I wrote before about backups. https://www.familie-kleinman.nl/brain/index.php/2025/04/12/backup-stories-what-was-needed-to-get-to-never-again/ . Backups are the last line of defense. If everything else fails, you fall back on them. But that raises the question: what’s the first line of defense, and what can you build in between? Having your data on multiple hard drives, in RAID, is such a defense. One…
Category: Computers
Hammer was shutdown suddenly
This morning I got downstairs, opened my laptop and checked out my Bluesky account. First symptom.. Bluesky loaded slowly, seemed DNS resolving was slow as well. Tried to access my DNS / PiHole instance. Unreachable…. I decided to check my new Uptime Kuma console to verify network issues. Huh, site unreachable too?! Tried to ping…
Bios Power Saving Settings
The numbers still surprise me. My second Proxmox host — an i5-12400 with P- and E-cores, 128 GB RAM — dropped from 55 W idle (default BIOS) to 22 W idle after just ten minutes of tweaking C-states and running powertop –auto-tune. That’s more than a 50% energy saving, with zero loss of functionality. And…
From Modest to Mayhem: Hammer is now a Sledgehammer!
From modest host to mad scientist build — Hammer is now running an i9 with 128GB RAM On July 20, 2025, I published this article titled ‘Servers’, where I walk through the home servers we’ve assembled over the years. In that article, I wrote that the ultimate upgrade for my Proxmox host would be an…
35 Years of CPU Mayhem!
When 16 MHz was enough… until my laptop showed up 20,000 times faster Here we are in 2025. i9s, fast Ryzen CPUs, Xeons with a gazillion cores — computers nowadays are fast beyond belief. But it all started somewhere! Intel kicked off the PC revolution with the 8088 CPU (add Wikipedia link later as a…
Blast from the past: My BBS, BRAiNDEAD
You might be thinking: Blast from the past? Braindead? BBS? What the hell is he talking about? It’s been almost exactly 30 years since my own Bulletin Board System (BBS) went online. I already had the hardware for a few months, and I was deep in the weeds configuring and customizing everything. This story is…
DrayTek: Built for Routing… Until You Actually Route Something
I had a perfectly working network at home. Just a simple router from my provider (Odido), a few port forwards, and everything ran smoothly. Then I rented a small office space to work from. Seemed logical to set up a site-to-site LAN connection — so I could access files from home while at the office,…
Optimization part #2
As you might (or might not) know, I’m the author of a tool called jSunnyReports. It’s a fairly dumb tool. It: Loads cache files Reads new and changed inverterdata Parses everything Writes JSON Writes HTML Saves the cache …and that’s it. It’s not elegant. Probably not even clean code by modern standards. But I did…
Saving the lifespan of an Intel 660p SSD
Our current server is over five years old. After several upgrades in the past couple of years, another ultimate upgrade is inbound. More on that later. This week, I got curious about the wear and tear on one of the most-used drives in this host: a 1TB Intel 660p QLC NVMe SSD. Five years ago,…