Media - Page 19 | virtualwolf.org

Looks we're finally at the point where the roads are all in and the land's been divided up, and it's just waiting for houses now.

schofields darkroom construction

Posted on 13 February 2025, 15:15

The "middle chaos" photo of our home office: there is a standing desk pulled entirely out from the wall, four ethernet cables running from the wall into the router that's sitting under the standing desk, plus a bunch of cables and external hard disks, a Mac mini, and a vacuum cleaner in the middle of the room, as well as a printer sitting on the chair. Beside the standing desk is a bookshelf with the bottom two shelves empty where the printer, Mac mini, and external hard disks live.

The finished glorious neatness: the standing desk is back against the wall, the printer, Mac mini, hard disks, and router are neatly back on the bookshelf, and the big power board has all its power plugs neatly labelled. Four of the cables (the three hard disks and the Raspberry Pi) are actually fed into a cable organiser that takes them up behind the bookshelf, and the four ethernet cables are neatly tied together. The only slightly messy bit are the four power cables coming down from the standing desk into a second powerboard, but even they're mostly tied together.

We had the electrician in yesterday to run a bunch of new ethernet cable for our new network setup with the additional wifi access points. Yesterday evening after dinner we went out and bought two big 12-port Arlec powerboards with two USB-A and two USB-C ports in them to neaten up the lounge room power setup, and the office too because I was going to move the router there but we'd run out of ports on the existing boards. I spent the rest of yesterday evening after we got home doing the lounge room, at lunch today I wall-mounted and tidied up the access point in the back room, and then this evening pulled EVERYTHING in the office apart and redid it all.

Witness the absolute chaos of the middle of it, and then the glorious neatness afterwards, I even labelled all of the power cables to indicate what they're for!

our house darkroom nerd shit tidying and rearranging

Posted on 12 February 2025, 22:41

A photo looking out of our sliding door onto the patio and into the backyard. The water has come up above the level of the grass in approximately half the lawn area, and it's only slightly less than that on the side of the patio closest to the house.

Bloody hell, the rain is so heavy our backyard has flooded. I've seen it occasionally happen before but not to this extent.

our house darkroom storm

Posted on 10 February 2025, 12:09

A screenshot from the end of the pilot episode of Dark Angel, showing Jessica Alba's character standing on top of the Seattle Space Needle. The camera is at a low angle so it's looking up heroically at her, the moon is directly behind her and looking quite yellow, and you can tell it's post-apocalypse because the top of the Space Needle is run-down and there's graffiti on it.

Despite it airing from 2000-2002, I have only just now finished the final episode of Dark Angel!

I've had it on DVD for MANY years now and definitely recall watching at least most of the first season more than once, but for some reason I got distracted or something and never got all the way through it, and hadn't ever started Season 2. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and of course I'm a sucker for any show with an arse-kicking woman as the main character (hello Buffy!). I'm sad there were only two seasons and that it was cancelled, I was reading the Wikipedia entry for it and realised that it's yet another show in the very long tally of "Shows cancelled by Fox", ugh.

Prior to starting Dark Angel, I'd been watching Van Helsing on Netflix, and while the concept is cool (vampires are real, the volcano under Yellowstone erupts and clouds block the sun out so the vampires can multiply and walk freely outside, and humanity is basically enslaved by them), fuck it was a drag... just everyone always doing awful things to each other rather than anything positive. I made it a couple of episodes into Season 2 before I had to bail, and from what I've read The Walking Dead is cut from the same cloth. Really not my cup of tea tbh.

screenshot dark angel

Posted on 8 February 2025, 16:43

A photo of a round white UFO-looking UniFi access point mounted on the wall, with an ethernet cable coming out of the bottom of it. There's a blue circle of LED in the middle, looking all cool and futuristic (he says as the table is moved in front of that piece of wall so you can't actually even see the thing is there anyway).

An absolute mess of mostly ethernet cables, plus a power cable, an RCA cable, and a small white D-Link switch sitting on the floor, looking very rat-nesty.

Well, the one for the lounge room was easy because there's already a cable coming straight from the Dream Router to where I wanted to mount the new access point anyway. And with being able to move everything to wireless because there's now a properly solid signal here, and moving the Raspberry Pi directly behind the TV because the only thing it needs to plug into is power and the amplifier, I've been able to clean out a whole rat's nest of cables.

This Power-over-Ethernet thing is pretty sweet, isn't it?

our house darkroom nerd shit

Posted on 4 February 2025, 21:45

A photo of two round white UFO-looking access points sitting on a table. There's nothing for scale but Ubiquiti's tech specs page says they're 16cm across.

I bought a couple of shiny new Ubiquiti U6+ access points because it turns out our wifi is not super-great particularly in the back room, and completely missed the fact that they're powered by power-over-ethernet ONLY, with no actual other way of getting power into them. Oops.

(Fortunately our Dream Router has two ports that can do PoE, but it'll require some rejiggering of the network at the front of the house, plus we'll have to get a sparky out to run some ethernet cable for the back room.)

our house darkroom new toys nerd shit

Posted on 4 February 2025, 16:26

A photo of five people sitting around a somewhat messy music area in our office. The drum kit is empty because I was on it but stepped back to take the photo, but we have someone on bass guitar, two guitarists, a keyboardist, and a vocalist.

In the office again for the first after-work music jam of the new year! As well as the guitar/bass/drums/keyboard, there's a little Korg synth of some description and one of the people had great fun playing around with that despite not actually knowing how to really use it. At one point I ended up just starting a simple little progression on the bass guitar and then everyone else joined in along the same lines and it sounded so good! Completely improvised but we all got into the groove and it was hella satisfying.

Then at the end we played Black Sabbath's Paranoid and oh man such a good song but I was on drums at that point and it absolutely did my arm in, haha.

darkroom friends in the office jamming

Posted on 30 January 2025, 20:44

A screenshot of the temperature graphs from our sensor at home showing it going from 45˚C at 15:53 down to 33˚C now at 16:13 (and it's still dropping even as I type this description).

Well, the southerly has certainly arrived with a vengeance.

our house screenshot weather grafana

Posted on 28 January 2025, 16:12

A photo of our little temperature dashboard display showing that it's 45.1˚C outside right now. (Inside it's a wonderfully comfortable 24.4˚C.)

NO THANK YOU.

our house darkroom too fucking hot

Posted on 28 January 2025, 15:51

A photo of the box of my iPad Pro. The box itself is white with an image of a black iPad Pro on it, and on the screen is some abstract art, mostly black, with a set of lines that kind of give the impression of something having been vacuum moulded underneath it.

Upgraded to the new 11" iPad Pro tonight, 6 years from my 2018 one is a good run! I had unfortunately dropped the old one a couple of months ago and cracked the glass, and it's since spread and is now registering phantom touches. I also likely would have been upgrading later this year anyway since the old one was getting rather long in the tooth (and I've had to have the "automatically remove unused apps" on for a good two-plus years now because I had very much run out of storage space), this just pushed the timeframe up a bit.

The new Magic Keyboard is MUCH more solid feeling than the old one (and there's an Escape key! 🎉), but the first order of business is disabling all the bloody Apple Intelligence rubbish now that I have an iPad that can actually run it.

our house darkroom new toys ipad pro

Posted on 23 January 2025, 21:58