Mastodon

Random Musings

Category: Personal

  • First Float Tank Experience

    For over 30 years (could actually be closer to 50 years!), I’ve had a tremendous interest in trying a floatation tank. In the old days, it was called a sensory deprivation tank, but everything is more sophisticated nowadays and deserves an upgraded moniker. Way back then, it was (probably) harder to find a […]

  • Cloning an ancient laptop to new hardware requires care

    Astute readers of the headline will realize that I failed to do that… There was a happy ending though (thankfully). The past few posts have had TL;DRs up front. This time is will be at the end, so if you don’t want to follow this saga (and who could blame you!), just skip […]

  • Wireguard, ZeroTier, ControlD and NextDNS

    This will be another soul-crushing length and techie laden post, so it definitely deserves a TL;DR to let most of you off the hook early. TL;DR When using two or more services, each of which is awesome on their own, sometimes, the interactions between them are unexpected and can cause headaches (followed by […]

  • Trigger pulled on new PC, a UM790 Pro from Minisforum

    Even shorter than a TL;DR, you can tell what machine I bought right in the title above. But, do I like it? Perhaps that deserves a TL;DR so you don’t fall asleep reading the rest of the post… TL;DR I absolutely love this mini-PC. It’s the UM790 Pro from Minisforum. I bought it […]

  • Contmeplating a new PC

    My current laptop is 9+ years old. It’s still going very strong (which is crazy), but every once in a while exhibits a potential issue (which I’ve been able to fully mitigate or correct so far). I’ve been researching, thinking and planning for what I’d replace it with for well over 6 months […]

  • Matrix, Dendrite and Element

    A more accurate headline would have been Matrix.org, Dendrite and Element.io. Even though I had intended to (and continue to intend to) blog regularly, for a number of reasons, I ended up not blogging in March at all. Don’t cry for me, it was a very good month in every other way, but […]

  • Converting Windows VM from VirtualBox to virt-manager

    This is going to be my typical long, rambling post. I might have a TL;DR section way at the bottom with bullet points that eventually worked for me, but who knows. If you don’t care about deep techie stuff, definitely just skip this post (trust me…). I recently blogged about VirtualBox and virt-manager […]

  • Welcome Me to Mastadon

    I mentioned in this post that my Twitter addiction had been broken. It still has. From the time of the great migration from Twitter to Mastodon, I had little interest in joining Mastodon. That’s ironic, because for many years, Mastodon has been on my to-do list of things to check out. My real […]

  • In Praise of the Intel Celeron N5105

    I mentioned a few times that I am in the midst of numerous technology projects. Many are interrelated and involve running virtual machines (VMs). In my post about Proxmox vs virt-manager I never mentioned the hardware that I’m currently using for some of these projects. In the past, 100% of my VM work […]

  • Acer Aspire 5 A515-43-R19L Journey

    Two posts ago I mentioned that our goddaughter donated three older laptops for me to find good homes for. In that post, I had already found a good home for the better two of them (the very next day). The third laptop was the one in the title of this post, an Acer […]