Tim Hordern

Things I use: Hardware

Laptops

My daily driver is an Apple MacBook Pro mid-2012. It has been upgraded with a new SSD and larger RAM, and has been flashed to macOS 12.7.5 Monterey using OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP).

I also have an Apple MacBook Air 13' from 2013 that I use as a slightly more portable device. It is still living on macOS 10.13.6 High Sierra, which I still believe was the high water mark for Apple software. Sadly, many many many apps no longer support High Sierra.

Desktop

I use a much beefier desktop Windows 10 PC from 2022 for local LLM development and media transcoding work that has:

It's housed in a Lian Li O11 Dynamic EVO ATX case and powered by a be quiet! DARK POWER 12 850W Titanium PSU with a Silent Wings 135mm Fan inside. Case cooling is provided by 7 be quiet! 3 120mm PWM fans that max out at 16.4dBA at 1450RPM for a balance of power and silence. I think be quiet! is underrated compared to Noctua. Both are excellent, but be quiet! is much better value for money.

Keebs

I have a few mechanical keyboards that I use with it, depending on my mood:

Servers

I have a second-hand 1U QNAP rack server that I reflashed and formatted over to Unraid to provide shared storage, container and VM hosting, and because it allows for combined ZFS and JBOD storage from disparate storage types. It's a low power, high storage device. I've replaced all of the 40mm fans inside with Noctua 40mm 1.5V low RPM fans.

I'm in the process of migrating some containers and VMs over to a Dell Optiplex micro PC running Proxmox VE. This provides decent CPU, onboard GPU transcoding, and SSD storage for faster operations. It will eventually be joined by another old fullsize ATX PC as a secondary Proxmox host for failover and some GPU tasks with an AMD Radeon RX 580 card. They likely will both run k3s for Kubernetes in some way.

Networking

Because I live Down Under and we have sub-standard internet forced upon us by the conservative party, I have the NBN in a Fibre-To-The-Curb configuration. A garden variety Netcomm router sits in between the Netcomm NBN NCD that provides the power to the Distribution Point Unit that lives in a hole under our street and a VDSL2 connection to the house. And yes, that's 2005 era technology people. Because the VDSL2 connection doesn't provide fast enough internet speeds, the degradation of speed and latency means there's not a lot of reason to upgrade to pure fibre connections, so I haven't bothered upgrading to SFP for fibre connections between the primary nodes.

I'm in the process of building an OPNSense router to be the next hop after the ISP router to provide VLAN structuring, firewalling, internet caching, and a few other things. I'm also considering using my Mikrotik hEX running RouterOS as an alternative (or it may end up being used as another host for a remote site-to-site Wireguard VPN).

For networking, I use an Ubiquiti UDM Pro and a variety of APs and switches all running CAT6. In some hard to reach places, I use powerline connectors providing 2000Mbps connections through the power circuit (it's ethernet-over-power, not power-over-ethernet), and in others I use a mesh network providing 2200Mbps and Zigbee connectivity. Most of the switches have had their fans also swapped out for Noctua 40mm replacements to decrease their noise.

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