still some development in Android that comes from the users.

Notifications. Apple does them terribly, especially overnight notifications. You get 2 sets of notification stacks. Current and past. I don’t know the criteria for how a current becomes past, but the single most irritating thing is in the morning on first unlock of the phone it plays all the pending notifications as if they’re all new right now, and will not step through them until you acknowledge each one. Thankfully it groups them by application, so email is a single dismiss, same with messages, but it’s the quickest way to make me disregard everything and miss crucial information.

Touching on Messages, there is no way comparable to Android to use messaging from a non Apple device. I’ve been hugely spoiled by Google Messages, if I am sitting at a known computer I can pull up the web app and continue conversations as if I had my phone in my hand. There’s no way to do this. There were suggestions to use the “Phone Link” app in Windows, it’s terrible for messaging, Intel’s Unison app, also terrible for messaging. There’s simply no analog for Google Messages.

Gestures in the OS are touchy and not as intuitive as they could be. Want to dismiss a bunch of notifications quickly, don’t forget to pause before you swipe or you’re gonna open the camera. Want the notification pulldown or the control panel pulldown if you’re off by a couple pixels, you’re going to get the wrong one. Accidentally pulled up search? You’re gonna swipe every cardinal direction and maybe get out of it. I’m sure a lot of these are just part of the learning curve and in six months I won’t even think twice about them, but they’re frustrating now.

Stepping to the headphones; I moved from the Pixel Buds 2 to the Air Pods pro 2. Not really a 1:1 comparison, but the ANC on the Air Pods is flat amazing. Touch control, however, is cumbersome and terrible comparatively. There was a recently added nod gesture that allows you to answer yes/no silently without touching the devices and its pretty damn cool. I will also note (not that I had a chance to experience this in Android) headphone switching between iPhone and iPad seamless. Switching to a 3rd party device, painful. It’s been my understanding that the Pixel buds do connectivity really well. Moving from my phone to a 3rd party device was simple, phone would only pull rank if a phone call came in.

When it comes to iPad there were a couple of nitpicks. iOS has a battery widget that allows you to see connected device battery percentage. Useful to be able to check my headphone battery without pulling them out of my pocket. Same for the iPad being able to tell me the charge on the pencil. But why oh why can’t I see my iPad’s battery level from my phone?! They can both see my headphones, seems to me like it would be a pretty simple thing to do.

Lastly, the iPhone screen, specifically the glass. Apparently if you make scratch resistant glass it’s easy to break, but if you make break-resistant glass it’s easy to scratch. Apple themselves suggest putting a screen protector on the device to mitigate the scratches. My immediate thought? Just ship it with one…

All in all, the switch has been not entirely bad, but also not entirely good. I do really enjoy being in the market-share majority in the United States, cause it means the accessories are plentiful, I’ve purchased some Magsafe stuff, and combined chargers that can handle Phone, Watch and Headphones off one cable. Since it’s type-c I haven’t really had to change anything else. I would really like to see some better support from Windows devices.

Shall not be infringed

I’ll try to keep this as sane as possible; it’s difficult with some of the arguments being thrown around. Let’s first set the stage, I am pro-gun. All the firearms I own are legal. I have a license to carry a firearm in the state of Texas. I exercise that right a lot. None of the firearms that I own have been used to harm another human being and to be clear, I hope that I am never put in to a situation where that would change. I try to make it to the range on a regular basis to maintain a level of proficiency with the firearms that I own.

There is a narrative across media outlets that is hell-bent to demonize anyone like me. Every time some of these people get screen time they revive tired old arguments that, despite any and all previous disproval or rebuttal, they claim goes unanswered. So; let’s put things back in to context.

The term Assault Rifle:

Defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as; military firearm that is chambered for ammunition of reduced size or propellant charge and that has the capacity to switch between semiautomatic and fully automatic fire. Because they are light and portable yet still able to deliver a high volume of fire with reasonable accuracy at modern combat ranges of 1,000 – 1,600 feet (300-500 metres), assault rifles have replaced the high-powered bolt-action and semiautomatic rifles of the World War II era as the standard infantry weapon of modern armies.
Defined by Mirriam-Webster as; any of various intermediate-range, magazine-fed military rifles (such as the AK-47) that can be set for automatic or semiautomatic fire; also: a rifle that resembles a military assault rifle but is designed to allow only semiautomatic fire.
Defined by Google as; a rapid-fire, magazine-fed automatic rifle designed for infantry use.

That’s interesting, isn’t it? Mirriam-Webster is the only one that defines a rifle that looks like a military assault rifle as an assault rifle. In fact, looking through weapon classifications through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) there is no actual designation of an Assault Rifle except as it pertains to the proper name of specific firearms (AK-47, MP-43, MP-44 and STG-44) Everything else refers to what is defined above as a “Machine-Gun” or “Machine Pistol”. Funny how the governing body doesn’t use the term Assault anywhere in regulations.

This raises 2 important questions;

First, who brought the term Assault-Rifle in to the narrative? We harken all the way back to World War II where Nazi Germany coined the term Sturmgewehr (loose translation Storm Rifle, or Assault Rifle). A more apt term to consider is ‘Assault Weapon’ which has been narrowed down to pretty much any semi-automatic weapon that looks like it could be military issue.

Second, why is a dictionary allowed to push political agenda? It’s been my understanding that Mirriam-Webster is a de-facto standard for word definition, and now they’re attempting to alter the meaning of a word (or two in conjunction in this case) in accordance with social and political landscape. I don’t know about you, but I think that should put Mirriam-Webster in the same league as Wikipedia. Still mostly valid, but cross reference with another source.

Gun-Crime vs Violent-Crime

There is a willful disconnect between Gun-crime and Violent-crime when the statistics start flying. There are always claims that after a ban on guns goes in to effect, gun-crime goes down. Nobody likes talking about violent crime. In fact if you compare the two, the only thing that changes after a ban goes in to effect is the weapon of choice. The reality is usually somewhere in the middle, while I will concede that having a gun someone determined to cause a lot of damage has less hindering them if they have a gun, but far more devastating atrocities have been achieved without guns.

It’s easier to buy a gun than a …

This is where things get funny. To legally obtain a firearm, one must fill out an ATF Form 4473, and pass an FBI Background check. It’s neither quick nor is it easy. Not to say that the 4473 is equivalent to the SAT, but it is comprehensive and falsifying information on the form is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and/or up to a $250,000 fine. I frequently ask anyone who thinks purchasing a firearm is as easy as getting a coke to actually take a look at the 4473 form.

A gun’s only purpose is to kill human beings

Well, no, and in the same vein, yes. There are some gun’s whose sole purpose is to be accurate for target shooting. But that’s an outlier. Of course, we’re talking about the AR-15, and similar rifles. You’re right, it’s primary function is to kill human beings. Unless you’re hunting small game, it’s not a great choice. But the ownership of said rifle is usually not for hunting, it’s for defense, be it from a home invader or some other threat to one’s liberties.

After only scratching the surface that’s all that’s there it’s an argument between the two sides. Since this is the United States, there must be two sides, and we must be polarized against each other to maintain our way of life. Look the only way to truly put the whole thing to bed is stop the mud-slinging, and have an adult conversation about all the contributing factors. Some takeaways from the narrative to consider; Most people want less murder (on both sides), most want to keep guns out of the hands of those who wish to commit evil. Lastly there is not nearly enough education about firearms in the world today. I don’t even pretend to have all the answers, I just know that we’re trying to achieve the same goal, maybe we should work together.

So preoccupied with whether they could..

I will be completely frank here, AI is a terrifying thing. Sure, some of the more harmless implementations are cool, but if you look down the road AI is on, you’ll surely see the problems. It’s great to conceptualize and implement an app on your phone that will automate tedious phone calls (See Google Duplex). But considering what else is emerging in technology it’s not hard to imagine what the future will bring. I want to believe that everything will be used solely for the benefit of all humanity, but I realistically know that’s not going to be the case.

So, let’s paint the landscape. AI can be classified in one of two buckets; Narrow, and General. Narrow can be defined as a machine (or computer) producing human-like results or decisions in a small subset of tasks (e.g. image recognition). General can be defined as a machine (or computer) producing human-like results or decisions in a greater set of tasks (e.g. autonomous interaction with the world). To be clear most of the implications of AI that make it to the news are narrow. Some examples; would be Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana, these applications are good at listening to your voice and returning results that you are asking for.

By in large Narrow AI is mostly benign, until of course you start applying it to teach General AI. Some other terms thrown around when talking about AI are Machine and Deep Learning. Both terms are essentially a method to teach machines or computers how to make decisions on their own. A third term that pops up is Big Data which is just an extremely large data set. Developers and companies will use Big Data to teach Narrow AI. You’ve probably seen the captcha images that ask you to select the portions of the image that have a specific object in it, these are usually used for machine learning to teach a Narrow AI. If you feed a trillion images to a fledgling AI that do or do not have a cat in them, eventually the AI will be able to recognize any picture’s feline content.

Tin-Foil-Hat Warning.

Now, the scary part; We’ve been made comfortable with the fact that we’re identifying roads for self-driving vehicles, but what we haven’t even thought of is all the surveillance data collected by the NSA. This is largely our behavioral information, and since it was collected in a method we would think of as unethical, it’s not a stretch to think that the data will be used in an unethical manner as well.

Then you’ve got the big names collecting an absurd amount of information on people. Facebook, Google, Amazon etc. These companies are using that data to build AI. Unfortunately, these companies are in business to make money and fiscal partnerships are bound to happen. The prompting of this particular post is just one of those partnerships; a partnership with Google and the Department of Defense (Project Maven). The idea is to assist our unmanned drones better identify their targets. What nobody is saying out loud is this is attaching an amount of fire power to AI.

Let’s move on to the truly terrifying; AI doesn’t have the conscience of a traditional human and will follow orders given to it so long as it is adhering to programming. Meaning that an AI will act on instructions that a soldier simply will not. Coupled with the people in control of the instructions may or may not have the best intentions in mind. With both sides of the political argument throwing around collusion with an outside source, and some notable people of power having their data / information leaked or taken over. The technology is cool, and I’m curious to see what we can achieve with it. The problem is, of course, who’s driving it?

Know the Content

The landscape of the world today is vastly different from when I was growing up. Having a viewport to the internet in your pocket has changed the game. In my adolescent years the internet hadn’t really come of age, and for those that would argue, it’s access wasn’t nearly as ambiguous as it is now. Technology in general is a requirement today, how to interface, operate, and fundamental concepts will dictate your personal and professional life.

With its prevalence we must do everything we can to make sure that our children have every advantage as they grow, which means introducing them to technology so that they can succeed in the world as we can only imagine it will be when they reach adulthood. Being an IT professional means that I have an affinity for technology. I used to say I am the purveyor of all things cool in the world of tech. I’d like to think that I still am, though there are some boundaries to what I can obtain which leads me to make more careful considerations on what I purchase.

Pulling back to the parenting theme; We as parents have a role in our child’s life that is more impactful that we can fathom. We are the ones responsible for the introduction of technology to our children, and with it the internet. As powerful as it can be I think a base level of understanding needs to be in place before ever setting a child loose on the internet. It can be a great learning opportunity, but it can also be the first step down a slippery slope or even downright dangerous.

Consider this; There are lots of things in the average home to drink. You’ve got water, milk, juice, alcohol, etc. Sure, you immediately dismiss alcohol as an option, but do you limit the amount of juice you give to your kid? Milk? Water? What if you give them Juice too often? It isn’t inherently bad, but have you seen a child deny water in favor of juice? This is curating the content that your child consumes. Basic interacting with the internet and technology is similar. There needs to be a balance in place so that basic skills and learning techniques are still present.

With that analogy in place just how much internet are you willing to just blindly hand over to your child? Let’s face it here, there’s some applications you can get for mobile that are educational, but they are the beginning of the avalanche. How long before the application becomes boring? Now on to Netflix, or YouTube, or any other of content delivery networks? While trying to understand how I should introduce technology into my son’s life, I had to take a few more steps back to appreciate where my understanding of it came from.

Largely technology and the ambiguity of the internet have lead many to take it for granted. It has become my realization that more and more people don’t understand where we came from. What did we do before the smartphone? What did we do before the internet was always on? I really think that missing out on physically reading a book, writing things down on paper, or interacting face-to-face with someone is incredibly detrimental to a developing child.

I think it’s tough to appreciate an always on fast internet connection without knowing what it’s like to have to tie up a phone line for it. It’s difficult to understand the pathways that have opened because we can transfer data across the globe in seconds rather than days. This is not to say that I will subject my son to a decade of internet at the painfully slow 56k (or worse). But I want him to know how to talk to people, how to read a book, and how to write. Additionally, I want him to be able to learn at will and not rely on an internet connection. If all goes according to plan the light I’ll have to tell him to turn off in the middle of the night will be a flashlight, not a smartphone or tablet.

What I am trying to convey here, is I want to give my son, at the very least, a Cliff’s Notes version of technology history before introducing him to all that the internet and technology has to offer, because I want him to understand how powerful of a tool it can be.