You Can't Silence Us

Data Infrastructure and Prepping

Records, communication, and security are all important parts of prepping. A robust computer network can work of all of those things. We’ve talked about the other sections of the prepping pyramid, but haven’t spent a lot of time on how we can use information technology to strengthen the other sections of the pyramid.

You may or may not remember that I changed my home network to an Omada system back in February. The Wifi coverage is excellent, but now there are other issues that I would like to take care of.

  • I wasn’t happy with how crowded and sloppy the onQ panel that contains everything is. It looks like a bowl of spaghetti and even though I have the largest panel made, it’s still crowded.
  • I am using Ring Cameras for surveillance, but I am not happy with them, for reasons that will be covered in a future post.
  • I have a Terramaster NAS with four 4TB NvMe SSDs in it, but I can’t get those SSDs any more because they now cost 5 times more than they once did.
  • There is a second setup in the bedroom I use as an office. It has an Omada switch, and it runs my office equipment. The issue is the UPS there just died, and I want everything consolidated, so I am moving that into the main server.

So I have decided to make a few changes. We are keeping the Omada system, but I am making a few upgrades.

  • I am mounting a 12U server cabinet on the wall of the utility closet in the house. This will make things cleaner and easier to manage.
  • I will be putting an 8 bay HDD rack in the cabinet. It will be used as both a NDVR and as a NAS device.
  • Three rooms in the house are device dense: the living room, the master bedroom, and the office. I am going to clean up the architecture a bit to make things faster and more resilient.

So how are we doing this? Well, in the racks, there will be:

  • A rackmount UPS. I just need enough storage to ridge the second or two it takes my powerwalls to take over when the power fails.
  • Power distribution
  • An Omada controller
  • An Omada gateway
  • A 24 port keystone patch panel
  • An Omada 16 port managed POE switch
  • an 8 bay rackmount HDD rack.
  • A shelf where the modem will be, along with my current NAS (until the HDD rack is installed)
  • There will be 4 remaining U for future additions

Records

Records are important. Having copies of things like financial records, professional licenses, certifications, and other important documents will allow you to rebuild your life in the aftermath of a large disaster. Ask the residents whose lives were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina how important those records were in doing that. Having a robust set of electronic records with copies of every important document, all in a RAID, is a great step towards that goal. I am thinking of at least 12TB of RAID storage space for important files. I need it, because I scan every document, bill, and receipt that comes into this house.

Security

One or two of the HDD bays will be reserved for surveillance hard drives. I am looking at 20TB or more of storage space for the camera system. Once the weather gets cooler, I am planning on running Ethernet cables in the attic for a PTZ camera, two outdoor wide view cameras, a doorbell camera, and one or two covering other areas of the property, all in 4k. So, a total of 5-6 cameras that will record 24/7. That takes up more storage space than my documents and files.

That’s the hardware. I will also have it organized into several VLANs for network security. There will be a VLAN for:

  • One for infrastructure. This will allow APs to be on their own VLAN, as well as controllers and those sorts of things.
  • IOT devices, so I can limit how much they will spy on the rest of the house. They will only access each other and the Internet.
  • Entertainment devices like televisions and SONOS speakers. Internet only
  • A Guest VLAN that will only have access to a printer and the Internet
  • Then phones belonging to my wife and I that will have full access.

I will decide more on rules later, but that is the idea in my head for now.

Implementation

First step is to get all of the hardware installed and move the network that already exists into the server cabinet. Then I will setup VLANs. After that, we will install the HDD rack and move the NAS files there. I have another HDD based NAS that I can use as a backup file server.

People who have read this post: 13
By Divemedic, ago

Why I’m Not Libertarian, pt 27

This is where the Libertarian Party is now.

If you don’t support rioting to protect illegal immigrants, you’re a tyrant, according to the Libertarian Party.

The term is peaceably assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Rioting, blocking others from traveling, committing violent acts and arson, are not peaceable or a petition.

I just can’t be a libertarian. I like classical liberal or perhaps Lockean liberal better.

People who have read this post: 225
By Divemedic, ago

Taxation for Profit

Ever since DeSantis came out with his proposal to virtually eliminate property taxes, by social media feeds have been absolutely overrun with people screaming about how towns will go bankrupt and have to shut down police, fire, and roads. It is so pervasive and widespread, it’s like a chorus. They are also being misleading.

I want to use my town as an example. For a reminder on how Florida does property taxes, you can read this old post from a year ago. Where I live is a town with 3500 people living in about 900 households. Our only commercial property consists of a convenience store and a single diner. Of those households, nearly a quarter of them (18%) pay less than $200 a year in non-school taxes.

Town revenue breaks down like this:

  • 29% of revenue is from ad valorem taxes, with almost half of it (14% of the total revenue) being from ad valorem taxes on homestead property.
  • 29% of revenue comes from fees for services (fees for water, sewer, trash, and other city services)
  • 20% from state and federal funding
  • 10% from shared taxes with the county
  • 10% from utility taxes
  • 2% miscellaneous sources

Keep in mind that the town LOVES my neighborhood, because the people in it comprise only 1/10 of the town’s population, but pay about 25% of all ad valorem taxes. Another 18% pay nothing, or nearly so. The governor’s plan would increase homestead exemptions to $250,000 (from $50,000 currently) in the first year, then to $500,000 the second year, meaning no one would pay taxes on any home until its value was more than $500,000, except for school taxes, which would remain unaffected. A complete loss of ad valorem taxes on homestead property would mean the city would face a loss of 14% of their revenues. What would have to be cut? Let’s look at the town budget. This is where the town budget goes:

  • 33% to the Police department
  • 29% to Administration, Finance, Legal, Legislative, and Planning
  • 22% to Public Works and solid waste
  • 10% to the library
  • 2% to Code Enforcement
  • 3% to Historical Preservation, Cemetaries, and Special Events
  • 1% to parks and recreation

It seems to me that the town is pretty top heavy in administration, the library is an extravagance, and I would argue that a town of 3500 people doesn’t need 15 police officers. I would cut the library, and I would cut the police and admin budgets by 10% each. That takes care of most of the cuts you need right there.

  • Will a small town with almost zero crime miss a single cop being cut from the budget? Likely not.
  • Likewise, the library just isn’t as important as it used to be in the age of the Internet. Certainly not important enough to take money from residents, and taking the homes of those who won’t pay.
  • and seriously, a third of the city budget being administrative overhead?

The town has 50 employees, with 15 being law enforcement officers. Granted, 20 of the town’s employees are seasonal or part time, but that seems like a heavy dead load for a town of 3500, where a fifth of them aren’t paying any taxes at all.

Since 2020, the town’s total revenue has increased 250%, but the population has only increased by 6%.

Losing ad valorem taxes on homestead property isn’t just doable, it’s the only way to curb the bloat. Towns are treating these massive windfalls from taxation like a teenager who just found his dad’s credit cards.

People who have read this post: 307
By Divemedic, ago

Race Card

A black woman parks in a handicap spot without a permit. She has a warrant. She has no license. But the cop is picking on her because she is black.

People who have read this post: 417
By Divemedic, ago

Payback and Food

I have had some really shitty bosses. My last two employers, while creating shitty working conditions and a bit of wage theft, weren’t even the worst of them. I had a boss once at an ambulance company who wouldn’t let us have food and water in the ambulance, and wouldn’t allow us to have meal breaks. His saying was “I don’t pay you to eat lunch, I pay you to transport patients.” His other (in)famous quote was, “The customer is always right. In our case, the customer is the nursing home, doctor’s office, or hospital that hires our service. It’s not the patients, the patients are cargo, and no one cares what cargo thinks.” He eventually got caught committing Medicare fraud and was forced to reimburse the government some of the money (about 25%) that the Feds accused him of stealing. Yeah, real nice guy.

It was that guy, more than most, who convinced me just how corrupt the government is, especially at the Federal level. It’s also about as rare as hair on a frog’s ass to see anyone get anything over on these kinds of people. It seems that crime DOES pay, if you are friends or coconspirators with the guys who decides what a crime is.

There was one boss that I really wound up getting a bit of payback, and it’s a great story. This was back in the late 90s, while my divorce was pending. I worked for a steel mill back then, and the steel mill went into bankruptcy. They made the announcement at quitting time. They told everyone to shut down the machines, stand in line, and clock out for the day. As you clocked out, they handed you your last check and told you whether or not you would still have a job. As the maintenance manager, I didn’t get laid off that round, but some of my employees did. Many of them complained that their checks were shorted.

One of the employees who got laid off was the girl in charge of the tool crib. It was her job to watch over the tools that employees could sign out, and ensure that the employee signing them out actually brought them back. There was some expensive stuff in there: welders, plasma cutters, some tool sets were thousands of dollars in value. Once she was gone, the employees who were left figured that those tools were free for the taking, and taking is exactly what happened.

A month later, it was my turn to be laid off. When they let me go, I was told that one of my employees would be taking over my job. He had been trying to get my job since I started there- even going so far as to sabotage things and then fix them quickly, pointing out that I wasn’t as good or as fast as he was. It’s easy to find the problem when you are the one who broke it. He would do things like move a wire in a control device from one terminal to another after taking all of the wire labels off. That was a tough thing to find. Trust me, this is important later.

Anyhow, they laid me off and claimed that since I was responsible for all of the tools that were now missing, I could consider that to be my last paycheck. I got screwed out of 2 grand or so.

A few months passed. In the meantime, I was homeless and really hurting for money. At this time, I was living in my car. I had a second job, picking up garbage after the Shamu show at Sea World. That paid less than $7 an hour. I bought a car at a “buy here, pay here.” I wasn’t eating much, I couldn’t afford it. I showered at work. As a perk of the job, the city allowed us to use the gym at the civic center for $20 per month. I joined so I could take showers at the gym. I worked out a lot because the gym was air conditioned.

One day, I got a call from the vice president. It went like this: “Dive, this is Stan.” Me: “What do you want?” Stan: “I have a problem, my number two line is down and Sonny can’t find the problem. I’m losing $2,000 an hour.” Me: “Yeah, you have a problem all right. It sucks to be you.”

Line two was a large pipe machine. It would take rolls of flat stainless steel and roll it into a tube. The ends of the steel would be welded together with a strong (50kw) microwave welder, then it would pass through a high frequency annealer that would heat the pipe using radio waves to temper the pipe. These things are fast- the high speed line was capable of making over 100 feet per minute of 1 inch stainless steel tubing. It’s all controlled by a microprocessor, and some of the electronics can be complicated. The pipe is pulled through the mill by a pair of 100 horsepower electric motors mounted on large transmissions.

So it turns out that I am pretty much the only guy in the entire state who knows how to repair stainless steel cold rolling machines with microwave welders. He is desperate. He practically begged me to come and help him. So, I told him that I would come and fix the machine for the 2 grand he owed me, any parts that were needed, plus a thousand bucks in a flat service fee, and I wanted the money in my hand before I would touch anything. He immediately replied, “Fine, as long as you are here within 90 minutes.” Damn, he didn’t hesitate, I must not have asked for enough.

So I was there in just over an hour, and it was an easy fix. He handed me $3000, I replaced a blown fuse, reset the microprocessor, and the machine started right up. Sonny was livid: “Demand your money back, he didn’t do shit. All he did was change a fuse and push two buttons! I could have done that!”

I looked at Sonny and replied: “So if you could do it, why didn’t you?” His answer was that he didn’t know which fuse to change. I laughed and said, “That’s what costs money- knowing which fuse to change and what buttons to push.”

That $3k really helped. It was two months’ pay at my other two jobs combined, and it was under the table money that the ex-wife couldn’t get her greedy fingers on.

Over the next year, I would get called over there to fix things from time to time. The charge was the same- $1000 per visit, flat charge, for up to two hours of work, then it was $250 per hour after that. I was working 3 or 4 days a month and making as much as I had been while I was working there full time. This gig helped me to be able to eat and eventually get an apartment with a roommate. I will admit that I did feel guilty at one point, and offered Stan a service contract where I would come out one day per week for $500 per week, plus emergency calls at $500 per visit. He said no.

One of the calls was because his eddy tester was broken. The plant had this eddy tester that you would run a pipe through, and it would test the integrity of the weld. The tester was connected to a PC with a proprietary expansion card. You can’t ship ISO certified welded pipe without it. Theirs was broken, and the company that made it charged portal to portal for service visits. It was expensive to have the factory guy come out, and he wouldn’t arrive for a couple of days.

I got there, and it turns out the motherboard of the PC was fried, but the expansion card and sensor was working. So I went to Stan and told him I would fix it that night, but it was going to cost him $5000. He paid it, and I fixed it by running home and grabbing my own PC to use as parts. The next day, I went and bought a new PC for only $1000. Some of my coworkers at the fire department told me I ripped him off by selling him a 2 year old PC for five times what it was worth. Whatever, he had a choice, and it still cost him less than it would have cost to have a factory guy come out, so I had no problems sleeping in the apartment I shared with my roommate.

The place finally shut down, but I got my money’s worth. The funniest part of the story was the two guys who owned the company went on to open another business a year later, and hired me to do some side work in their new place. I cut them a deal- I did the jobs for slightly less. One of those was putting a rotary phase converter into the place so he could run three phase motors on single phase power.

The extra cash I got from those guys was a big help when I needed it, and it was a bit of payback for how they screwed me on the way out.

This story is part of the reason why I get angry when the GenZ faggots tell me that I had it easy, and how hard their lives are now. Those blue haired commie idiots wouldn’t know hard knocks if it pushed a broomstick up their ass.

People who have read this post: 548
By Divemedic, ago

Preparing for War

White liberal women training to be in a Roman Legion, except with smaller shields, no leg protection, and only a single rank.

Does this mean I need some melee weapons? A Gladius or even a cutlass? Excuse for me to get one from here.

Are those shields rated to stop 5.56mm?

People who have read this post: 408
By Divemedic, ago

No Longer Paying

I am so tired of people telling me and asking me how AI is going to replace all of us in our jobs. These AI models get so much stuff wrong that I find myself arguing with the stupid computer. Here is a great example:

I was researching water flows for the drains in my rear concrete deck. Grok insisted that this narrow channel of 2 inches deep by 1.5 inches wide can move 240 gallons per minute of rainwater. We went back and forth repeatedly, so I used the formula for calculating water flow through a fire hose to explain my point. Here was what it said:

Why the Formula Doesn’t Fit Your Deco Drain

  • Your drain operates under gravity/open channel flow, not high pressure.
  • The “pressure” (head) is extremely low — usually just 0.1 to 0.5 inches of water depth over the slot or in the channel (a tiny fraction of a psi).
  • Water enters gradually along the full 24 ft length, and the channel flows partially full with a free surface (not pressurized pipe flow).
  • The end opening is the outlet, but flow is limited by the entire channel’s hydraulics, slope, and roughness — not a single orifice under tank pressure.

If you plugged tiny head values into the 29.7 formula, you’d get very low flow numbers, which is why it feels wrong compared to manufacturer-style ratings.

Bottom Line

Your intuition is good that the small channel limits things, and these narrow deco drains are not high-capacity systems. 100–150 GPM is a reasonable practical maximum for a well-installed 24 ft run — enough for normal pool deck runoff in most rains, but it can pond in heavy downpours or if clogged/poorly sloped.

The 29.7 formula overestimates or underestimates dramatically here because the conditions are completely different.

So I replied with: I still think 150 gallons per minute is far too high. A firehose is flowing those numbers, but the stream is under much more pressure and is moving much faster. I think you are incorrect here in insisting that this drain is moving as much water as a fire hose.

So this is the answer I got:

I appreciate you pushing back — you’re right, and I was too optimistic in my earlier estimates.

The firehose comparison highlights a key point: a firehose at 250 GPM is shooting a fast, pressurized jet (often 50+ psi). Your Deco Drain moves water slowly under gravity with almost no pressure (just inches of water head), through a narrow channel. That makes high numbers unrealistic.

Better Data on Narrow Deck Drains Like Deck-O-Drain

Deck-O-Drain (and similar PVC linear drains) has an internal channel roughly 1.5–1.75″ wide by ~2–2.5″ deep. Real manufacturer and product data for comparable narrow systems shows:

  • Typical capacity: 4–10 GPM per linear foot at good slope (¼” per foot), depending on the exact model.
  • For 24 feet: Roughly 100–180 GPM theoretical max under ideal lab conditions, but real-world practical capacity is lower — often 60–120 GPM total before ponding starts.

Many similar slim drains rate even lower:

  • 1.25″ channel examples: ~4.2 GPM per foot → ~100 GPM for 24 ft.
  • Stegmeier Frontier-style: Up to ~9.6 GPM/ft in some tests.
  • Other 2″ class deck drains: Often max out in the 15–30 GPM range for short sections, scaling modestly with length.

The outlet pipe (usually 1.5″ PVC) frequently bottlenecks first at around 40–70 GPM under gravity.

It’s still wrong. There is a maximum amount of water that can move through a narrow channel, and making the channel longer doesn’t increase that. A mile long Deco drain isn’t going to move 52,000 gallons per minute. AI is nowhere near being ready to take any job that requires applying logic.

We went back and forth before the system began agreeing with everything I said. AI isn’t ready for this. This is why I no longer pay for AI access.

In case you are wondering, the nozzle formula is:

Flow equals 29.7 times the square of the diameter times the square root of the pressure.

Q (GPM) ≈ 29.7 × d² × √P, where d is the diameter in inches and P is nozzle pressure in psi.

This is a formula that I know well from my firefighting days. That’s why flows of 200+ gallons per minute were seeming far too high.

People who have read this post: 174
By Divemedic, ago