Recent content on The Tymscar Blog
It’s hard for me to explain why, but ever since I can remember I hated sleeping in full darkness. Perhaps it’s to do with where I was born, where even during the night I could see street lights. Maybe it has to do with me just being a big baby. But because of also being a nerd I love to automate all sorts of things like this. I use Home Assistant to control basically everything smart…
Fifteen years or so ago I read about this cool thing on Reddit, called Crinkle Crankle walls , which is basically an unusual type of wall made out of bricks that is curvy. As far as I can see, this first started in Egypt 3 and a half millennia ago, but nowadays it’s most “common” in England. Fast forward to 11 years ago and I moved to the UK myself. I had forgotten about these,…
I already had an RTX 4080. 16GB of VRAM. Good enough for gaming, not good enough for the models I wanted to run locally. The next step up in GPU land is either spend a fortune on a card with more VRAM, or find another way. I found another way. I bought a datacenter GPU that doesn’t even have a normal PCIe connector, stuck it in my gaming PC with an adapter, and now I have 32GB of VRAM across…
I have owned somewhere near ten monitors at this point. CRTs, LCDs, a pretty disappointing 4K Samsung panel, then an ultrawide I genuinely loved. For the last few years though, I wanted one very specific thing: a retina-class 5K display at 120 Hz. 4K 120 Hz displays are everywhere. 5K 120 Hz displays, until very recently, basically did not exist at all. There are finally a couple of companies…
I recently got a Ugreen 4800 Plus NAS, and it is basically perfect for what I wanted. Four bays, enough CPU, enough RAM, nice build quality, and it does not look like a sci-fi router from 2012. The first thing I did was wipe the OS it shipped with and install TrueNAS. That part was also great. The not so great part was the noise. I expected it to be louder than my old Synology, mostly because I…
I recently moved from Synology to TrueNAS and set up cloud backups to Backblaze B2. I have two buckets: one for important files like documents, and one for homelab services. The services bucket backs up things like qcow2 disk images for my VMs, some of which are hundreds of gigabytes. When I created the buckets, I set the lifecycle rule to “Keep only the last version of the file.” I…
I do Advent of Code every year. For the last seven years, including this one, I have managed to get all the stars. I do not say that to brag. I say it because it explains why I keep coming back. It is one of the few tech traditions I never get bored of, even after doing it for a long time. I like the time pressure. I like the community vibe. I like that every December I can pick one language and…
Imgur decided to block UK users. Honestly? I don’t really care that much. I haven’t actively browsed the site in years. But it used to be everywhere. Back when Reddit embedded everything on Imgur, maybe fifteen years ago, it was genuinely useful. Then Reddit built their own image hosting, Discord did the same, and Imgur slowly faded into the background. Except it never fully…
During OpenAI’s GPT-5 launch event, they demoed the model’s ability to fix real bugs in production code. Live on stage. In their own repository. The kind of demo that makes CTOs reach for their credit cards and engineers nervously update their resumes. There’s just one small problem: the fix they promised to merge “right after the show” is still sitting there,…
I recently upgraded from a UniFi Dream Machine to a UniFi Dream Router 7 because I’m getting 2.5 Gbps internet in two weeks and figured I’d jump on the WiFi 7 bandwagon while I’m at it. My iPhone 17 Pro Max supports it, so why not? After setting everything up, I was getting nowhere near the speeds I expected. Time for some debugging. The disappointing numbers My wired connection…
I run a bunch of internal services through Traefik on my LAN, each with a proper domain name and TLS, so I don’t have to remember ports. One of them is Ollama, sitting on a beefy gaming PC at 10.0.0.105 and exposed as https://ollama.tymscar.com . From the terminal everything behaved exactly as expected: fast responses, certificate valid, models listed. Then IntelliJ IDEA decided this host…
For the past five years, my Yubikey has been my digital companion. Every single day, I use it to sign my Git commits, authenticate into countless websites, and secure my most important accounts. It’s become such an integral part of my workflow that I barely think about it, until it’s not there. A couple of years ago, I made the classic mistake of leaving it in my jeans pocket before…
OpenAI recently launched something I didn’t expect to see from them: an open source model called GPT-OSS . After years of keeping their models locked behind APIs, they’ve finally released both 20 billion and 120 billion parameter models that you can run entirely on your own hardware. Both can run on consumer grade hardware, but realistically most people would go with the 20 billion…
For the longest time I ran every container in my homelab on Proxmox. It did the job, but because I use NixOS on my main workstation and NixDarwin on my laptop, I eventually wanted the lab to follow the same declarative model. A few months ago I switched those machines to NixOS as well. Everything went smoothly except for one thing: moving the containers themselves. The problem was secrets. I keep…
Nix is a great tool for building software, especially in professional settings because of the guarantees it comes with. For example, you can be sure that the software you build is reproducible and that it will work on any machine. When it comes to building packages in the Nix world, you usually end up going with derivation builders already made for you. For Rust there is…
A bit over a year ago, I bought a pair of Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro headphones. They are amazing for what I need—they work great over 2.4 GHz, so I don’t experience noticeable latency like with Bluetooth, and I can connect four devices to the base station simultaneously. This is something I do daily when working on multiple computers. I never had any issues until I connected them to a Mac…
I’ve always like VR For 15 years, I’ve been captivated by the possibilities of VR/AR. It all became real when I held my first Google Cardboard at Google I/O 2015—here’s the moment captured: My professional and personal life has been deeply intertwined with virtual reality. I spent five fulfilling years harnessing VR’s potential at JLR, and for my Bachelor of Science First…
Do you ever just scroll mindlessly online and stumble upon a satisfying video about physics and you can’t help but have that urge to reproduce it in code? No, just me? Well perhaps this blogpost isn’t for you then. Otherwise, buckle up! The experiment that caught my eye this time around was this video of a plate of water, with some pepper sprinkled on top uniformly, that when touched…
Reminiscing with some friends about how long the compile times were on Gentoo back in the day when we used it, I got curious about how long it would take to compile Chromium today in WSL2 on an i9 13900KF CPU . Back then, it used to take well over a day on my i5 3470 . Getting Chromium to compile All you have to do to compile Chromium is follow the official Google build instructions here :
Applying to a job is a broken system This blog post is a call to action, urging reform in the tech recruitment process. It’s a shared struggle, demanding change for a more efficient and promising future in our industry. Being genuine is not encouraged In the tech recruiting scene, a significant emphasis is placed on writing personalized cover letters. However, these letters, requiring…
Photogrammetry has held my interest for a very long time. After all, my profile picture , almost everywhere, is a LiDAR scan of my head that I accomplished with the FaceID of an old iPhone about five years ago. Recently, I stumbled upon a new paper about something called Gaussian Splatting . This topic is fascinating because, instead of creating a 3D mesh, it more closely resembles a point cloud…
How I deploy private GitHub projects to local self-hosted servers (CI/CD) I have a lot of experience with massive CI/CD pipelines that deploy private code to public servers. I’ve also worked with pipelines that deploy public repositories to private servers, such as my homelab. However, I never experimented with a pipeline that takes a private GitHub repo, builds it, and deploys it to a…
EDIT: I have raised a PR to fix this upstream and got it merged, so you don’t have to follow the guide anymore, you can just use the package on nixpkgs unstable for the time being and later on in the future, a stable branch. For the past year or so I have been very interested in NixOS and Nix in general. I have set it up as my main OS on my desktop , I have used it on remote VPS instances,…
HackTheMidlands is a 24-hour hackathon, or “creative marathon”, which was founded in 2016. I used to participate back in the day, and I’ve even won a prize before, here you can find a video about it! 📷 CTFs🏁: Being a programmer at heart I’ve never played seriously with capture the flag challenges before, but because I am busy with work I did not have the time and energy to…