Sojourn of Life

Well, I would not really call it a temporary stay in life, because things were quite a lot hectic for me. Between getting my Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering to getting ready to try for admission so that I can return to the wonderful land of Germany and in between, planning and executing a lot of different areas related to house construction, saying that things got a little out of hand would be an understatement.

So while I type this while blasting Dave Matthews Band's live playlist from Spotify at the dead of night, No, I did not undertake any hobby projects.

Big surprise.

Well, hold that thought. I did say we are supposed to move to a new house. And that means implementing everything I have learned and everything I wanted to have in my current house, would be there. There won't be a wallpaper TV that is concealed in the false ceiling of my room, mimicking open sky when not in use and showing the images of our multiverse when I am lying down. Unfortunately, there is this thing called money. However, I did wire up the house with CAT-6 ethernet cables. And since we are starting from scratch, even furniture is under my control.

That means a pretty decent Activity room is planned, with 800W of audio power,  TV with Ambilight, and of course there will be A LOT OF RGB because RGB makes everything better.

But that's not all. Since I have CAT-6 wiring, that means there has to be some sort of switch, which means some sort of home server. Which means I would be repurposing my dismantled laptop as a server with 2 NAS drives in RAID 1, set up a VPN so I can access my files regardless where I am, thanks to the fiber connection. Also, all the TV's in the house will have Nvidia's GameStream support and obviously Kodi that pulls all media form the central server. That server would also be storing the CCTV footage recorded by the Pi's running MotionEyeOS.

Keeping in mind that I am not a professional or even trained remotely in any of the things I just mentioned, it is going to be a lot of fun! But the more challenging aspect is the availability of time or lack thereof. Since if everything goes according to plan, I would have barely 2 months to build and test everything to its limits so that none of these components fail when left unsupervised for over a year or so. Of course, I can always remote ssh or just ask someone to do a reset, but that's a challenge that I have given myself. And it seems like a tall order, getting taller every day.

Still, I am excited, majorly because I always wanted a proper server looking server in my home. Weird desire but ok. And that means that there would be at least 1 blog post more this year. (LOL)

In other news, since G+ is shutting down, I'm not sure who will read this blog, and who will even discover it, but its good to keep a self-track, however terrible I am at it.


Sitrep

Because of how work is done in India, We still have not moved to the new place, which means the "every day getting taller" order is now a 7 ft Russian guy named Dimitri, and I would rather have potatoes with him.

Anyhow. There have been some slight changes to the room layout and plans, and I would be adding a PC which would drive both a monitor and a TV. I plan on some reviews of the parts that I've chosen. But the actual projects would start once I actually move to the new place because it's just better that way. Here's a small list of the things I have to do for the total completion of the activity room.
  • Desktop build and review of parts
  • Wiring of Desktop to both TV and Monitor
  • Setup sound system
  • Setup Ambilight clone for TV
  • Setup server with FreeNAS or Amahi
  • Ethernet wiring and crimping along with cable management
  • Setup of MotionEyeOS
  • RBG LEDs (Analog) on roofline - Remote and AudioReact enabled
  • Supplying POWAAH for everything, which is not going to be easy as it sounds
But there is a good side to this waiting.


I know, the Graphics card is totally mismatched, and I will replace it if and when required. I just dont feel the need to do that and block money right now. The CPU on the other hand, I plan to use for at least 5-6 years, if not more, so the Ryzen 5 2600 should hold well enough.



Basic cable management is done, but I think I would tinker properly with this setup only after moving it to the final location. Also, it would be kept flat. Because of reasons.

Short review coming shortly, because I need to kill time


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