-
Second of my recent painting spurt, this time Rebel Taun Tauns. Again, the painting color options were rather limited to just a starter set, so the details got a bit muddy. I was also going for less of a wintry design, with a basic concept that Taun Tauns might be transplanted to a non-Hoth world. The final colors worked well, I was happy with the beasts themselves, though the riders became a bit rough and one-tone. It isnt really noticeable unless you look closely, but apparently one of the Taun Taun’s arms came loose during the gluing, leaving the shoulders…
-
Been doing some painting with my son, assembling and applying some paint to various Star Wars Legion figures. This is made easy given our temporary freedom between homes, though my gear options are limited. At the start, we picked up a basic painting starter set for George, so that he could dive in and start the painting hobby himself. Then I decided to contribute as well, and my own model sets. First up is a Dewback, equipped with two stormtrooper options. The final trooper body is loose, so that they can be assembled a bit at the start of a…
-
Brief update on the house build – holes have been dug. The construction did apparently encounter some sort of soil concern, which required an additional review by the engineer and a bit deeper of a dig for the footing, but as of yesterday that has been cleared. As shown, the form of the basement is laid out, with the start of the foundation framing. In addition, the utility box which was incorrectly placed in the middle of our planned driveway has now been moved by the vendor, and is no longer a concern. Next step is the concrete pour for…
-
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about a new tool I had added to my network in order to actively block and eliminate adds. Pi-Hole in my case is running on an Ubuntu VM located on our FreeNAS media server, though it will likely eventually live on my 3d printer Raspberry Pi. However, as frequently as the advertising space seems to evolve, I wanted a way to automatically update the block lists, and stay current with the standard settings. Enter Cron, the job scheduler on Linux. The cronjob itself is trivial, just run the “pi-hole -up” command once a…
-
As planned, my upgrade of the FreeNAS media server was completed, successfully upgrading our 10 TB of storage to a new total of 48 TB. The data migration only ran about 12 hours, much shorter than I had feared, and overall the upgrade was fairly painless. In the process, I also upgraded to the latest version of FreeNAS (11.3-U4.1), and replaced the aging USB drive with small mirrored set of SSDs. To my surprise, this dramatically improved the boot up time of the system. Not that I am surprised about the speed of SSD drives, but I really had not…
-
For the past 4+ years, I have maintained a home server, running various versions of FreeNAS. This itself was a replacement for a cobbled together and informal version, until I opted to build a dedicated system, roughly 2015. Combined total, I managed to squeeze out about 15 TB of storage, using a variety of shucked drives and new drives – 4x 4 TB and 3x 3 TB in a pair of Raid-Z1 vdevs (two large volumes with a single failure drive for both sets). These drives, using Western Digital Red drives, have been very reliable. To date, I have not…
-
After many weeks, months (and years) waiting, the actual build of the new home has begun with the ground breaking. This was delayed from last week due to some apparent challenges with the utilities (who measured and placed the utility box in the middle of the future driveway). That hurdle was finally cleared, which allowed the digging to begin. In theory, we are still on track for a completion mid-October, but keeping the fingers crossed for no major further complications.
-
In preparation for the new home, and my plans to improve overall the new networking, I have implemented a virtual server running Pi-Hole. Functionally, Pi-Hole is a software tool that attempts to block all advertisements, similar to a web browser adblocker, except it can be used to block all traffic from all devices on the network. Thus it can also eliminate ads on Roku or cell phone devices, which typically can’t load adblockers. Functionally, this also removes adds from YouTube and similar platforms. In my case, I opted for a virtual machine running on my home FreeNAS server, but this…
Halfling13 Hobbies
Something about nothing – a collection of miscellaneous hobbies
14,228 visitors