Notes for January 15-21

Somehow, I managed to get a cold again. Go figure. Still, I had a mildly productive week, all things considered.

Martin Luther King day, so work was slow.

• Spent entirely too long futzing with UPS configurations. Couldn’t get nut to work with my APC Back-UPS 550G, but apcupsd worked, even though my UPS doesn’t support any of the advanced features like self-testing, etc.
• Wrote two ground-init scripts to set either apcupsd or nut up on Proxmox nodes.
• Did some Orange Pi 5+ testing with Proxmox.

Woke up with a sore throat, which didn’t improve during the day’s meetings.

• Cleaned up the office a bit.
• Received a RP2040-ETH, which I’ll be testing soon.
• Printed some more replacement parts for my Prusa (the order with the replacement Z-axis lead screws is still stuck someplace in limbo).
• Messed about with OnnxStream and Ollama, both of which are broken on the u59 due to the lack of AVX2 support.

Slept very poorly due to the cold, so most of my free time was devoted to zoning out.

• Re-did some of my Orange Pi 5+ benchmarks on rogueone (which does have AVX2 support)
• Started drafting the final review post.

Busy day. Spent most of it in meetings or PowerPoint.

• Tried to track down an AliExpress package that has been held hostage by Ecoscooting for over a week now. Not impressed, since they’re not answering any emails or even have a Portuguese phone number (which is kind of a legal requirement to operate logistics here).

Sore throat progressed onto a full blown cold, yet I still plowed through the day.

• Did some more Orange Pi 5+ testing.
• Spent some time setting up Steam in a container again, but since NVIDIA CUDA drivers still do not support DRI, the only sane way forward is to use PCI passthrough to a VM with a dedicated GPU.

Peace and quiet at last.

• Cleaned up and published my Orange Pi 5+ review, was mildly amused at the HN response.

Slept miserably. Puttered at various computer things.

• Dug furter into why VFIO passthrough wasn’t working on the Orange Pi 5+, to no avail.
• Spent the afternoon fiddling with disk2vhd and trying to snapshot borg‘s physical Windows 10 partition into a VM.
• Ended up setting up IOMMU and up PCI passthrough for the GPU and trying out Bazzite, which is… different.
• Since my review apparently got enough traction to make the Orange Pi web site inaccessible yesterday, I decided to check Cloudflare analytics and Clarity to see if I could get a better idea of what happened¹:
  • Clarity now has AI-enhanced summaries, and the first thing it pointed out was that the link to the Orange Pi site was the most clicked item in the article, so… there’s that.
  • Cloudflare analytics showed a huge spike in traffic from the US, but the most interesting thing was the sheer volume of traffic (99% of which was cached:

Ah well. I’m glad people found it useful, which is kind of the point of my writing these things.