Software Engineering and Computer Science Major - A Retrospective

I'm almost at the end of a Software Engineering and Computer Science double major at my college. I'm a month away, but I don't have any classes this quarter (just finishing up a Senior Project) so I feel qualified to have an opinion on the whole... thing. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to write about yet, but I do know that I can't possibly be as thorough as I should be.

Setting Up My Plex Server In Docker

I've been gearing up to maintaining my own Plex server. Back in the good ol' days, I ran a Plex server off of my very first computer in my homelab and it was... adequate. It didn't have a bunch of media but it served its purpose. But, eventually, I stopped upgrading it and it became obsolete very quickly. Then, in college, my friends and I started to build a Plex machine using an old laptop and an external 16TB hard drive. Then we outgrew that, so we moved to a larger storage system. Now, we're all graduating. We all want copies of the Plex but we also want to continue to grow it. So, how did we do it?

How I Transcoded 11TB of Media Under A Week

The answer to the question "how did I transcode 11TB of media in under a week" will not shock you. In fact, there's really only one answer: I threw a disgusting amount of compute power at the problem. Now, I know what you're thinking. Throw enough computer at something and it will break, but the design used to solve a problem is just as important as the power you have behind it. If you don't use the power correctly, then you don't truly have power.

Running a Blade Server Without an Enclosure

I remember when the commercials for IBM Blades aired on TV. I thought the concept was pretty interesting, although at the time I didn't fully understand what was going on. After working with a few HP blades for a while, I get why they're so important. You can put a lot of compute power in a very small amount of space. But in order for many of them to be useful they have to be linked to a midplane in the blade enclosure. Or do they?

Headless Raspberry Pi Stream Youtube Streamer

There are many reasons you'd want to stream to Youtube from a Raspberry Pi. With the camera attachment, you can watch over anything with great clarity. My friend wanted to set up a camera to watch over his hedgehog - mostly for fun - and chose this system to do so. In many of the solutions I've seen to now, it simply offers a command line interface from which you can start streaming. What I intend to do is far more simple to use.

Building A Temperature Based Fan Controller

Cooling is important. I know this, because in the file vault I built myself there is hardly any airflow with 8 hard drives in close proximity to each other. This causes the hard drives to approach their safe temperature limit. In an enclosed space, they exceed it and shut down. This isn't good, as it wears the hard drives more than regular usage. So we need to add a fan to them. I want to build my own temperature based fan controller because I'll need one for another project I'm working on. The payoff on that one will be pretty cool, too. So stick around.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 6

Calvin has been on my desk for far too long now. I really want to just, you know, finish this project. Obviously, the software will be continuously evolving, but the hardware will be packed away in this nice package and will not be in wires and parts on my desk as it has been for many months. But I think that Calvin's design - as well as his codebase, isn't what I want it to be. Maybe I should start from scratch? Let's design a whole system architecture that allows us to make a whole smart home based on Calvin.