IT & Computers ⁽⁶⁾

[this article is a work in progress] I'm a strong advocate for local hosting over cloud services provided by big tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM). I have no trust in these corporations, and some of their decisions pose significant threats to civil rights. For instance, Apple's move to scan all your photos for illegal content (initially). The importance of data sovereignty and the risk of surveillance are critical issues. Thus, to the best of my ability, I prefer to host everything myself. At home, everything…

Until around 2007 [0], I was a big fan of powerful desktops as my daily driver. At that point my computer was liquid-cooled PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5 Ghz. This was a beast and I loved it. I then switched to a MacBook Pro 15" Penryn complemented by a NAS to compensate for lack of local storage. I kept on the laptop + NAS train for a while : more recently with availability of 4TB SSDs I went to a laptop-only setup. My previous laptop was the IdeaPad Pro 5 (5800U,…

I built a new computer to play with some machine learning. It uses what seems to be the best scoring case for airflow and temperature : Fractal Torrent Compact. The full setup is : The 4090 is capped to 65% TDP as going any further quickly hits drastrictly diminishing returns (anything above 75% should be considered OC). When capped, the card only runs at about 60° ! That thing really is a crazy object and product. During training the computer draws about 400W at the wall. Which sits perfectly in…

One of our US-48-500W died at work. Since Ubiquiti has bumped the price and shifted the range quite a lot, I decided to repair it to keep it as a spare. I first confirmed that the PSU was the culprit by powering the switch with my lab PSU. Using a meanwell PSU (RD-125-2448) providing both 24V and 48V rails ,we don't reach the original 500W of PoE power, but that's still enough for our needs (some phones, cameras, and access points). I didn't put much efforts into PSU placement in…

I replicated the results of Connor Bolton, Sara Rampazzi, Chaohao Li, Andrew Kwong, Wenyuan Xu and Kevin Fu. in "Blue Note: How intentional acoutic interference Damages availability and integrity in hard disk drives and operating systems". I set up one of my DIY Cabasse Spheres in front of a Fujitsu MJA2160BH. Doing a frequency sweep from 850Hz to 1.1Khz at around 102 to 105dB. When reaching close to 975Hz +/- 25Hz, the bitrate of the read file drops from 70MiB/s to a few KiB/s. Data was generated from /dev/random, secondary…