Interests

the craft side of things. tolerances, failure modes, why the cheap part broke and the overbuilt one didn't. i like reading accident reports the way other people read mystery novels.

top rope and bouldering, mostly. top rope when there's a partner and a tall wall, and bouldering when there isn't. bouldering is just short, hard problems a few feet off a crash pad, no rope needed.

it's problem-solving you do with your whole body. you fall, you stare at the wall, you try a different sequence. very compatible with the engineering brain.

the rotation right now is rainbow six siege, war thunder, overwatch, brawlhalla, and some roblox. no, i will not elaborate on the roblox.

war thunder counts as aviation research and i will not be taking questions at this time.

anyone else procrastinate changing strings? just me? high E is broke on my les paul, which means i haven't been playing as much as i would like to. been using my acoustic a decent amount though.

other guitars i have are a prs se ce, a washburn 332, and a bc rich warlock bass. for amps it's a krank krankenstein+ or a marshall jcm900 into a 4x12 with g12-70s when i want it loud, and a roland jc120 when i want it clean. the jc120 is kind of a cheat code for that post-hardcore clean tone.

been seeing a lot of media on refurbished thinkpads, homelabbing, etc. looks cool. very tempted to grab an old thinkpad, refurbish it, and run an egpu setup into it with a 4060 or something of the likes. tempted to try linux as well.

update: not theoretical anymore, i've actually started. see laptop.dat and homelab.dat.

one thinkpad so far, an x220, and it's running libreboot now. flashed it myself with a raspberry pi clipped onto the flash chip, which is the most nervous i've been about a project in a while. it's still on kali and arch is deferred, since kali works and i've put enough config into it that replacing it isn't worth the disruption yet.

on the hardware side, the ram stick i bought turned out to be dead on arrival, so that's going back and 16gb is waiting on the replacement. a wifi card with bluetooth, a new display, and the usb-c charging mod are all maybes depending on cost. the x220 is old enough that every one of these is its own little rabbit hole, which i honestly kind of like.

this one stopped being an interest and turned into infrastructure i actually live on. an hp 280 g1 i pulled out of an office, running debian and about ten containers, doing pi-hole, jellyfin, immich, nextcloud, a minecraft server, and uptime kuma keeping an eye on all of it. tailscale ties it together, so i can reach any of it from anywhere without opening the box up to the internet.

i built my own router too, though not the way i planned it. instead of a minipc with openwrt it's an r7000 nighthawk my dad gave me, flashed off netgear's firmware onto freshtomato, since the r7000 is broadcom and openwrt can't properly drive broadcom wireless. all of this is to maximize security, increase privacy, and mostly just let me have control over my own digital utilities instead of renting them. build log in notes.

looking to break more into electronics work and refine my soldering ability. want to revisit some old projects too, like an old marantz turntable i need to fix (it needs a soldering job).

got inspired after a trip to microcenter and seeing all the cool soldering and electronics parts, breadboards and all the components and everything. walked in for one thing and left wanting to build stuff.

got a canon ae-1 for my birthday. something funny about being 19 now and already shooting a camera from the 70s... already messed up one roll of iso 400, and it's probably septuple exposed at this point. but it's finally working and i'm excited to start taking pictures.

mostly focused on architecture and building stills, maybe some nature too, as opposed to people photography or anything like that. and i want to break into double exposure art at some point (on purpose next time).

finished reading the climber and i loved it. now reading berserk, i'm roughly 260-270 chapters in and also loving it. guts is such a tragic character and the story is so brutal. it's amazing how someone can write something so devastating and pair it with such beautiful art.

(the heavy borders and screentones on this site are not a coincidence.)