Notes for January 13-19

This felt like a normal work week in that I had much less free time than I’d like due to constant pivots. But there were a few fun bits, like rediscovering a pouch full of stickers from my travels and past developer events:

I got a new machine to review, and spent a little while setting up a “router-on-a-stick” that takes a few VLANs and routes between them with the ultimate goal of segmenting my home network a bit.

My LG TV has no internet access and most of my home automation runs over Zigbee, but now that I have a dual 10GbE NAS I would like to organize things a little better and plan to separate my media and gaming devices from my office network and set up for a multi-WAN scenario since I have a backup LTE router.

Also, since telcos have recently taken to getting metrics off home gateways I’d like to isolate our servers and laptops a bit more and drop my own Tailscale-enabled router in between (even though I expect to have to do some finagling for weirder protocols).

Even though I have a few managed switches, I still need to consider Wi-Fi segregation, and if like me you still have Apple Airport Extreme base stations even after Apple left that market, you’ve probably looked at the “Guest Network” option a few times and mostly ignored it.

As it turns out, that option maps the guest SSID to VLAN 1003, and it’s almost trivial to set up a tagged network interface inside Proxmox to handle that traffic as an extra “leg” into a virtual router, so I’ve been fiddling with that even as I start investigating options for new access points.

That’s going to be tricky, as:

• I need five to six access points (not routers), so they should be relatively cheap.
• They should have a similar form factor to the Airport Extreme (I can’t hang things off walls or ceilings).
• They should have Wi-Fi 6+ and 2.5GbE (I need to use hard-wired backhaul, not meshing, and I want them to last).
• I don’t want to rely on any mobile apps for setup (except if Apple ever returns to this market). I must have a full-featured web UI.
• I want exactly zero cloud features.

The thing is, most vendors (like TP-Link) have increasingly relied on cloud features and stupid mobile apps instead of shipping proper web UIs, so I don’t have a lot of options–and trying to roll my own with OpenWRT will likely mean being stuck with sub-par antenna designs.

I found my old Nook Simple Touch and the front bezel plastic was pretty much flaking and melting off, so I decided to scrape off the resulting gunk and try to print a new bezel out of TPU (which may be more of a ‘feel good’ project than a successful one, but we’ll see).

Severance is back, and the multiple levels of surreal it delivered in a single episode (and the gaps it hints at) it was certainly worth the wait.

Even though I’ve never played the game (and likely never will), I’m definitely starting to become a fan of the League of Legends’ “cinematic universe”. I came across their latest cinematic for the Noxus game “season” and it is another Fortiche-style animation gem that makes me wish they could release an Arcane follow-up right now, although I am positive that will take a while to surface. The fact that the thing popped up in my YouTube queue with 169 million views already is… staggering.