Smokeydope

Hello there, I'm currently doing my first ever night of dispersed camping at a local national forest here in USA.

I plan to have this trip go two weeks, though I will be happy enough if I can make it to one without issue. After I'm done here I'll go sightseeing at a big state attraction that my parents always talked about.

The only camping I ever knew about was campgrounds where you pay money for a site or a cabin. I had no idea that dispersed camping was a thing.

In certain public lands you are allowed to just park off the road and camp out for a certain amount of time. Each place has their own rules and exceptions but its generally 2 weeks before you have to move a couple miles.

I'm essentially allowed to live here in nature free of charge for as long as I like. I just need to observe and respect the rules and limits of the state. The idea of doing this makes me feel a sense of freedom that I really needed in my life.

The van is pretty much converted out. Ive got a comfy bed. Ive got enough solar panel power for charging devices, keeping lights on, and coffee in the morning (theoretically). Ive got propane heating. Combine that with food, water, clothes, and cleaning supplies to make for the bare minimum of a comfy existance.

Despite all that, I'm out of my comfort zone. All the preparation in the world couldn't offset this feeling I have right now. The feeling of being in an unfamiliar new place and unsure if I'll be okay. Perhaps a real adventure requires at least a dash of uncertainty.

Its dark and quiet in a way I'm not used to. Stillness is a little unsettling when youre used to noise and commotion. I'm also right off a busy ish road so theres a car passing every now and again which is a little noisy but not unwelcome.

If something does go wrong I'm parked in a way that I can just turn the key and go. I need to clear the way to driver seat a little better currently blocked by food bag. All my windows are covered well so nobody can really peek at me. Not that I think anyone is out here to peek in.

I realize now that my sneakers arent exactly meant for off path forest exploration. I will get some good boots for the next trip. Im an overthinking planner type person so its fustrating to forget things like this. But before I left I told myself that I wasn't going to be able to think of every detail, and to just try my best and learn from the experience. I'm going to make mistakes and learn as I go and thats okay.

If you actually managed to read through this I thank you.

I wanted to share my current vaporizer setup with you guys.

To start, heres synthetic ruby balls over ceramic heater set to max temp.

Next is a custom herb extraction chamber device made from an omega wand, modified dynavap fat mouthpiece, and diy nectar collector herb chamber.

The extraction device inserts into the EQ forming an air tight seal with glass adapter. The herb chamber sits directly above the ruby heater balls.

Finally some glass is added on top. Arizer solo stems work well.

Share your most commonly used pieces!

Mistral Small 22B just dropped today and I am blown away by how good it is. I was already impressed with Mistral NeMo 12B's abilities, so I didn't know how much better a 22B could be. It passes really tough obscure trivia that NeMo couldn't, and its reasoning abilities are even more refined.

With Mistral Small I have finally reached the plateu of what my hardware can handle for my personal usecase. I need my AI to be able to at least generate around my base reading speed. The lowest I can tolerate is 1.5~T/s lower than that is unacceptable. I really doubted that a 22B could even run on my measly Nvidia GTX 1070 8G VRRAM card and 16GB DDR4 RAM. Nemo ran at about 5.5t/s on this system, so how would Small do?

Mistral Small Q4_KM runs at 2.5T/s with 28 layers offloaded onto VRAM. As context increases that number goes to 1.7T/s. It is absolutely usable for real time conversation needs. I would like the token speed to be faster sure, and have considered going with the lowest Q4 recommended to help balance the speed a little. However, I am very happy just to have it running and actually usable in real time. Its crazy to me that such a seemingly advanced model fits on my modest hardware.

Im a little sad now though, since this is as far as I think I can go in the AI self hosting frontier without investing in a beefier card. Do I need a bigger smarter model than Mistral Small 22B? No. Hell, NeMo was serving me just fine. But now I want to know just how smart the biggest models get. I caught the AI Acquisition Syndrome!

My first guitar string snapped and it launched a small circular pin somewhere. I looked up how to restring guitar strings and other peoples stringboard look different than how mine is set up. the pins I have aren't long and straight they are small circular things fitted into a small hole in the wood. What are these kinds of pins called? Can I upgrade to standard guitar pins?

List of icons/services suggested:

• Calibre
• Jitsi
• Kiwix
• Monero (Node)
• Nextcloud
• Pihole
• Ollama (Should at least be able to run tiny-llama 1.1B)
• Open Media Vault
• Syncthing
• VLC Media Player Media Server

I am a hobbyist computer and IT guy. Not professionally trained but I grew up with the technology and have been tinkering with them for years. I am still learning new things and enjoy deeping my understanding. Troubleshooting is often a great journey to discovering new insights.

Shelved in the basement was a desktop pc released in 2018. Ryzen 5 2600 6 core CPU, 24GB DDR4 RAM, and an AMD RX580. These days such specs are modest compared to the latest and greatest but still pretty good IMO. If I remember right, it was having some graphical issues probably caused by a hdmi cable or something. It was a long time ago, no idea why such a good PC ended up collecting dust. Oh well, as a silver lining this story is about giving the PC new life.

This week I began tinkering around with local AI. LLama 3.1 8b just got released; I have been having lots of fun learning with it on the laptop. Sadly my poor old thinkpad is just not meant for that kind of work. It was sloow to generate text and process information..

So remembering the 6 core desktop in the basement, the time felt right to dust off the PC and get it to do some useful computing. Unfortunately while the specs are powerful, the things wifi never worked right for some reason. I never thought much about it since the PC was situated next to a router with Ethernet as a connection. Now it needs to live significantly further away and rely solely on wifi for big file transfers.

On an internet connection where my laptops right next to it were getting hundreds of mbps download, the pc was getting 10mbps. Ive had metal cased desktops before and none of them were this bad connection wise. Something was seriously wrong bottlenecking an otherwise great setup. So at first I figured it must have been a linux driver issue or some kind of software bug. Spent hours installing the right drivers for my specific wifi card and troubleshooting via terminal. Didn't help any.

Then I figured maybe the card was bust and researched new wifi cards. I always thought wifi cards were little chips and antennas built into the motherboard. Not the case with this computer.

My first important discovery was that this computer had a huge wifi card mounted just underneath graphics card taking up its own slot in the back. This makes sense, if you want to upgrade to the newest wifi frequency in 10-20 years just pop a updated card into the slot.

My second important discovery was realizing the beastly wifi card had two little brass bits connecting out behind the PC. Threaded bits. Hey I know these, they are male coaxial bits.... For an... antenna.... facepalm

The realization hit me like a club. Oh... OH. YOOO IT NEEDS ANTENNAS, DUDE. I had been using a radio technology with either no antenna or an inbuilt one so awful it might as well be malfunctioning.

I felt like an idiot, have seen the back of that PC many times but for some reason just never noticed or thought about the coaxial bits and what they could be for. Oh well lets just order some cheap sticks and hope it helps.

So I with the cheap set of antennas in hand, I screwed them on. Honestly expected it not to do anything because its never that simple. Fired up speedtest before and after installation. Before antennas was 10mbps up and down After installing the antennas >200mbps down and >100mpbs up. Yeeeeah looks like that took care of the issue right away.

In the future ill look on the back of my big desktops and see if they could be easily upgraded with a set of antennas. The more you know!

Hello, I am trying to get some advice from experienced electricians and engineer workers on what jobs could be a good fit for my experience and skill sets. As well as advice on how to do a better job picking work that won't screw me over.

I am a nationally certified (NOCTI) Electromechanical Engineer. I got mentally/emotionally chewed up and spit out after working as a maintenance technician for a couple years as a young 'n dumb kid right out of school. I have kept my electrical skills sharp enough to wire up my own offgrid solar DC systems. I remember enough theory to do calculations and read schematics. My maintenance days have me somewhat familiar with electrical wiring, air duct systems, mechanical drives, pneumatic/hydraulic systems, PLC automation, and repairing broken parts with all manner of tools. I enjoy the feelings of satisfaction and capability that comes from successfully putting together and maintaining an efficient functioning system.

But im kind of scared to get back into the career field knowing how dangerous it can be (Ive mainly worked on 480v systems) and how little money I was paid before. On one hand I feel like I should use my highly technical skills and further a real career. However on the other hand every company i’ve ever worked for has screwed me over with promised training that never happened, severely understaffed stressed out maintenance teams who didn’t have the time or energy to spend teaching a newbie, and OSHA violations so egregious the inspectors were surely bribed.

I guess im trying to ask where I went wrong. What job paths are a better use of my skills that isn't so mentally and physically taxing? What are some red flags to look out for? What is contracting work like? Should I try to get into a union? I really don’t know if I want to get back into this career field and I don’t know if I want to commit to a 2 year apprenticeship contract.

Im kind of an environment guy who cares about clean energy and would love to be helping out the planet a little through my work sometimes I fantasize about working on solar arrays and renewable energy stuff.

Im pretty good with computers and IT, I use linux daily, can ssh into a remote server, port forward, and have set up some local services on my own network. I am a main developer of an open source project decently familiar with the basics of programming in lua and commiting with git. A lot of the older guys have appreciated my help navigating companies old poorly organized intranets for schematic scans and work orders.

I am in my mid 20s, single and from the US but willing to travel.