Writing with LLMs

I listened to a podcast where an author spoke about using agentic AI to make a writing “team”. He had beta reader/critics responding from specific perspectives, another grammar LLM, and an editor LLM – he’d pass drafts back and forth between them like they were people as part of the process.

I have a couple of paid LLMs – Microsoft CoPilot for 365 as part of a subscription, and Perplexity (I have a 3 month free trial program). I started playing with them to see how they could benefit.

I wanted to research a science-fiction book I’d read as a teenager, I only knew the name of one of the races in book, and tried Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT and CoPilot. Only ChatGPT pulled up the book title and author, along with a summary – and this was the free ChatGPT version.

I assume that’s more a function of the training library, not the LLM itself.

Then, I tried giving them outlines of plot ideas to write – Gemini came in last, the others were comparable. As a last task, I asked them all to write a 500-word short story about an astronaut stranded on Mars, with elements of the story Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Martian.

ChatGPT felt more nuanced, CoPilot even used the names of the sources in the story. Perplexity felt like a direct-to-dvd version of “The Martian” that you’d see one on of those free channels on Roku.

I think I’ll use CoPilot when writing, I like the idea of training it on my own documents and having it easily identify my writing style and body of work out of the box.

Posted on November 8th, 2025 in ai, writing | No Comments »

Thinkpad homelab upgrades

You can spend a lot of money building a homelab that competes with small office networks. Or, you can do what I did and build a network of cast-off, unwanted hardware.

A thrift-store Synology NAS, “parts-only” Thinkpad laptop with a cracked screen and broken keyboard, and a $5 goodwill router, flashed with OpenWRT forms the basis of my home network. Proxmox, a free hypervisor allowed me to test LXC and docker containers, block ads on my network with Pi-Hole, run a test Windows Active Directory environment, run Windows95 as a client VM, and host my BBS on this collection of cast-offs.

I’m happy with it, and am always looking for new ways to upgrade on the cheap.

I’ve wondered if I could add another hard drive to the system, or speed up the storage.

I found this post after a web search – apparently, Thinkpads support SATA Express, an older technology meant to bridge support between SATA and NVMe drives. The drive interface is backwards compatible with SATA, but provides 2 PCI-x lanes (instead of 4 with native NVMe).

While a compromise, it appear to be quite a bit faster in testing.

Posted on November 2nd, 2025 in journal | No Comments »

Living With Proxmox

My Proxmox VE 9.0 upgrade went smoothly, I ran the following command from a shell:

apt update; apt upgrade;pve8to9

Then, updated my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to “Trixie” repositories, then ran:

apt dist-upgrade

to run the upgrade process. Admittedly, I’m not running Ceph or Proxmox Backup server, it’s definitely worth checking out the update documentation at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Upgrade_from_8_to_9#In-place_upgrade.

A quick reboot, just because, and everything was up and running.

A week later, unrelated to the upgrade, I noticed that my secondary PVE server was unresponsive. I saw lots of “read error on drive /dev/sda” messages, and rebooted the server. BIOS complained the boot drive was unavailable. I checked the cables, all seemed fine.Still no boot.

Unfortunately, I’d moved the BBS from the primary server to the secondary server when I did maintenance on the primary, and forgot to move it back. The two VMs running on the secondary were the BBS and Proxmox Backup Server.

I installed a fresh copy of Windows 11 and copied by daily BBS backup (a file backup to my NAS) to it, got the BBS working.

I took another look at the secondary, reseated everything and now it booted. The PVE gui came up, but the VMs were unavailable.

smartctl -a /dev/sda

didn’t pull up anything out of the ordinary, no remapped sectors, moderate power-up time.

I saw the message:

TASK ERROR: activating LV 'pve/data' failed: Check of pool pve/data failed (status:64). Manual repair required!

Looking at all of the LVM commands, the logical volumes all looked OK. Searching on the web revealed the command:

lvconvert --repair pve/data

After I ran the lvconvert command, the VMs appeared in PVE just fine. I copied the data files from the new BBS VM to the old BBS, and all is back up and running.

This brought up an issue with Proxmox Backup server – since it needs a VM to run, if the host running PBS crashes, how do you restore it? I wasn’t sure if the VM stored metadata in the VM or on the backup media. Hopefully the latter. While the deduplication is nice (the BBS file area is 11 gigabytes and rarely changes) being able to restore a VM directly from any Proxmox VE server is nice. I’ll have to think about what to do in the future.

I suppose I could use the Proxmox built-in backup tool to backup PBS, and PBS to back up everything else.Then, restore PBS from backup (a 2-click process) and restore everything else from PBS.

I run a 2 node cluster without Ceph and HA. One possibility is to add a third node to create a proper quorum and run Proxmox Backup server on that node. If backup metadata is stored on the target media, then an occasional drive clone would suffice.

Posted on August 31st, 2025 in homalab | No Comments »

Proxmox 9.0 released

Proxmox VE 9.0 is out, and it brings a solid set of updates. Built on Debian 13 “Trixie” with Linux kernel 6.14.8, it improves hardware support and overall performance.

Core Updates

The virtualization stack includes:

QEMU 10.0.2 for better VM performance
LXC 6.0.4 for improved container stability
ZFS 2.3.3 with RAID-Z expansion
Ceph Squid 19.2.3 for distributed storage (useful in clusters)

Storage & Networking

You can now take VM snapshots on thick-provisioned LVM storage, which is helpful if you use Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Proxmox also adds Software-Defined Networking (SDN) features like OpenFabric and OSPF routing—ideal for more complex setups.

High Availability & Monitoring

New HA affinity rules let you control where VMs run in a cluster. Plus, real-time node metrics give better visibility into system performance.

Interface Improvements

The mobile UI has been redesigned, making it easier to manage your lab from a phone or tablet.

Upgrade Notes

If you’re running Proxmox VE 8.4, the upgrade path is well-documented. You’ll want to run the pve8to9 checklist script before upgrading to catch any issues.

For homelabbers, Proxmox VE 9.0 offers meaningful improvements without adding complexity. It’s a worthwhile upgrade if you want better performance, more control, and cleaner management tools.

Posted on August 15th, 2025 in journal | No Comments »

Citizen’s Band

Antique CB Radio

Posted on August 9th, 2025 in android | No Comments »

Bookstore Still Life

Dark Carnival, Oakland CA

Posted on January 31st, 2025 in android | No Comments »

Thinkpad Homelab Upgrades

You can spend a lot of money building a homelab that competes with small office networks. Or, you can do what I did and build a network of cast-off, unwanted hardware.

I’m happy with it, and am always looking for new ways to upgrade on the cheap.

I’ve wondered if I could add another hard drive to the system, or speed up the storage. I found this post after a web search – apparently, Thinkpads support SATA Express, an older technology meant to bridge support between SATA and NVMe drives. The drive interface is backwards compatible with SATA, but provides 2 PCI-x lanes (instead of 4 with native NVMe).

While a compromise, it appear to be quite a bit faster in testing.

And, I’ve found adapters that support 2 NVMe drives on one SATA port. Add 2 drives, set up a ZFS pool, on a laptop – the mind boggles.

Posted on January 30th, 2025 in blog | No Comments »

Proxmox Datacenter Manager: Centralized Management for Proxmox VE

Proxmox Server Solutions announced the first Alpha release of Proxmox Datacenter Manager, an open-source server management software designed to provide a unified overview of all nodes and clusters in Proxmox VE environments. This new tool aims to simplify the management of virtualized environments by offering a modern user interface and centralized control.

Key Features of Proxmox Datacenter Manager

Centralized Overview: The Datacenter Manager offers a centralized view of all individual nodes and clusters, making it easier to monitor and manage resources.
Basic Management: Users can perform basic operations such as shutdown, reboot, start, and remote migration of virtual guests between different data centers.
Modern User Interface: The tool features a redesigned front end, optimized for accessibility, speed, and compatibility.
Resource Management: It allows for better organization of resources, including hierarchical groups or resource pools, and simplifies adding remotes.
Integration with Proxmox VE: For more complex configurations, the tool links directly to the full web interface of Proxmox VE.
Future Enhancements: The roadmap includes plans for improved health state overview, support for multiple VRFs across clusters, and off-site replication copies for manual recovery.

The Alpha version of Proxmox Datacenter Manager is available for testing and collaboration. Installation is similar to Proxmox VE Server, with a straightforward process that includes selecting the target disk, configuring network settings, and setting up user credentials.

Proxmox Datacenter Manager is a promising tool for administrators managing multiple standalone nodes or clusters. While still in the Alpha stage, it provides valuable features that streamline administrative tasks and improve resource management. The Proxmox community is encouraged to test and provide feedback to help shape the future of this project.

More information and a download link are available on their wiki at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_Datacenter_Manager_Roadmap

Posted on December 23rd, 2024 in blog | No Comments »

RIP tteck, creator of Proxmox Helper Scripts

tteck’s Proxmox Helper Scripts are what helped me dig more deeply into Proxmox; they automate upgrades and made it simple to try out homelab apps from a shell scripts. Sorry to hear that he was in failing health, but the time I read the post below, he had already passed away.

It looks like there’s a major change coming to one of our favorite repos: Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts Project Update (EDIT) · tteck/Proxmox · Discussion #4009

Recently, TTeck was diagnosed with incurable appendix cancer that has already spread. If you appreciate his scripts, now’s the time to show him some love. TTeck’s work has been a tremendous help to me over the years, probably for you too.

The repository has already been migrated to a GitHub organization and will now be managed by the community (thanks guys).

Posted on November 24th, 2024 in blog | No Comments »

Proxmox VE 8.3 released

Proxmox VE 8.3 has been released, and it was a painless upgrade from version 8.2. The new version includes:

Support for Ceph Reef and Ceph Squid
Tighter integration of the SDN stack with the firewall
New webhook notification target
New view type “Tag View” for the resource tree
New change detection modes for speeding up container backups to Proxmox Backup Server
More streamlined guest import from files in OVF and OVA

I’ve been extremely happy with my Proxmox instance; I’ve moved quite a few docker containers to standalone LXC containers, configured backups using the built-in tool (I’m going to set up Proxmox Backup Server next…) and gotten more use out of a system that had previously been running one application on bare metal.

Release notes
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap

Download
https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads

Posted on November 24th, 2024 in blog | No Comments »

New Outlook – not ready for Prime Time?

I’ve been fighting with and against the “New” Microsoft Outlook, as I’ve written about. My biggest issue revolves around the replacement of Outlook’s Tasks functionality with Microsoft ToDo. I use Tasks heavily, sorting by category and using dates to prioritize daily lists.

My email and meeting workflow ties closely to OneNote and Outlook – and I can’t get the same level of integration with the new Outlook.

Windows Central published an article entitled “Microsoft is wrong: The new Outlook for Windows is not ready for prime time”, and after some time trying to work with the new Outlook, it seems that I’m not alone.

From the article:

So, what can Microsoft do to improve Outlook for Windows? First, it should really think about abandoning web tech in favor of a native Windows UI framework such as WinUI 3. I can’t fathom why Microsoft thinks it’s acceptable for a first-party, pre-installed, essential Windows app such as a mail client to not showcase the best of Windows.

Second, it needs to support basic touch functionality at the very least. Microsoft’s best-selling PC is a tablet called the Surface Pro, and now that device is going to suffer significantly when it comes to reading email in the default Windows client. It’s just shocking.

Third, it needs to be faster and lighter. If it’s not as fast as the old Mail & Calendar apps, I don’t want it. Those are so lightweight and easy to use, the only problem they have is Microsoft abandoned them. I wouldn’t be mad if Microsoft decided to unabandon them and deliver new features, functionality, and UI improvements to these older apps instead.

In short, I think Microsoft needs to go back to the drawing board. The default Windows mail client should be a native Windows app, not a web app.

[via windowscentral]

Posted on August 3rd, 2024 in blog | No Comments »

Walkabout

“did you see that?”

Posted on July 11th, 2024 in android | No Comments »

State of the Home Office, 2024

I’ve worked out of my home since 2020. My home office has evolved and has become a place where I enjoy working. With a little effort, you can improve any home office environment with some of the tips I’ve discovered.

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Posted on June 20th, 2024 in blog | No Comments »

Homelab Maintenance

I work out of my home office full-time. I spend a lot of time here, and so I’m used to the way things look – and sound. I was on a video call this week when something felt off. I took off my headphones and heard it.

clunk.

One of the drives in my homelab was beginning to fail.

My Proxmox server hosts an Active Directory domain, Windows test environment, LXC containers and Docker containers. It hosts media services, ad blocking and backs up data from my family’s computers.

This “homelab” isn’t one of those half-racks full of industrial-grade servers in closets you see on YouTube. I assembled mine over the years from end-of-life, unwanted and discounted hardware. My primary server is a laptop purchased on eBay for parts, with screen burn in and missing keys. It did, however, come with 20 GB of RAM. My firewall and NAS came from thrift shops. I’d thought about upgrading it, but it serves my needs well and cost less than a used Dell desktop.

Looking at the NAS logs, I saw one drive was logging an I/O error every 30 seconds. One drive might be failing. I deactivated the drive (turns out it was one of the newer white-label drives) and replaced it with a spare I had laying around. Once let the consistency check finished, all was good.

I deactivated the failing drive and replaced it with a spare drive I had laying around. I would have set up a hot-spare, but I needed all of the bays in my NAS.

clunk.

While the NAS drive was beginning to fail, the clunk was coming from an external USB drive used to back up the NAS. The drive was sitting vertically as was designed. I turned it around so the drive lay horizontally, and the noise went away. When I was starting out in IT, we had a superstition about running spinning drives sideways, thinking it could make a head crash easier. Turns out that superstition still lives in the back of my head.

I spent the rest of the afternoon pruning backups, putting a replacement external drive on my Amazon wishlist, and re-routing cables, like you do when you run a homelab.

Posted on May 11th, 2024 in blog | No Comments »

Old Iron

IBM 360 Mainframe at the Computer History Museum.

Posted on May 3rd, 2024 in android, blog | No Comments »

Proxmox VE 8.2 released!

With all of the changes at Broadcom affecting smaller customers, it’s great to see Proxmox adding the ability to migrate directly from VMWare. While VMWare is a best-of-breed hypervisor, many customers use a fraction of VMWare features – and tools like Proxmox VE can provide an effective hypervisor with commercial support and a great feature set.

Based on Debian Bookworm (12.5)
Latest 6.8 Kernel as new stable default
QEMU 8.1.5
LXC 6.0.0
ZFS 2.2.3
Ceph Reef 18.2.2
Ceph Quincy 17.2.7

Highlights

- New import wizard to migrate guests directly from other hypervisors.
  
  Connect to other hypervisors using their public APIs and directly migrate guests to Proxmox VE.
  
  First implementation is for VMware ESXi.
  
  Guests can be started on Proxmox VE while their data is still being imported to the target storage in the background.

More information is available here.

Posted on April 24th, 2024 in blog | No Comments »

25 Years…

I realized that my blog and this domain (kataan.org) are 25 years old today! I started a project to move the older items from a text archive (downloaded from blogger, remember them?) into my WordPress database. I hadn’t realized that with blogger, I used it like Twitter as a microblog – there are some days where I posted multiple times a day, on different trains of thought.
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Posted on April 15th, 2024 in blog | No Comments »

Another Nikon

I’ve had a string of good luck lately.

Shopping at thrift stores can be a hit-or-miss proposition. My latest find is a Coolpix 5400, a logical progression from my Coolpix 995 and 4300.

This one has the same lens, a 5 megapixel sensor, swaps the swivel-body design for the body-with-grip design that took Nikon through the 2000s, and uses the same batteries as my other Nikons – all with strap, battery and lens cap in great shape for $15.

I’ll take it out for some test shots and write a review shortly.

Posted on February 22nd, 2024 in coolpix5400 | No Comments »

It’s a mystery…

Ever go through your camera roll and have no idea what you took a picture of? I know this is somewhere in Las Vegas, but that’s about it.

Posted on February 22nd, 2024 in android, digital | No Comments »

Cirque

Cameraphones are getting pretty good in low light…

Posted on February 21st, 2024 in android, digital | No Comments »

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