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Leadership Success. Many leadership qualities have been observed throughout history. Some were adopted by tyrannical leaders while others were exhibited by great leaders. In both cases, the traits of those in charge correlated to their ability to accomplish their desired outcomes. Just as importantly, those same characteristics of a good leader determined how much — or how little — their followers considered them to be effective leaders.

Writing a book and becoming an author is a lifetime dream for many people. But it can be more than a dream. Links are dead, technologies have changed, and weird manufacturer-specific incompatibilities made working through any of these guides impossible! Basically, I wound up using a mish-mash of steps from all of these guides to bungle my way through what was needed for the hardware that I picked out. But here are the important parts that I learned:. In the time since, lots of people me included, I hope!

More importantly, the content that iXsystems has created and shared is quite helpful. It seemed inefficient to try and recreate the same content, especially when iXsystems has done such a good job with theirs. Mission accomplished!

Having a sandbox machine to evaluate the latest and greatest offering is a huge value to me. For the first time ever, I wished that I had a stopwatch running. I was surprised at how smoothly it went. It is probably worth pointing out that along the way, I was asked this in Twitter by JonathonMoore :. How's reporting for you? All the graphs seem to be broken for me, I've seen it reported a few times so think it's a bug. If this is what you think, I agree with you! This machine is ultimately much more of homelab server than it is a NAS.

It has plenty of potential to handle quite a bit of computing responsibilities beyond network-attached-storage. I tried to leverage that flexibility in picking out components for the EconoNAS. In building the homelab server around surprisingly-affordable used Intel Xeon CPUs, I discovered there was quite a bit of inexpensive enterprise network hardware to be found on eBay.

I found inexpensive switches too, but rarely with enough 10Gb ports. Worse, all of the inexpensive switches that I found were meant to installed in a rack and had a large footprint.

In the grand scheme of things, these were—and continue—to be no huge deal. These Windows-specific side effects were easily managed by power cycling my computer after a reboot happens and by manually locking the computer.

I had already conquered two of my pain points in setting up the 10Gb links among the three computers that I wanted on my 10Gb network. But at the end of September, I began a new job that will have me permanently working from home. But this desk quickly became too crowded to accommodate everything that was on top of it: my DIY NAS, a tablet stand, a Google Home Mini, my work laptop, docking station, monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

I decided that I would invest some money in my office space. I bought a matching desk extension with the intention of moving the NAS and homelab machine a few feet further to the right.

Buying a QNAP QSWS , placing it in the middle of where the computers are interconnected, and spending a little bit of time reconfiguring my network interfaces was going to be quite a bit cheaper. My new switch would be located in nearly the same place that my homelab server had previously occupied.

The network cable had to reach about 7—9 feet to my computer and then about 3—4 feet in the opposite direction to reach my DIY NAS and homelab servers on the opposite side of the new desk. Once I had the new switch installed and the desk in position, I powered it up, plugged my computer into it, and powered my computer back on. Just like I had hoped, it simply worked.

My computer obtained an IP address from the router and I successfully tested my connectivity to the Internet. What came next took a little while longer. With my desks firmly entrenched in their positions and all various cables behind my two desks being meticulously some might even say obsessive-compulsively cable managed, it took quite a bit of time. Unplugging and removing the cables 10Gb, 1Gb, USB and power , moving the computers, and then neatly plugging the cables back in was quite a lot of work!

Finally, once the computers were all plugged in, I reconfigured their interfaces to use DHCP and confirmed that my NAS, the homelab server, and my few virtual machines were accessible within the network and could connect out to the Internet.

Firstly, I fired up iperf using my homelab server and my desktop as a client. The next benchmark I performed was to see throughput to the NAS—this is important to me because my NAS is my primary storage for all of my data. Frankly, I was a bit shocked with the results of my read test from NAS. The I was surprised because this exceeded similar tests that I ran back in by a considerable margin.

When I built my inexpensive 10Gb network , I was excited to show how inexpensive it was to build a small network of 2—3 computers. Or are you opting to wait for the price of 10Gb over CAT6 to come down? What other sorts of inexpensive faster-than-Gigabit networking options are you considering? Doing some testing to see how my new 10Gb switch is working. In my prior blog, I recreated the first two of those automated tasks in Home Assistant.

I figured that the best way to find an answer was to create a few automated tasks using Node-RED. When I created my 3D-printing automation , it was using multiple services eWeLink, Google Drive, YouTube, Twitter, and more to accomplish a number of tasks, which resembled a Rube Goldberg machine , but nothing as amazing as this one that the Guiness World Records shared on Youtube.

The automation I put together wound up being convoluted enough that I instantly deleted all of the steps except these: turning the red cherry light on, waiting a few seconds, and then turn it back off. The cherry light would turn on, but never turn off. My office is on the front side of my house, and I was more than a little worried a 3D print would finish late at night and the cherry light would go off all night, potentially worrying my neighbors.

As a result, I unplugged that light a couple of months ago and it has been dormant since. Since originally writing that automation, I installed an IKEA Tertial lamp at my 3D printer to improve the lighting for my time-lapse photography of the 3D prints.

Naturally, I plugged this new lamp into a Sonoff S31 smart outlet and wanted to incorporate the new lamp into my automation.

I could use one node to monitor the state of OctoPrint Printing and then use the switch node based on the two possible states on and off and create two different sequences of nodes to execute based on those two states. Between the inject node and debug node , I was able to understand exactly what was going on inside my sequence.

However, by this time I was really motivated to delete my IFTTT account and I wanted to demonstrate to others that there are options available that complement what Home Assistant does. Within the function node, I wrote a little bit of code to set the message variables that the Pushover node was needing using the Tweet object returned by the Twitter node. In my very basic discovery, here are a few of the things that I liked about creating these automated tasks in Node-RED:.

However, there were a couple minor observations that I had after working with both. But there are other benefits to home automation other than energy savings. All of these things will help me start making my home smarter! Once I had them recreated and working, it freed me to follow through with what I had set out to do! It took a few tries, but Brian C. In that time, Brian and I ironed out the shipping details, and just this morning I dropped the RaspberryPi Kit in the mail.

The package is now on its way to Florida. Congratulations, Brian and have fun with Home Assistant! The setup of Home Assistant and getting it configured to be able to automate the same tasks that IFTTT was assisting with was simple and straightforward.

Would transferring over my automated tasks to Home Assistant be as easy? It was complicated and error-prone enough that I immediately turned off most of the applets in the automation.

Recreating these automated tasks would also give me the opportunity to explore how they could be further simplified and improved. I could set up and create really simple automated tasks from inside a mobile app.

Sharing how easy it was to get Home Assistant installed and working is helpful, but that work is a drop in the bucket with regards to the amount of effort to create and maintain the automated jobs. I ended my previous blog with these questions left unanswered:. As my first automations in Home Assistant, I figured I could create rule s for each of these groups of lights.

Essentially, the automation is all very simple: an event my location or the position of the sun triggers the devices to turn on or off depending on the type of trigger. In total, I created 6 automations to automate all of these lights. I wrote, modified, and rewrote some of these first few automations more than one time. As I progressed, I realized that I would need a better naming convention and descriptions so that the automated tasks were grouped together better.

If I wanted to— and I do —I could use conditions to hone in whether or not the lights in my office actually needed to be turned on when I return home.

As an example, because I like to capture time-lapse recordings of my 3D prints, I leave the lights in my office on during a 3D print. Next up was adding action s to be executed when the automation is triggered. At first, I tinkered with the idea of adding an action for each individual device I wanted to turn on in my office. Much on my mind and in my heart right now is the question: "Why does the Church quite frequently individually although not always collectively seem to so often let people down?

And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Why hasn't a shepherd come in search of this wandering sheep? This post — in an occasional series devoted to signed books in my 'library' as I grandly refer to a great many piles of assorted volumes! Leslie's career is chronicled with charm and a sly wit in his 'Sorta-biography', Pure Imagination.

With Leslie's lavish signature we collectors love an author with a distinctive hand over the careless scribbler! Always a welcoming, gracious host and one of the easiest and most accommodating interviewees who would always deliver the purest of gold!

Then in London in , meeting up with Leslie after the premiere of his stage production of Doctor Dolittle along with Phillip Schofield playing the Doctor who was contributing to a programme I was making about Julie Andrews the voice in the show of the Doc's parrot, Polynesia. Phillip inscribed the cover of my souvenir programme to which Leslie couldn't resist adding his added his own idiosyncratic addition Many thanks for all the music, Leslie — and the memories!

I own signed books that simply feature the author's name; many from a long career of interviewing that have such additions as 'Nice to meet you In signing this particular book, Lord of Misrule , the seldom taciturn Christopher Lee used very few words and a number! Modesty forbids, but if you have a copy of Lord of Misrule , you can look up the reference!

This post is for all you aficionados of the BBC radio serialisation of The Lord of the Rings who have been following my six-monthly Blog and Facebook journey across the original twenty-six weekly episodes as they were first broadcast on Sundays from 8 March to 30 August, forty years ago. Here, all in one place, is the complete set of Eric Fraser's black-and-white illustrations made to accompany the credits to the weekly episodes in the BBC's listings magazine, Radio Times.

All images, except that for the second episode 'The Shadow of the Past' , are reproduced from Fraser's original art now in my collection; in this one instance, the image used was scanned from its printed reproduction in Radio Times. I would, incidentally, be grateful for any information about the ownership of this 'missing' piece! The three images made for episodes 'The Voice of Saruman', ' The Black Gate is Closed' and 'The Window on the West' are published on this blog for the very first time since, during that three week period, there was an industrial dispute at the print-works responsible for producing Radio Times and the magazine was issued only in an slimmed-down emergency format with few, if any, illustrations.

The additional image at the top of this post was a generic design Fraser made featuring Gandalf, Frodo and Sam which was used on the BBC souvenir poster for the series and, subsequently, as a decoration for the box containing the cassette-tape release of the recordings. The Long-awaited Party. The Shadow of the Past. The Black Riders. It is designed to help you apply these abilities immediately to your product and company. Essays Quick Takes Courses About. Andrew Chen Growth Uber "Brian's thoughtful writings on growth touch on key strategic and tactical considerations, making his blog a must-read.

Product Channel Fit Execution won't matter unless you have product channel fit. Seek Authentic Growth The cycle of meaningless growth and how to avoid it. Why Retention Is The Silent Killer Why retention is still the 1 factor for why a product fails highlights some important lessons of how we should be thinking about it.

Why Focus Wins I have come very close to a few very big wins in my career. Advanced Courses I co-host selective 8 week programs designed for experienced practitioners with some of the most amazing leaders from Uber, Pinterest, Grubhub, Atlassian, SurveyMonkey, LinkedIn, Google and more.

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