Hehe, I have been aware of suitcase model railways for a long time, probably about two decades or so, but never felt like I had the skill to build one before.

At the end of the pandemic I got hit with dual flat feet, dual heel spurs and a bad knee at the same time.

It was a bad time for me, every step hurt, to the point that I ate six paracetamols and a few ibuprofen every day just to cope, and when walking home from the bus after work, I cried hard due to the pain of every single step.

During this time, I snowed in on videos about making dioramas, especially this video stuck with me:

https://youtu.be/HEG3d0cMuv4

I loved the weathering and how real it looked.

Anyway, I got help for my feet and knee, and mostly moved on from the videos, but never forgot about the above video.

I got laid off at my earlier job and got this job, it is far more stressful, and I have been feeling depressed, so I have been looking for something to do.

I recently did some simple wood working stuff, and found I quite enjoyed it.

So I decided to give this a try.

I have a workbench at home, in a utility room in my apartment, it used to be occupied with a shit load of rum and other alcohol, but last weekend I went and bought a small Billy bookshelf at IKEA and turned that into an fairly elegant bar shelf.

(Just a quick note, just because I have a lot of alcohol at home and live alone doesn’t mean that I drink a lot.

I mostly collect because I find it interesting to have a selection to pick from.

I drink alcohol maybe once every other month, often less.)

So now I have a workspace, I need to make room under the workbench, get a chair and some proper lights and I can start the project.

Yeah, that feeling has lingered for years, and is now out in force

Your possible future sounds wonderful, I wish you every success with it.

If I could leave work and keep the same salary, I would…

As for what I would do, I enjoy photography ( https://metapixl.com/stoy ), I would probably buy a reliable car and start driving around europe taking photos of interesting places.

I might also start buying used cameras and set up a local studio called something like “snåljåpens fotobibliotek”, or “The cheapskate’s photo library” where for a monthly fee you can rent older but good cameras and equipment.

Sweet!

I have actually thought about setting up a Meshtastic node, or perhaps even setting up a LORA link for a personal project.

During the pandemic, my dad asked me to see if we could set up a water temp sensor at a local swimming hole, a few months of work with a raspberry pi, a DS8B20, a motorcycle battery, a web hotel and a friendly neighbor later and we have for several years had an automatic website displaying the current temp in the water at the swimming hole, we borrow the neighbor’s wifi, and send the data to the webhotel.

It would be interesting to see if instead of relying on the neighbors wifi we could use LORA nodes to send the data to a node at home and have that submit the data to the webhotel

It was fun and built in bash/php/mysql with zero ai.

I’ll have to look into it, thanks for the tip!

Yeah, I feel you, I live alone an watch a shit tonne of YT, luckily I have been curating my watch history for many years now, and my recommendations are quite well tuned.

I have a few channels that have helpt me stay sane.

Clabretro - a guy my age homelabbing with 90s/00s IT gear, really fun.

All the gear - Jack and Ethan from Car Throttle going on small adventures and setting cheap challenges. Really fun.

Philip Thompson - Real life spy stories, well made and interesting.

Code Bullet - chaotic programming.

James Channel - gaming, angle grinders duct tape and super glue.

Aviation Republic - Well made long form documentaries about military aircraft.

Keeping_a_lighthouse - amazing footage, interesting insight into a very special work.

Our own devices - interesting video about interesting things by a lovely Canadian man.

Other than YT, I love driving, and I mostly listen to podcasts, but have recently got into audiobooks, with a main focus on sci-fi.

Brilliant stuff.

Oh and I just found out my favourite lens has been repaired, so soon I’ll get to head out with my amazing 24-105mm f4 Lumix lens again.

That actually sounds quite interesting!

I find telecoms to be interesting.

What really got me down was when HDDs got affected by AI, I am building a NAS at home and need two more 8tb drives and they have shot up in cost by almost 1000SEK which is fucking ridiculous.

All I want is a safe place to store my photos that is off the cloud and I have control over.

I am over worked, I am the sole It guy for almost 200 users across several sites.

I am also their video producer.

My manager has said that we need a minimum if two more IT workers but management has refused.

I am a Swede, we have unions baded on sectors instead of just places of work, we also allow sympathy strikes.

One of the most epic union stories here was in the 90s when Toys 'R Us was opening here.

The Swedish labour market is notoriously unregulated by the government, even more so back then, we had no minimum wage (still effectively don’t), the market was/is mostly regulated between employers and unions themselves with minimal involvement from the government.

So when TRU tried to avoid signing a collective bargaining agreement with the union for storeworkers, the union called a strike so union workers hired by the company stopped going, well the company hired non union replacements and thought that was that.

The Swedish unions did not agree.

Sympathy strikes started.

The transport union refused to make deliveries for TRU, the printers union refused to print material for TRU, and even the financial workers union refused to process transactions for TRU.

A few months later, TRU caved and signed an agreement with the union, and the strikes ended.

For almost my entire career I have been working in the finance industry, my past place of work was amazing, if I get an offer to go back, I would go immediately.

I wouldn’t mind working in IT at a rail company, would be interesting

I’ll hope it will be cool (:

I’ll try to remember to post a follow up in a year here.

Wow, this conversation has really shifted from a sysadmin question to an ideological discussion.

As an IT professional, I have to say that I believe that you have a highly unrealistic view of the world, not everything can be about supporting open source, most of the time you gotta be rational and select the best tool for the job and move on.

Having to expect everyone to be everything and do everything is such macho bullshit.

Didn’t you say that everyone should only run software that they have access to the source?

This is litterarly what you sat on your high horse and yelled out that people should do, yet you decide that you don’t.

Not really consistent.

I am sorry but this is an argument on par with a 5 year old saying “my dad can beat up your dad!”

I am glad that you have an environment that works for you, but unless you yourself maintain it to the standard you set earlier, I find it difficult to take you seriously.

That is a very idealistic way of looking at the issue, and I am very impressed if you have the skill and time to maintain your computer systems completely free from proprietary software.

However, we do neither have the skill not the resources to follow that path, so while I agree with you on principle, reality does make those principles impossible for us to work under.

Yeah, I have a small Milrotik home router that I opened once, checked out Winbox for 15 min, realized I was WAY out of my depth and got an Asus router instead, this was about 8 years ago though, so things may have changed.

At this moment we are not really big enough to justify a dedicated network tech, which is why Ubiquiti have caught our eye.

Thank you very much for a very thorough run down of the system, we are based in the EU and are trying to make sure that we have as few mandatory ties to US manufacturers as possible while running a modern IT system.

We have thought about MikroTik and Extreme but our CTO wants us to investigate Ubiquiti as it has a nice web UI for all devices on the network which would be a big advantage for our small network.

I will push for a small POC network or demo so we can get a better understanding of it.

Ah, thank you!

This seems like exactly what I need!