With firewall rules finally on the box, I went back to the guest VLAN I’d set out to build. I isolated it cleanly from every other subnet, tested it, and shipped it. Then I realized guests could still walk right up to the router’s own admin page. The same blind spot from last time, pointed inward.
I sat down to do a routine bit of network segmentation and instead found my router had been sitting on a public IP with SSH and its admin GUI open to the internet, no firewall rules at all. A lesson in the difference between ‘working’ and ‘secure.’
BIOS tuning bought my SFF build 20 degrees, but a cooler swap bought it 25 more with no power limits at all. The unlikely hero: an off-center mount that overhangs the RAM in exactly the right way.
A reader asked how my low-profile cooler handles heat in the Fractal Ridge. My Grafana data showed the CPU peaking at 93°C, just shy of Tjmax. Two free BIOS changes dropped sustained temps by about 20°C.
Amazon force-migrated my Echos to Alexa+, leaving always-on microphones in multiple rooms of my house. So I replaced them with a Tronbyt LED matrix clock that renders on my own server and answers to no one.
The problem with streaming in 2025 When Netflix launched its “Watch Now” streaming feature in 2007, it revolutionized how people consumed television and film. For one monthly fee, you could watch your favorite shows and movies. Netflix Watch Now required no contracts or physical media, and there were no limitations on where, how, or how often you watched. It was simple and affordable. Fast forward to 2025, and streaming has become increasingly frustrating. On one hand, the competition amongst platforms has created better content with higher quality writing. However, it has also introduced several major drawbacks: ...