Resigned To Reinvention

An imminent new year, time for a new plan.

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” - Semisonic

This is the new beginning that’s before me today …

And this is the ending. The recently retired Dell R610 was doubly cursed - both really old, and an SFF machine - 2.5” drives are all it supported. So the storage from it is sitting here atop a Dell Optiplex 9020 SFF. Yes, it’s a twelve year old machine, but someone purchased it as a spare, never used it, and it’s got all of four or five hours on it. It should provide a couple years of service, and all I need it to do is last long enough that I can get a minimum viable product together, then migrate to sturdier equipment.

I rounded up a few cheap parts to turn it into a tolerable Proxmox machine, and after several stumbles looks like Amazon might actually get them here this evening.

And here is what this feels like. For the younger members of the audience, Kevin Costner’s character in Waterworld looses his really large trimaran, they later find some land, and at the end he goes back out on a dinky catamaran a quarter the size of his original boat. I guess maybe you needed to see the movie …

Expectations & Implications:

So I’m going to have a really minimal setup - a 16GB M1 Mac, a 32GB Proxmox system that’s literally going to do two or three VMs at most, and a pair of Raspberry Pi5 single board computers. This is purely prototype gear, it’s not going to be like 2019 when I had five machines with 896GB of ram and 60TB of storage in my hut.

The radio related work is what it is, the other stuff I have coming in can be grouped under fraud investigation work. I don’t have a specific need for this little Proxmox system, but it’s costing me a whole $43 to turn a doorstop into a cloud computing environment under my desk. Having been me for a while now, I know that any random functional system that’s just sitting around will quickly get turned into something, the question is … what?

It’ll have Proxmox and there will be one machine for Docker, so I can host a local Dify.ai setup. The other thing it’s going to get is TSDProxy. I’m not precisely sure what this does yet, but I keep finding new things to do with TailScale, and I’ve come to tolerate Docker over the years. Making them work smoothly as a team could really open up a sort of walled garden construct - it’s basically a smooth carrier grade NAT overlay on the internet, and in a time when our former 4th Amendment protections are obviously just some dated language on dusty old paper … this could be good.

So there’s enough hardware to do … something. But what?

Whatever it is, it MUST have an AI component to it - like taking a look around to see if there’s a GraphRAG setup for Dify yet. This is future proofing myself.

What it is, there MUST be a MARKET for it. And by market, I mean something where the system and/or I do something, and then people pay promptly. This puts an end to enormous investigations that might eventually yield a brief mention in a journalistic outlet.

There SHOULD be an international angle to it. The U.S. is liable to shoot itself in both feet, fall face first, and knock out its teeth on the butt of the gun on the way down. “I told you so” will be a lot more satisfying if I’m not personally enmeshed in the “Find Out” phase of this.

Conclusion:

Despite the big picture, December is turning out great. My Craigslist half price studio apartment unicorn slipped through my fingers, but it WAS real, and there will be another opening before too long. The radio stuff kinda stalled … because a fraud interdiction thing actually forced me to mask up and ride the train down to San Jose two days in a row. That job is done, I don’t have to worry about January, but I did spend the next 36 hours sleeping off the exertion. The work timing stepped on my cardiology appointment, it’ll get rescheduled, and I bet that won’t be till early January. I’ve got fingers crossed there will be a non-surgical solution …

It feels weird to me, after six years of constantly MORE in the hardware realm, to be doing the math & moves on making things small. But then I see things like this … and I am quite intrigued.