Cloud Gaming - Part 1: The Proof of Concept and The Plan

Cloud gaming. Everybody's doing it. NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, Sony... you get the picture. Big tech companies are doing it. Am I willing to say it's the future of gaming? Not quite, but it is an interesting service that clearly has a market. I wanted to see what it took to build a service like this in the cloud as well as the bandwidth it required to play things at a higher resolution, framerate, and quality than my computer.

Virtualizing my Original Homelab

Remember that high school home lab that I had set up many years ago? Well, most if it is coming down. After graduation I'm moving to my own place and for some odd and inexplicable reason my parents don't want those horribly outdated computers in their basement. Well, I certainly don't have room for them in the place I'm moving. So why don't we take what we can and virtualize it? That way we can still have the computers without the bulk.

Looking at a DLP Chip From a Projector

DLP chips are pretty neat in a "how do they work?" sort of way. Like, I get how they work, but I guess I don't quite understand why someone thought moving thousands of microscopic mirrors at lightning speeds would be a good idea to produce images. It blows my mind that this technology works at all. The DLP chip has to produce the image on its surface in order to make it come out of the box, so let's tear one down and see if we can make it work without light.

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?