Happy Holidays, Hive!

Another Year Come and Gone

Once again we are well into December and I can't believe how fast it has all gone by. This is my first Hive post in months! The truth is, I really have gotten a bit burnt out with the blogging thing. I really don't go many places or do many things these days other than kid related stuff. @little-ricky is in preschool 5 days a week now, which has given me a chance to get back to work and start earning a bit of money again.

I've been doing an interesting job for the past few months, which I can't really say much about since I'm under non-disclosure. All I can really say is that I'm upscaling and restoring a popular 90s TV show for release on Netflix. It sure is a tedious process, but is a nice break from being jumped on all day by an increasingly heavy child!

The project was a great excuse to get a new laptop. I have piles of PCs and Macs around the house that are being used for various things. I was using my Mac Studio M1 Max for audio related tasks, and occasionally to process BRAW footage in resolve but I wanted to get something a bit more portable but with enough power to do serious work. Luckily the new M4 Macs came out so I got myself a maxed out M4 Macbook Pro.

I also went a bit nuts and bought a QNAP all NVME NAS which also has Thunderbolt. I managed to get 5 8TB drives at an awesome discount on that "Prime Big Deal Days" thing on Amazon. Man! There were some seriously good bargains going during that time. Hooking the NAS up directly to the laptop gives me amazing speed, and with all that space it is making life a lot easier working on this project. My old rackmount fileserver is still great, but is really not up to the task of video editing real-time.

I also picked up a gen 2 Asustor Flashtor 12 pro. I almost got the Gen 1 a few months ago, but heard bad things about the processor in it. The CPU was not fast enough to keep up with the drives. That being said, I am a bit dumbfounded by the crazy Frankenstein mash-up of NVME speeds/gens in this thing. It supports a total of 12 NVME drives, but they are all over the place. Luckily I only ordered 6 drives for it, so I'll test it and see how the transfer speeds are. This is meant to replace our main NAS so that @afturner can work directly from the network drive rather than having to work locally, then save everything later to the network.

I just realized that this has turned into an extremely boring post talking about tech that I've bought for myself. Anyhow, I realize that I don't get on here much these days, but I am still alive! I also continue to maintain my Witness node which has had very few issues. I did manage to upgrade to 1.27.6 recently and all is well. Hopefully I'll have more interesting things to report in the coming months. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season!