It has been eight years since my last blog post. In that time, life has taken me on quite the journey—I moved to a new state, my wife and I welcomed two wonderful kids into the world, and I’ve found myself celebrating a sabbatical that provides fresh perspective. With the new year upon us, I’m ready to break that long blogging hiatus, and what better way to start than by refreshing my entire blogging platform? My first step: migrating from Tumblr to Jekyll.
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Guide to add zRAM on the Synology DiskStation DS212j
My Synology DiskStation DS212j has gotten slower over the years ever since I bought in 2012. DSM
operating system security and software upgrades introduced feature bloat that required more memory and caused memory to page to disk. Wikipedia gives an amazing overview of why paging is bad and why zRAM is amazing for memory constrained PCs.
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Nils in Whistler
Crazy Pow at Mt Bachelor in Oregon
Gaming with XDMA CrossFire Passthrough on Ubuntu 17.04
I have used Windows as my primary OS ever since I was a teenager because I am a gamer. Ironically, my gaming hobby also introduced me to my programming/Linux hobby (and now career) which are always at odds with one another. I can either game, which has an unfortunate requirement of needing Windows, or hack, which usually requires Linux. This meant I had to constantly dual boot between Windows and Linux or suffer with a virtual machine with poor video performance. Not ideal.However, a few years ago the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) project enabled near native Windows guest performance by passing through a host video card to a guest. I was extremely interested in trying this out but was deterred by a lack of proof that SLI or CrossFire worked since my other, other hobby is also being a hardware enthusiast.All that changed when I discovered a post authored...
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