My mat is screwed

I had a problem with my repair mat wherein it would slowly slide up the table. I had tried sticking it to the table with double sided tape, but the problem is the mat is very “non-stick”, nothing sticks to it. So I used two small screws to hold it to the table. Time will tell if the screws hold or not… (and yes, it *is* upside down… this is so that I can get my low component drawers out… :P)



New computer ‘trail’

I have built a new computer ‘trail‘ out of my old workstation ‘tradition‘. I was able to do this because I migrated the VirtualBox VMs that were running on ‘tradition’ over to QEMU/KVM VMs now running on ‘lore‘.

My new computer ‘trail’ is setup as the recording workstation for the “booth” in my studio. This is good because now I can record at 4K in the booth!

I don’t use Windows much these days but this new studio workstation runs Windows 11 Pro. I haven’t used software RAID on Windows before but for this workstation I setup a RAID1 mirror using 2x 2TB NVMe drives. I was able to configure the block size for the NTFS file system so I picked 2MB (which was the maximum) as this RAID array will only be for storing video recordings (which are huge files).

Number pad

I have various workspaces in my lab, and I call one of them my “booth”. It’s called the booth because I use it when I need to take photos of things which I’m selling on eBay, usually Xbox consoles or games.

Anyway the booth is also setup with two video cameras, one for a view of the booth bench and the other for a view of my face while I am working in the booth. There’s a retractable drawer bolted under the booth bench too which is full of breadboard jumper wires, so this is the place where I do some of my electronics projects, particularly my Maxitronix X in 1 projects. It’s also a convenient workspace when I’m breadboarding something, as I have ready access to my component drawers above.

Today I’ve installed a number pad in the booth so that I can control my cameras in OBS Studio while I’m working at that bench: