The build log.
Short posts about work as it actually goes: what shipped, what broke, and what turned out to be wrong. Pulled live from feed.jacobnollette.com.
Updates every few minutes
- View on Mastodon ↗
29.49/yr - screens (vnc client)
- View on Mastodon ↗
99/yr - spark mail
- View on Mastodon ↗
9.99/yr - prompt (ssh client)
- View on Mastodon ↗
56.99/yr - fantastical
- View on Mastodon ↗
99/yr - evernote
- View on Mastodon ↗
$20/month - apple care on three devices
- View on Mastodon ↗
o365 - 10.88
(I was primarily a mac and google user; still using google for a number of accounts, and opensource editors) - View on Mastodon ↗
granolla - 17
- View on Mastodon ↗
adobe creative cloud - 76.31
- View on Mastodon ↗
money saved from switching to linux:
- View on Mastodon ↗
The takeaway: on a 1 gig line, the UniFi Dream Machine Pro was the bottleneck, not the ISP. A consumer VPN on most networks plus intrusion prevention on the backup VLANs was more than it could encrypt and inspect. One QoS rule now puts people first and lets backups have the rest. How the lab's main AZ does VPN needs rethinking, probably somewhere other than the router.
- View on Mastodon ↗
Then the uploads hit the network. WAN latency spiked to 1.9 s, and I blamed inbound traffic, since QoS can't shape what has already crossed the ISP link, so I capped B2 downloads. Wrong. The router's CPU was at 93–97% from VPN encryption plus IPS inspecting every backup byte. With the VPN gone and IPS off the server VLANs, download hit 1 Gbit/s at 4–8 ms latency. Pulled the cap the same night.
- View on Mastodon ↗
Rebuilt the backups today. Everything now goes from the cluster straight to B2 with restic — no more mirroring to an offsite box first. Cloud drives are backed up from read-only rclone mounts, so nothing gets staged on Ceph on the way. An 11 TiB archive tree became B2-only once its pinned snapshot passed a restic read check and all 297,369 file paths matched the manifest before deleting the local copy.
- View on Mastodon ↗
20 fucking hours on a 16" laptop
- View on Mastodon ↗
the productivity gains from having a more customizable setup means, that the machine can expand your familiarity with the operating system. meaning, your operating system, can more closely align to the pathways you learn, and produce
- View on Mastodon ↗
7 years, if it was a car...
- View on Mastodon ↗
on one hand, the workspaces and keyboard shortcuts help with cleaning up wip; on the other hand, i wasn't running any of the extreme power management plugin i had written for the 2020 xps 17 i bought used to start this journey. in that case i was getting 8 hours on a 7 year old laptop, with a new battery
- View on Mastodon ↗
I dont know who needs to hear this - but I switched from a $3000 m3 max 16" laptop, to a lower mid range xps16 2025, for about 2000 on an openbox in 2026. I am running omarchy quatro linux, and its getting almost 20h of battery life, listening to music, running terminal, and ripping through a handfull of workspaces or chromium.
- View on Mastodon ↗
We've had software defined networks, software defined storage, software define architecture. This is becoming software defined knowledge.
- View on Mastodon ↗
I dont know if I am drawn to Android;
In fact this transition away from the mac desktop, has also coincidentially been drawing me away from the physical phone... the mobile device, and the standard app-base desktop. Away from traditional software interactions, really. The workflow has grown to mostly represent pure agentic terminal work; the tui; which has become a systematic growth of typically like a collection of ongoing prompt loops, and software file system collections.
The long version is in the case studies.
Once a piece of work is finished, it gets written up properly.