Technology, marketing, networking and the odd gadget review.
Plus all the other random stuff that crosses my mind: Hypervisors, VLANs, storage and backups, GPUs, Monitors, Keyboards. Twenty years of digital marketing leaks in from time to time, and so does football (LFC related). Read on at your own peril.
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Latest Posts
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Building Gilgalad Was Never the Plan
I have a regular cadence for building PCs. My first PC was bought in 1994. The next one was in 1999. A laptop in 2004. Then desktops in 2009, 2014, 2019 and 2024. A 5 year gap between PC builds, with frequent GPU upgrades along the way to keep up with hardware requirements. But sometimes, extreme situations and extenuating circumstances can change even the best laid plans. I wasn’t looking to build a new PC for another 3 years, because my existing Windows box already scored better than 87% of all results on 3DMark Time Spy:
This is the story of how and why I built Gilgalad in December 2025, right as DDR5 prices started climbing out of control. A 32GB kit of Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR5 6000 CL36 I’d bought for S$120 in 2024 was going for S$500 by the time it went in the machine, if it had gone in clean. Which it didn’t. Murphy’s law strikes again!
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CDs and the Fiio DM13
Late-stage-capitalism has us longing for a simpler time
One of the earliest teenage memories I have is sitting by the radio at 8pm every night to listen in to the DJ take requests and song dedications. I used to have a blank cassette tape ready to record the latest and greatest songs. I had to hit the record and play buttons at the same time to actually record the songs!
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D-Link DXS-F108T Review: Eight 10G Ports for S$340
A fast, honest little L2 switch with a web UI that will eat your work if you let it.
I spent most of a Saturday moving my house from an unmanaged 10G switch to a managed one, and the switch I picked was the D-Link DXS-F108T — eight 10GBASE-T ports, web management, S$340. Here’s what it actually does, what the datasheet gets wrong, and the four ways its firmware will bite you.
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Five Copies, Two and a Half Fault Domains
3-2-1 is the rule everyone quotes. Three copies of your data, on two different media, with one offsite. It is a good floor and it is easy to think you have cleared it when you have not.
I counted my copies earlier this year and got five. Primary NAS (NAS1), secondary NAS (NAS2), a cold box, a drive at the office, and OneDrive. Comfortably past the bar. Then I counted what could fail independently and got roughly two and a half.
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Where Guest Network Pro Runs Out
The topology post ended on a promise. I said Guest Network Pro on the RT-BE88U would let me finally segment the IoT and media gear off the main network, and that having hardware which supported it natively removed my last excuse for not doing it.
It removed about seventy percent of the excuse. This is where the other thirty percent lives.