During my holiday break, I built a Stratum 1 NTP server in my home lab. Ordinarily, we get our time from internet-based NTP servers which usually Stratum 2 or 3. With Stratum 1, I can get significantly more accurate time directly from the Stratum 0 GPS satellites orbiting above me. On these satellites are atomic...

"Ignorance is bliss" usually has a negative connotation, a way to refer to someone who is ignorant on some topic that someone else has deemed very important (sometimes meant as an insult). In my view, ignorance can be a positive thing when it comes to most topics. It's not so much about a lack of information on a...

Other than looking cool to your friends, owning your own domain increases your digital self-reliance. It's kind of like having your own phone number. Just like switching cell phone carriers if you don't like your provider, you can easily switch registrars, hosting companies, or email provider and the world would be...

I have an NVMe base for my Raspberry Pi 5 and it's been running for a little over a year without any issues. A couple of months ago I switched to Almalinux and noticed that I could SSH into it right after it booted, but around 30-40 minutes after boot, I could ping from another host on my network but could no longer...

This is a follow up from something I wrote in 2020 titled The End of Ownership in a Digital Age where I discuss (ie complain) about what it means to "own" something in the modern digital age. I've recently experienced a kind of digital revocation of a purchase through Bandcamp - a company I've only had positive...

A few years ago I published a post about aliases, one of which I set up to allow me to SSH into a shared web server. Someone shared that post to Hacker News, so naturally the gaping flaws in my understanding of both aliases and SSH came to light. One piece of feedback I got was that my alias "sshchuck" was...

To be "terminally-online" is to be deeply engaged on social media, consuming YouTube creator-driven drama, or spending a significant amount of one's free time doing online activities. Personal interests are focused on some form of digital activities such as online communities, streaming, gaming, YouTube/podcasts,...

Like many, I've always romanticized the idea of traveling long-term, all while earning my living solely through my laptop and my phone. I've loosely experimented with this, traveling for periods from a week to three months while working to some degree. In my view, this kind of lifestyle is not sustainable (at least...

I've been thinking about how my digital consumption habits have changed over the last year. Lately, I've found myself consuming too many movies and shows and spending less time reading and writing. I wake up then turn on the TV while I sip coffee, something I never used to do. I've spent years intentionally creating...

A few years ago I read Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End) and I recently revisited it in audiobook format. The Dark Forest is my favorite in the trilogy because it touches on so many different ideas. The title of the book comes from the dark...

After hearing a lot of praise for Proxmox both online and in my courses (from both fellow students and instructors), I decided to experiment with it in my homelab environment. I also wanted to get hands on experience with it after hearing that many companies have been switching to Proxmox from VMware to cut costs,...

The storage drives connected to my servers are LUKS-encrypted which means every time the server restarts I need to manually decrypt and then mount them. This hasn't been much of an issue since I hardly ever had to reboot my servers, but lately I've been experimenting with virtualization and have had to deal with a...