Daily - 2025-11-13

Previously…

Yesterday recap

I had time in the morning before I had to head out to my one stop and I did some odds and ends around the house. I went through my work bins and compared what I had to what our new install will need and then got some misc. parts ordered. I’m trying to keep spending to a minimum right now, so we are gonna use up what we got.

Hit my stop and it ended up being a little longer, which is fine by me since I get to bill more. The customer said something that has made me laugh since. He said I’m kind of zen and my brother (business partner who normally deals with customers) is the “spicy” one. This is funny because if you ask anyone who knows me personally they would say I’m extremely intense, serious, and blunt. I guess I give this customer a little different personality.

Got home and wife went to her appointment. I spent the time working on this E5440, mostly testing. The first thing I wanted to test was performance if I installed /root on the internal mSATA drive and then /home on an external NVMe. The performance is fantastic. Honestly, I don’t even notice that /home is on an external drive. Looking at the speed of all the drives, the external NVMe is the fastest even over the internal.

I then tested the GPU. It is an Nvidia 720M which isn’t much of a GPU. It uses the legacy 39X driver and does not have Vulkan support. This means gaming will be limited, but not the primary use. It will also play most of my favorite games just fine with OpenGL rendering. The driver mostly helps with having multiple monitors attached.

After dinner I continued to work on it. Someone gave me a 2014 Mac Mini with a 1TB HDD, so I removed the drive and put the Mac Mini in the trash heap. Then I looked at all my drives and decided to build the E5440 to have the already installed layout for /root and /home and then put the 1TB drive and a 500GB thin SSHD into the two internal 2.5" HDD slots and create a single mergerfs pool for bulk storage. So far I’m happy with the results. Today will be setting everything up for EDC usage.

After the gorls went to bed we started watching Uncle Buck.

Gratitude

• I have a lot of computers to play with. Yes, they are older. But, I can find fun projects to do here and there with what I have.

How are you feeling today?

Better. I woke up at 5:30AM so I know I’ll be tired later. But GERD is behaving better today.

Todo

Chores

• Annual check-up with the doctor. I have a lot to discuss with them and will need a lot of labs. Fingers crossed the office is cooperative today. I’ve had nothing but bad luck with them.
• Wash rain gear and boots, then wax the boots. It is supposed to rain all next week during our new sprinkler install. Its the last of the season, so of course it is going to be miserable throughout.

Fun

• Research and plan out my magic act for the talent show. More on this tomorrow. Short version: The gorls found out I came in second place at GQ contest in High School and my wife was in two talent shows as a kid, so the gorls decided we should have a family talent show. We are doing it on Thanksgiving.

Projects

• Finish setting up this Dell Latitude E5440. I actually think I’m gonna strip down my desk and make it E5440 only for the rest of the month.

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