Stefan Didak – Home Office

Vape Station

February 25, 2014 by Stefan Didak 5 Comments

After my recent “epic sized” blog post on ignorance about vaping a few people asked to see some pictures of my “vaping gear” in The Office. Well, I’m happy to oblige since I’ve now finally set things up in a way that work for me. It is, in part, thanks to one of our cats, Bece, that I ended up with more plastic display stands than I originally planned to get. As I was ordering a few things online she jumped up and walked straight over my MacBook Pro Retina. As I tried to get her to move her butt off of it she trampled a few times on the trackpad and it wasn’t until I placed the order that I noticed there were a few more things in there than I planned on. Ah, well… such things do happen. I guess she just likes vape gear and decided I should get more. Lots more. Perhaps I should “blame” her for all my vape related purchases, right Anyway, I have a few more mods, RBA’s and RDA’s on the way and thanks to Bece I know have enough holes to last me a while. Luckily those plastic stands were cheap so it didn’t result in any holes in my wallet.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal, Very Lengthy Tagged With: Vape, Vaping, Vapor

New Home Office Pictures VERY SOON

December 18, 2013 by Stefan Didak 6 Comments

I know, it’s been long overdue. But I’ve finally got to the editing of the pictures. Selecting the images for the “making of” section has really been a pain in the butt because there were so many and I have to pick the right images to reflect the things I’ll be writing about (and hopefully explaining). Tonight, and possibly tomorrow night I am going to shoot the night-time pictures, which is easier said than done because it still involves setting up some flashes and lighting to make the pictures actually reflect what it really looks like. With lots of reflective surfaces and areas of extremely low and high contrast (the environment versus the light emitted from the monitors) taking these shots is not as straightforward and easy a task as it might look. But I’m confident they will come out just fine since I had a few test runs over the past months.

Filed Under: Home Office Tagged With: Home Office, Office 7.0 Beta, Pictures

WordPress, Ignytion DDT and the Home Office (aka the Ignyter Network)

July 12, 2013 by Stefan Didak 2 Comments

I use WordPress. I use it a lot. I use it for most of my personal sites, business sites, I hack around with it and contort things to do what I need them to do. I’m not, however, one of those WordPress fanatics. In fact, you will hear me say a lot of nice things about Drupal, for example, even in public and even when talking to WordPress fans. I believe in using the right tool for the right job and in this case you can consider platforms of choice to be no different from any tool. One way I use WordPress is for something that nobody ever gets to really see (unless you visit my office and I happen to show you how I manage and control things): managing my vast number of systems, laptops, devices, and most of all the growing deployment of virtual machines. I used to keep track of network port diagrams via Microsoft Visio but since I am not using Windows as much these days and also don’t want to go back to keeping ASCII notes or document files I decided to put together a more proprietary and automated way to keep track of IP addresses, services provided systems and VM’s, passwords, installation and deployment notes, hardware notes, driver information, etc. And for that I decided to go with WordPress.

Filed Under: Home Office, Lengthy, Software, Software Development, The Web Tagged With: APC, Automation, Home Office, Ignyter, jQuery, Nagios, Nginx, PHP, Plugin, Puppet, Skematic, Theme, Twitter Bootstrap, Varnish, WordPress, XDebug

Home Office Security and Update

February 19, 2013 by Stefan Didak 34 Comments

I know, I know, you had hoped for a major update with pictures of the new final completed Home Office 7.0 and instead you’re getting something completely different! In the meantime, people often ask me what I do about security and protection at home, especially with the office being a possible target of ill-willed criminals and other likeminded varmint. I normally don’t go into details about that and answer in rather broad terms that we have an excellent alarm system that is being monitored 24-7 by a professional security company. However, recently we extended the “home office defense system” (ha ha) with a new firewall and a thing that can fire very nicely at any kind of wall. And not just walls. Meet the home office protection device! You might wonder what on earth I’d need a tactical assault rifle for, amongst other things. The answer to that might be a long story.

Filed Under: Hardware, Home Office, Lengthy Tagged With: Assault Rifle, Gun, Red Dot, Tactical

The Home Office Tattoo?

February 9, 2013 by Stefan Didak 4 Comments

This morning I woke up and checked my e-mail and found a message from one of the big fans of my office and website, Steven Dray. Attached were two images that certainly surprised me, to make an understatement. Steven has posted the images to his Facebook page and on Twitter but considering the content of the images I’m also posting it here with a little bit more information. It is, I suppose, flattering, but at the same time it brings up a few questions. I asked Steven Dray how he made the image because I couldn’t see any artifacts that are usually present when photoshopping or compositing an image. With my background in 3D computer graphics, rendering, and pixels in general, I would be able to tell and I couldn’t. So either this was a really amazing photoshop skill or not. I asked Steven about it and he told me it wasn’t a composite, it was real.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Home Office, Ink, Steven Dray, Tattoo

Mitch Haile and Stefan Didak in the New Office

January 21, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment

I have a quick update on the current status of the new (7.0 final) home office for you all. Pictures are being delayed by several factors. One factor being that it’s real busy here. The other factor being that two machines arrived with some serious problems after transport. They’re being looked at now but this is going to be an insurance claim situation. Of course, if you are a fellow crazy home office aficionado, you get “first dibbs” on seeing the current new home office “live and in the flesh” or is that “live and in the metal?” 🙂 So for those few crazy people out there who blog about how Mitch Haile and myself are adversaries in some kind of home office contest, we’re not. We get along just fine! And yes, Mitch is the first fellow tech guy who’s actually seen the office as it is right now.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Home Office, Mitch Haile

Getting ready to build the new home office

December 2, 2012 by Stefan Didak 15 Comments

However, I have most of my camera gear here and the other half is being shipped along with the majority of Home Office 6.0, my books, and tons of boxes with other stuff that still needed to be shipped from Rotterdam to California. With a bit of luck everything should arrive in perfect order sometime near the end of the year. This of course means that starting 2013 I’ll be (finally) constructing the final office 7.0, the combination of the current California office and the previous office.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Batteries, Charger, Office 7.0 Beta, Person Of Interest, Velcro, Whiskey

Andre Alves of Aware Bear perjured himself AGAIN!

March 30, 2012 by Stefan Didak 2 Comments

Aware Bear Computers Rochester Pittsford New York, unreliable fraudulent scammer

Our favorite habitual liar and serial copyright infringer, Andre Leite Alves, of Aware Bear Computers in Rochester, is at it again and proving himself to now also be a habitual perjurer. And no, I am not talking about his Rochester Perennial Exchange “website”, which is nothing more than his attempt to link-build to gain a tiny bit of SEO juice in the hopes that all the negative exposure of his business activities and habitual lies would no longer score as high as they have done. This week, Andre Leite Alves, Mr. AwareBear, has once again perjured himself, in an attempt to file a DMCA against this site and three of the images used (in good faith used under 17 USC Section 107 which allows for such considering the context of this site). This is not the first time Andre Alves has attempted to do so. Remember many years ago when he filed a false DMCA (against my domain registrar) claiming the images of my office were actually his and that I was the one infringing on them? Perjury might be something Andre Alves was born with but since I am not a doctor I don’t know that for sure. Lying and displaying deceit, however, that I think has long since been proven.

Filed Under: Home Office, Infringer, Lengthy Tagged With: Andre Alves, Andre Leite Alves, Aware Bear Computers, Computer Repair, Copyright, DMCA, Failure, Home Office, Infringement, Misuse, Monroe County, New York, Perjury, Pittsford, Rochester, Theft, Thief, Thieves

Office 7.0 Beta 3 (stage one) is final… for now!

December 20, 2011 by Stefan Didak 30 Comments

Stefan Didak's New and Second Home Office in Oakley, California, Final Intermediate Stage

Yes, it’s a milestone. Office 7.0 (beta 3, by now) is officially done, functional, installed, running, and ready for action. I’m not going to make any final “beauty” shots of the current state because there’s not much point in doing that until the other half of the office completes the current ensemble and that won’t be for quite a number of months yet. I’ll just have to make do with this setup in the meantime. And yes, you can imagine it’s painful and under-powered and under-monitored, and boy am I missing the extra pixels… not. 🙂 I’m quite happy with the 3 x 2560 x 1600, actually. But of course, the office won’t be complete until it’s complete. And besides, my camera gear is all in The Netherlands anyway, so there’s no point in trying to create perfect RAW shots and then editing them for a final “beauty” pass. I didn’t take shots of other parts of the office since nothing has changed there but if you want to see then anyway I refer you to the other Office 7.0 beta blog posts and images. There’s a server, a workstation, a second workstation, a Mac Pro, the MacBook Air, and the Clevo laptop. That should be enough for the intermediate stages of getting up and running. The three Lian-Li cases look nice together and all have watercooling for the CPU’s. ATI 6970 Eyefinity cards take care of the two workstations, each of them hooked to the 3 x 30 inch Dell U3011 monitors using StarTech DisplayPort switches to allow for an extra set of DisplayPort ports on each monitor. The server is hooked up via DVI connection (and also capable of doing 2560×1200) while the Mac Pro is using 3 x DVI where one of those is run from a mini DisplayPort port via an Apple converter that turns it into full dual-link DVI.

Filed Under: Hardware, Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Audio, Cables, California, Monitors, Multi-Monitor, Network, Oakley, Office 7.0 Beta, Pictures, Screens, Switches

Computers USA / BTO Diablo and AngelFire

December 4, 2011 by Stefan Didak 2 Comments

The new Home Office is starting to take a little more shape every day but there’s still much to do and a lot of things to complete before I can consider having properly settled in. This post, however, is not about the office itself but the people who have built the new systems that are in it. The company is called Computers USA and are the home where BTO Diablo computers and BTO AngelFire servers are built to spec. They are local to me with both stores (a short drive to Brentwood or a slightly longer drive to Clayton) and I think people should support local business more. Instead of telling people that I hope to lead by example here. Don’t be fooled by the website that needs some work. These guys know what they’re talking about and really have tons of clues about what they’re doing. That’s a rare thing to find these days when it comes to computer stores that claim they can build machines with amazing specs. In my experiene most don’t but these guys certainly do! If you’re around the area here and are in need of great quality and support, definitely check out Computers USA.

Filed Under: Hardware, Home Office Tagged With: Brentwood, BTO AngelFire, BTO Diablo, Clayton, Computers, Computers USA, Custom, Hardware, Oakley, Office 7.0 Beta, Quality, Servers, Shop, Store, Support, Workstations

Vape Station

New Home Office Pictures VERY SOON

WordPress, Ignytion DDT and the Home Office (aka the Ignyter Network)

Home Office Security and Update

The Home Office Tattoo?

Mitch Haile and Stefan Didak in the New Office

Getting ready to build the new home office

Andre Alves of Aware Bear perjured himself AGAIN!

Office 7.0 Beta 3 (stage one) is final… for now!

Computers USA / BTO Diablo and AngelFire

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