Stupid Little Cups

I collect stupid little cups. These are sometimes called ‘toothpick holders’ or ‘shot glasses’ but I call them stupid little cups. The primary reason I collect stupid little cups is the following.

  1. They are cheap, so I can buy several on a trip and not feel bad about it
  2. They are smaller than coffee cups
  3. They are generally uniform in scale, which means they are easy to display

However, there are not a lot of great options for stupid little cup display settings, because not many people apparently recognize the values I outlined above.

so I took this as a learning opportunity within fusion to design my own modular and stackable stupid little cup holder. The benefit of this design is it’s simple to print, each cubby takes about 1 hour to print. I have LED strips coming from Aliexpress to light the individual cubby, which is why there is a hole at the top.

I had considered building this out of wood, however I discovered the cost of the wood at Home Depot for the dimensions I need (without a table saw) would be $120 for the wood alone and I decided that was much too much for stupid little cups as they serve no practical purpose whatsoever.

Eventually, I would like to swap out the controller from Aliexpress with an arduino and custom code to light up specific glasses at a time, selectable from a menu. For example you might want to illuminate only the shot glasses from the states, for example.

300 Gallon Tank: Reflection

“Get the largest tank you can, it will be easier to stop bad things from happening” is sound enough logic, and realistically true. It’s easy to see videos and photos of these completely gorgeous large reef tanks, with beautiful fish, huge coral colonies and everything looks amazing and so perfect.

My experience was not completely unlike that for about a month or two. I bought a 300 gallon tank off of craigslist for $300 in 2014. I had a fantastic family friend build me a iron stand, because the unique shape of the tank meant plywood wouldn’t be an option. I got inexpensive LED lights that said they could grow coral. It was going to be amazing. I went to my local fish store and bought a frag or two. I brought them home and things looked like they were going great for a good long while. My son was born a bit after the tank was put up, which meant I quickly fell behind on water changes. Soon I’d be overrun with one or more types of nuisance algae. For months at a time the tank looked absolutely terrible, I hated it. I thought “I need to get this out of my house. Nobody would every buy it like this, I need to clean it.”

So I’d spend a week or two fully dedicating myself to the tank. It would look great and I’d think “…I should buy a fish!”

I would slowly start to ignore the tank and rinse and repeat for at least 3 years. Not a great saltwater experience. One of the issues I quickly realized, large tanks are very expensive. Heck small saltwater tanks are expensive. If I was going to do the standard 20% water change every other week or so that would come out to $13 a week or $335 a year in salt. That is an amazing cost for just keeping the tank pristine, and considering my water change system was two 20 gallon trash cans, I’d need to be preforming a water change every 5 days to keep that up. That’s a lot of water changing time and money.

I guess ultimately I knew what I was getting into with the large tank, but I hadn’t really thought it out to have the “huh, do I have $300 a year to spend on salt?”

I was not a good fishkeeper, my fish were ignored and forgotten. I did not want to kill them, and I would actively try to keep them alive but if there was a huge failure I’d be pretty okay with that and be able to say “well, I guess that some things just happen isn’t that sad.”

One day at work I got an alert that the temperature in the tank was higher than it should have been. I ducked out of work and found the return pump had failed, and so I had a choice. Do I let the tank die, go get a new pump for this big tank I didn’t want to the tune of $200ish, or quickly and unexpectedly tear down the big tank and move them into a smaller tank. I got an old 20 gallon tank out of the garage and got to work.

This is probably the single worst photo I’ve ever taken and kept of the tank. This is the last day it was full of water, still covered in hair algae and looking bad.

33 Gallon Peninsula

This post is originally from August, 2019

With the 300 gallon tank down and out the fish were swimming in a 20 gallon long tank from 1997. This tank had been around the block with some scratches and some discoloration on the glass. I was eyeing a different tank and I was looking for something that would fill the space on the ledge while still allowing me to get into the tank to do work. The ledge is a hair over 48 inches of usable tank space, with about an inch against the wall available. This meant I had to get something smaller or find some way to have an internal filter.

I ended up looking at a 33 gallon long. This is not a new super fancy rimless aquarium so it was pretty economical compared to the super minimalist aquariums displayed as centerpieces but that’s okay. The dimensions are perfect for the ledge, 48 inches long, 12 inches across and 13 inches tall. This allows plenty of overhead room to get into the tank. It’s exactly the same footprint as a 55 gallon, except a bit shorter.

I found FIJI aquatics and their boxes, I’m using that as the internal sump and I will say that it’s a very good looking black box and almost exactly what I was hoping for. Admittedly, if I was better at DIY stuff I’d be able to build a similar box but this just went right into the tank as is.

Grafana

This post is originally from August, 2020

Grafana is one of those things that I had tried it out at least ten times. I would install a docker, follow a guide and when it wouldn’t work immediately I promptly gave up.

Until I didn’t. During the pandemic, I spent a solid weekend ignoring my family and configuring Prometheus and Grafana, lots of trial and error and lots of do overs later, I have something that I’m pretty pleased with. Using a reverse proxy through my Synology, I have it set to Grafana.Digilan.org but you can’t get there unless you’re on the network. Which given the audience of this blog, there’s actually a fair chance you are.

This dashboard went through at least a dozen changes, after learning about variables I created a separate dashboard for the remote sites once I realized not everything would fit on one page anyway. This page captures just about everything important on my network at this point, though I did see another guy using Home Assistant to capture information from homekit. That would be sort of fun to put on there.

Rose – ATO Aquarium Lights

This post is from January 2020, apparently I forgot about it and left it in draftsville.

I have a love / hate relationship with my drop ceiling in my basement. On one hand, it’s allowed more than one squirrel somewhere to live for a few days. On the other hand, it’s made routing wires and hoses through my ceiling possible and downright easy.

I was able to route the wires for the AI Prime 16HD’s through the ceiling and into the server room where the apex Neptune is. These lights are unique compared to the older generation because they are Bluetooth only and not wifi. From a security perspective that’s great because that means you need to be near the tank to turn the lights on or off, and let’s be realistic I have no need to change the color of the aquarium when I’m at work and after setting the tank on the schedule, I’ll never change it but I can still show off the lights qualities with the app.

This also means I don’t need to think about VLANS and put lights onto the Jarvis VLAN with the rest of the IoT things. Ultimately that’s a very good thing but admittedly a little bit of a letdown for no good reason at all.

Ultimately I’m very happy with the new lights, they should consume a little bit less power and in a house that has a server rack burning through 300w it’s good to cut corners where I can.

Carol Home Network

My sister bought a house, so I decided to help with some overkill networking. I wired my home when I bought it with some help, and I’ve since run a cable here or there at home, mostly around the basement.

The shopping list was as such –

  • 2,000 feet of cat6 cable
  • Ubiquiti Edgerouter
  • Ubiquiti Unifi 24 port switch
  • 2 unifi AP-lite
  • patch panel
  • 8U wall rack
  • Synology disk station

what honestly made the project possible for an novice like myself is their sub-basement. I called it the Demon Hole when I saw it, but it’s been since renamed “The Mosh Pit” by the people who actually live there, which is fine. I guess. This is an unfinished area under about half of the house that allowed us to run all of cables to this location, and then over to where the network rack went. We ended up using a LOT more cable than expected, but we were able to get the job done with all of the wires.

In typical fashion, I did not take a lot of photos of the project while we were working on it. It took two 12 hour days with two of us working on this – climbing into attics, other attics, and spending a lot of time on our hands and knees in the mosh pit.

The other thing that was helpful, the previous owners had run a single cat5 cable to their kitchen, where they decided to put the cable modem. We used that to run a string through the wall, which then ran our first cables.

This was after we ran about half of the cables. Using hooks and zip ties, I suspended them from the ceiling so they weren’t all just hanging down loosey goosey.

You’re going to need to put some holes in your walls, that’s a given. Using these handy dandy super cheap brackets from your local hardware store, you can screw in your mounting bracket to look like a professional did it.

I taught my sister how to punch down keystone jacks – she’s a natural and has a real future in low voltage electrical.

We ended up filling a lot more of the switch than I thought we would. Though a lot of these aren’t being used, they will be ready for the future.

One of the more fun and ridiculous aspects of this network I’ve built is the cloud key that the Ubiquiti devices at my sister tie into is at my house. The Synology has software updates and package updates controlled from my main synology featured in a different post.

Big House Network

We made some changes to the Big House network in October 2020. The wire colors are not as perfect as I’d like, but it works.

  • we ran two network cables around the house into the garage for an access point, and a potential camera down the road.
  • Added a third access point in the garage for better coverage on the east side of the house.
  • Added a UPS, to allow the network to stay up even if nobody is at the house.
  • swapped out Edge Router for Unifi USG.
  • Added Unifi Switches for complete visibility remotely from the app.
  • Configured Pi Hole for bandwidth saving
  • Added a IP Camera as a test to see if this is remotely viable to have a camera at the house usable.

Big House Game Room Update

The game room has always had the goal of being where consoles go to retire. The idea is that while an older console might sit at home unplayed for decades, it just might get used at the Big House for the novelty of playing the original Halo game on the original Xbox, in all of that 2001 glory.

The previous media cabinet was not designed for game consoles, and I’m not entirely sure what it was designed for since the doors on either side of it were not tall enough for a DVD case to stand so it’s not like you could have loaded it up with your DVD’s.

I found this laundry cabinet on Wayfair.com and decided it would be perfect for the setup. I wish it had more shelves, but perhaps I can add some down the line.

There is a 5 port HDMI switcher and a 3 port Component cable switcher. The Original Xbox, Wii and PlayStation 2 are going through the component switcher while the NES is being converted to HDMI. It’s not perfect but it works and it’s actually really satisfying to play Mario on the original Nintendo system like it was intended way back in 1990.

DigiLAN

This is a post about DigiLAN – our homelab run amuck into production.