2026-01-20                             dispatches from helix
   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

   I spent last night tinkering with computers for very little
   reason. It was fun!

   This was hardware-level tinkering, closer to IT than
   anything else. I've set up my Chromebook's motherboard on a
   stand (that I designed and made) and I'm trying to get
   various PCIe cards to work with it, to little success. And,
   like, I don't need this for anything. I just thought it
   would be funny to have increasingly ridiculous cards working
   on this Chromebook, like how Jeff Geerling does similar on
   the Raspberry Pi.

   I've actually got a bunch of stuff coming in the mail over
   the next few weeks for "IT" -- 4TiB SAS drives, some SAS
   adaptors, a new network switch, cheap NVMe disks. All of it
   is second-hand so I can feel a little better about being
   consumerist -- and strictly none of it is things that I
   need. They are actual toys, dressed up as productive
   computing. I am 100% fine with this, though, at least for
   right now.

   It's been hard to capture the spark of enjoying computing
   that used to come very easily to me. As programming gets
   hemmed in by various AI and extractive-capitalism concerns,
   the physical side of computing is mostly left alone from
   this. A tidy and well run homelab rack is like my little
   indoor garden of metal and silicon.

   AI is getting shoveled into various bits of homelab
   software, which I don't love, but I am also happy to build
   little things with Claude Code to scratch my personal itch.
   So, maybe I am hypocritical? I just don't feel the desire to
   release them. Similar to something that I read recently
   about LLM-generated PRs -- if the person receiving the PR
   could just have generated the same code with the same
   prompting, it'd be more efficient to share that, instead.

   I have a low-poly horse burned onto some maple sitting on my
   desk. Someone who enjoyed pyrography made it and sold it at
   a craft fair. My wife, who enjoys crafting but happens to
   use more automated things like a laser cutter, was talking
   to the woman about how she could do it with a laser cutter
   and the woman made a kind of face. I mean, with some
   perspective, it's obvious: she doesn't want to automate her
   hobby away, burning it by hand with a soldering iron is the
   whole point.

   I feel like that with a homelab. For some people it's
   training for their real IT/DevOps roles, and the tools that
   we often use are biased towards efficiency, like a laser
   cutter. But for me, doing things by hand is the point. Like
   the soldering iron.