So I've been pretty quiet here

Life's been pretty busy over the last year or two! It's nearly been two years since I've had anything at all interesting to say here, but I'm finally putting out an update.

I've mostly spent the last two years away from tech, just letting it serve me for once as best as I could instead of serving it. My services have mostly been stable, and minimal changes have taken place. Running a few more private services to make my life easier, and swapped out the decrepit airsonic-advanced server out for a more up to date Navidrome.

My living situation has changed quite a bit as well, which is why I'm no longer nearly as obsessed with tech as I had been. I'm living with my partner now, along with a cat! It's been quite the change of pace, and I've gotten much more into home automation with Home Assistant, so I'm sure I'll have something interesting to post about that at some point.

In terms of audio gear, there's not been much change in my desk setup, though my partner is into vinyl records, so we've been exploring that front. I'm sure I'll have something nerdy to say about that later as well, so possibly look forward to that, probably expensive, deep dive.

For those of you with a keen eye, I have changed my name (not legally yet unfortunately), so that's been a bit of a change in life. It's over all life as usual, just a lot more happy and comfortable than I've ever been before. Hopefully I'll have some interesting things to come in 2026!

How I got here

So I see a lot of confusion from people that seem to think that they should also get a system like mine, or otherwise replicate my software setup on their machines. I figured I should probably explain more of why I have this setup, and probably why you don't want what I have as not understanding how things work are likely to lead you into many pain points that have lead me directly here. I should probably start with the list of things that I don't need, but people seem to think is a massive gain.

I got tired of managing systems

After messing with GlusterFS for a while, learning it's ups and downs, I've determined that I'm moving back to a single physical node, for the most part. I had a few goals in mind when looking at hardware.

• Enough CPU/RAM to replace everything I currently run
• PCIE expansion. Lots of lanes for everything I ram in there.
• IPMI! I don't want to have to go plugging in display/keyboard constantly.

This pretty much left me with 2 major system types to look at. Multi socket Intel Xeon's, or AMD Epyc systems. With old Xeon systems being even more work due to the absolute requirement of understanding UMA and NUMA and more importantly going through the steps of setting it up, higher power draw, and with that noise, I quickly ruled them out. I set my eyes on the Epyc 7551p and the Supermicro H11SSL-NC motherboard to cover every single thing I wanted out of the system. At the cost of about $700 USD to fully replace the core of my old system, I felt like this was a reasonable price for what all I get.

What's a Glusterfs?

Glusterfs is a network filesystem with many features, but the important ones here are it's ability to live on top of another filesystem, and offer high availability. If you have used SSHFS, it's quite similar in concept, giving you a "fake" filesystem from a remote machine, and as a user, you can use it just like normal without caring about the details of where the files are actually stored, except "over there I guess". Glusterfs unlike SSHFS, can be stored across multiple machines similar to network RAID. If one machine goes down, the data is still all there and well.

So I think I know how to flakes! Sort of...

After much pain over a week of learning, and a lot of failing, I've started to understand some of why people use flakes. I don't believe that this is something that any sane person should learn, but that applies to most of Nix. Having nix around should be like having docker around for many people. You don't know how it works, but you can use a docker compose file and just do light edits to have most of the gain for knowing nearly nothing. With that said, if you are dumb enough to fall down the rabbit hole like I was, here's what I learned about flakes. First some highlights of what they even are.

• Nix channels become inputs. No need to manage these anymore if that bothers you.
• Thanks to version locking, it's great for keeping systems in sync with each other.
• Solves what I was doing with linking home manager configs "for free"

It's happened, I've drank the punch.

So I got into dev shells a while back, but I've started to run into some issues, mostly with other's nix shell environments. QMK's shell.nix is one such issue, and I believe it has something to do with it being written for NixOS, or at least Nix on Linux. This highlights one of the biggest weaknesses of using "bare" nix as opposed to Nix Flakes, with their ability to build different targets. With that out of the way on the why I bothered, here's my first flake!

So you want some speed, huh?

Before we get into the how to do this, I want to explain what this does at a basic level to make sure it's even worth your time. This allows you to independantly control the acceleration of the X/Y axies on your CoreXY, Cartesian, or (untested) CoreXZ printer. If you aren't one that wants to get more speed, aren't even close to the limits of what you can print with your printer currently, or just don't like to tune your printer, please stop reading now. Hope you have a wonderful day!

Ok, you still with me? Let's get going then.

The problem

Many of us in the printing space chase speed. We do this, usually, not because we want to watch a printer zoom around, but to rapid prototype, reduce the need to have more printers for volume, and many other reasons. Many of us have moved from Cartesian systems like bed flingers to CoreXY systems in the persuit of quality at speed, but unfortunately these share one specific problem. There's a weak primary axis. Thanks to this weak axis, we have to limit the strong axis. The bed moving is clearly more of a limit than the toolhead on bed flingers, and moving the entire gantry on CoreXY systems is more weight than just a toolhead.

Time for a teeny tiny printer!

While I absolutely love my Vz330, I have learned some lessons about what it's good and bad at. It's absolutely not a bad printer, and is by no means going to be surplanted any time soon. Sometimes I do feel the need to have a backup printer for when it's down, especially if I need a part that's not already printed. With repraps, you always want a spare printer. In comes the Voron V0! It's got a laughably small build volume, but it's enough to print basically any required part on any 3d printer I own, have owned, or will own. That makes it quite the useful little printer even if some parts I want to print don't fit on it. Enough rambling in an intro, let's see how it went!

Planar for the masses

Anyone that has ever heard me talk about headphones knows that I can't talk enough about the Hifiman Sundara. I've had the chance to listen to quite a few headphones even in the $4000 mark, and I'm still surprised how well the Sundara keeps up for it's relatively low price. For those that have never heard an open back headphone, or a planar magnetic driver, you are in for a surprise. I'll keep the intro short and get into tracks, and give assessments of over all, as well as other things to consider towards the end. Without further ado, here's the hardware used test and we'll get into it.

• DAC
  • Denafrips Ares II
• Amps
  • Jotunheim 2 (modded)
  • Valhalla 2