Aluminum Dirt

I’m Andrew Chao, a programmer, a mathematician, and the guy that made this website.

  • Hyper Converged Infrastructure with Proxmox

    After Broadcom aquired VMware, I was once again introduced to a name that had already been floating around the home-lab circles: Proxmox. At the time I still had no idea what it even was, but as my little experiment began to grow and take a life of its own, I began to find myself searching…

  • Fallout: Nostalgia for the Future

    Fallout is something near and dear to my heart, with the original isometric games playing on a small netbook, where the Atom processor would heat up the table if there were more than 4 enemies on the screen at. It sits right next to the memories of “I Love Lucy” re-runs and that hefty Windows…

  • Hello World #2: Migrating the Website

    I’ve previously been using Ghost as the primary software for my website, although that has turned out to be a questionable decision. Software support was fine and the service was stable enough, but general experience of trying to get it to work nicely with Docker (and security updates) has made it a bit of a…

  • It’s the New Year!

    I haven’t been keeping up with regular posts recently, but here is a update on what I’ve been doing recently and what is going to happen moving forward. A Change in Mentality… Last year was a doozy, and after 2020 I’m quite sure everyone has lost the ball when it comes to time. Remote work,…

  • Sleep States

    When I first got my own computer, it was a refurbished Windows laptop built to last all of 4 years. It wasn’t particularity fast or well built, but it was mine. I wasn’t so well versed with technology back then, and kept most everything at stock settings. This led to some unusual issues – sometimes…

  • IoT Sensors with InfluxDB

    I’ve discovered rather that microprocessors are rather cheap these days, and development kits that originally went for 20$ – 50$ can now be had for less than 10$. An ESP32 averages 6$ and the Pico series is roughly in the same place. Why would I would even need such a thing? I have other, significantly…