- RV Life (I have the t-shirt). I spent a few months tearing apart my RV and installing routers, switches, computers, wifi antennas, and other geek tech. It was/is super fun. I used a speaker (?!) that was on the outside of the RV as an exhaust fan. The end game goal was/is to start working from the road indefinitely. Had to pivot all my thinking to DC power which I much prefer anyway.
- I built a sacrificial raidz3 ZFS volume on an old NAS I had to see what would happen if spinning disks were exposed to the bumpy roads and other forces. To use non-spinning disks was simply not cost effective- not just because of the volume of data I have, but the cost of SSD not low enough to send magnetic disks into the past. Yet. Plus, SSD isn’t generally more reliable, it’s likely just more resistant to shock. I thought about how to go about this for a while and settled on these dense rubber squares aka “isolation pads” used for absorbing vibration from washing machines, compressors, etc. I mounted them on the bottom of the unit and went driving around looking for sink holes while it was on and doing stuff. I really thought this was just another stupid idea I had as this RV shakes and rumbles a lot while driving. (As of May 2025 no problems..yet?).
- I had a friend install a pretty industrial looking LTE/5G/Wifi6+ antenna on the top of the RV and I installed an UPS, some gig switches, and a router running OpenWRT. I wish I was a little ahead of the curve on eSIM’s but the device I purchased for the cellular side of things had one eSIM and one physical sim (I’d have loved to just use eSIM’s exclusively.) I’d have probably tried to hack it all together with a Pi but time wasn’t on my side. Physical SIM’s, no thanks. So that runs the network that chooses the strongest cellular signal or best bandwidth via various scripts other folks contributed, fails over during an outage of either carrier (tmo/vz/att). While at home in the driveway with this beast I ran an old TPlink router in repeater/bridged mode and just use that inside the house. Goodbye, cable. Some tests have resulted in getting at least 1Gbps/sec using this setup (moving) which is plenty fine by me. Now, when you’re in an Alfalfa field in Kearney, Nebraska..
- I’m back working mostly on LLM’s more as the heat of the Summer drives me back indoors, and this Summer is particularly hot, although I can’t seem to even scratch the itch of all of this incredible growth of AI in the media space.
- I’m also interested in using small edge models to take data inputs in with code and make inference based decision routing based on it’s training data. Maybe I just described an agent, that sort of thing I’m not too up on yet. I know some big AI people are talking about it like it’ll solve world hunger. That usually means it’s more hype than reality. For now.
- Civil War training. I don’t recall if I mentioned this elsewhere but I trained a model on several thousand (5k+ images) from the LOC (a WAN 2.1 LoRA to be specific). I need to get back to it but where I left off it was generating pretty “realistic” motion pictures of what the Civil War may have looked if say Brady was wandering around with an old black and white 16mm. This was a month before 2.2 came out so now a whole other thing. I do recall 2.2 is backwards compatible but with hi/low noise models there is much tuning to be done + distillation and etc.