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So, for many years we have had air-conditioning in the house. I used to have a unit back in my parents place when I lived there and when I eventually moved out I had to leave that behind since I wasn’t able to put one into my window at the apartment I was renting.

In those days I was nice to have but I don’t recall the heat being bad enough that you couldn’t survive without having a AC unit running during the summer.

The last 15 years or so though, things are changing. It’s getting hot enough here to make life very uncomfortable if you don’t have at least some AC in the house during the summer, especially when we get hit with a heat dome.

But apparently climate change is not real, so what the hell do I know.

Either case last year our oldest AC Unit died, so we had to spring for a new one for the living room. The old one was bought when my daughter was born so that my wife didn’t have to deal with a baby in the heat of the summer, and it managed to hold itself together for over 15 years. So in that regard the old one didn’t really owe us anything. The new one however is much the same but with a few new tricks. Regardless of those tricks it’s keeping the room cool today and it’s a hell of a lot quieter than what it replaced.

The thing is that while I live in an area that’s known for being cool when it gets hot it seems like it’s getting to be a more and more extreme swing. As a kid I really don’t recall it getting screaming hot here except for perhaps a couple of times a year at most. This year though we have had three or four times where it’s gotten hot enough that you just go hide someplace where you can hug your AV and try to stay cool.

But yea, I guess climate change is so not real.

Lucky enough I have the option to put a AC into the window here. There’s a lot of people however that can’t and I feel for them. Given the choice I still think I would prefer a more moderate climate so that I didn’t need the AC units at all, but I think that ‘s going to require a lot of change that people probably are not ready for.

Earlier in the year I was given a chance to go over to a family members home to hang out and watch some fireworks. Normally I’m not huge on sitting in a huge crowd like we get when fireworks happen in my neck of the woods, but since the family members place is literally beachfront it’s much easier to deal with.

Anyhow I brought along my camera to take some photos of the fireworks since the last time I was able to do that was a long while ago and the new Z50 would hopefully do a better job overall.

And overall, at least after some editing, it’s going pretty good.

Shooting Fireworks is a bit more challenging than street photography. You need a long enough shutter to capture the movement of the fireworks without overexposure. Playing around with my lens I was able to get reasonable results by shooting with the lens sopped down to f11 and around a three second exposure.

Some shots came out ok, most were a little overexposed, but that’s where digital is nice – because I was shooting RAW each photo is effectively just a dump of whatever the sensor in the camera sees. This lets you tweak a lot of settings after the photo was taken in ways that you can’t do with a JPG. This means that even though the photos were slightly overexposed I could still go back and adjust them back to a better result.

Some of this stuff was doable with Film back in the day, however it was harder to pull off and you had to have a idea what you were doing before starting the process. Digital it’s literally just a slider that you roll backwards to reduce the exposure. Anyhow, more photos!

Vancouver Summer Lights July 30, 2026

I’m headed down to compete in the IBJJF worlds this coming September. It’s going to be the first time that I compete outside of some in house competitions that we run at the school that I train at.

So I’m jumping straight into the deep end with the sharks.

That’s not to say that I haven’t been trying to prep for this. I’ve been aggressively training since the start of the year so there are some things that I’m pulling off in training now that I wouldn’t have been even able to attempt six months ago. However it’s still going to be a huge challenge to progress forward on the mats.

The thing that a lot of folks are warning me about though is the nerves about competing in front of a crowd, and that’s not even something that’s on my radar.

This won’t be my first time on a public stage, between competing in First Aid Competitions and having to present in front of crowds at work that’s not something that really bothers me at all. What is kind of giving me pause is all the things that I have absolutely no control over.

I can’t control who I’m competing against, what their games are, how physical they are, or how good they may be. I can place plans in my head to try to handle as many situations as possible but there are still a lot of variables that are unknown or completely out of my control.

And as much as I can say that I’m going for the experience and that I’m not worried about winning that’s kind of bullshit. I want to win here, and that’s going to be the goal that I’m walking on the mats with. At least there I’m not going to have to worry about holding back out of fear of causing pain to someone that I know. There’s nothing but strangers on the mats there.

So when they announced the Masters of The Universe movie I really didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. I was a kid when those toys were being released and they were a fixture while I was growing up, however after the movie that came out in 1987 I really just lost interest.

The problem with the cartoon is that it’s really over the top as a cartoon and adapting it to make a serious movie of resulted in something that was just hard to watch. Granted it’s almost bad enough that it’s worth watching agin but that’s a feeling that quickly passes.

The 2026 version however didn’t try to take itself seriously at all.

It’s picking up all the crazy of the original cartoon and just runs with it like it’s normal. A lot of the character designs are really close to the original toys, and they didn’t try to hide that it was kind of being silly about it.

At one point they go as far as having a character called Fisto telling a character named Ram-Man to “give them head”.

So yea, it’s almost like the folks doing the movie knew it was going to be “bad” and just decided to turn the dial up to 11 and run with it. I wasn’t expecting a lot but it was amusing to watch.

One review I read after the fact kind of compared it to a restaurant. It isn’t fine dining, more of a Golden Corral, but some times that’s exactly what you are looking for.

Back in the day my parents would take us camping to a couple of places, one being Golden Ears, the other being a smaller campground called Rolly Lake.

Now as a kid Golden Ears was generally prefered because it was a a larger campground and lake and tended to have more kids roaming around to hang with. However now it’s been over 20 years since the last time I camped there and while we would normally gone someplace else this time around there was some room at Rolley Lake, so why not.

Funny thing is that the things that turned me off of the park as a kid kind of make it appealing as an adult, it’s quiet, there’s not a lot of people running around, and while the hike around the lake is kind of short it’s something you could do do multiple laps of if you wanted something longer.

And this time around the weather cooperated and we wound up with clear skies and warm weather for the entire trip.

Rolly Lake – June 15, 2026

There was one thing that was a bit of a disappointment – and that was the bridge across Rolley Falls. Now to be clear Rolley falls isn’t a huge waterfall, it’s around a 6ft drop in a local stream, but it’s still nice to have something to hike over to and have a look at. This time around however the bridge that crosses over the stream was not passable. I’m not specifically squeamish about sketchy trails, but this bridge had enough holes in it that I wasn’t willing to risk it.

Normally it wouldn’t be a huge issue but not having the ability to get on the bridge really limited my ability to get photos of the falls. It’s a good thing I suppose that the Falls aren’t the whole reason that I was there. There were some notes up indicating that repairs where being looked into but I have no idea how long that’s been the case.

Either way, given that most of my camping involves sitting in a hammock reading and just enjoying being disconnected from the world this place definitely fit the bill.

I’m a little over a month out from going down to compete at the BIJJF Worlds in Vegas this year. It’s the first time I’m competing at anything outside of the in house tournaments that run at the school.

Yea. I know. I’m jumping straight into the deep end.

This week however I did have a chance to go down and spectate at the IBJJF competition in Portland this weekend. Overall while it’s a long drive there and back in the same day it answered a lot of questions about how these things are run. Where the bullpen is, what the signage looks like, things like that. And while the worlds is going to be a completely different scale compared to the competition in Portland it’s also going to have a lot of stuff in common with the smaller competitions.

Unfortunately there were not a lot of people in my weight class and belt range signed up, and given that I wasn’t sure I was able to make it down in time to compete so I didn’t wind up fighting this time around. It would have been interesting to get a match in but at least I was able to watch and get a feel for things before I head down.

So with a new camera I’m spending a lot of time looking for places where I can go take some photos. I was going to make a run up to a viewpoint on the way to Mount Cypress but given that a FIFA game was running traffic was enough of a mess that I decided to head the other direction and wound up in a place called White Rock.

It’s home to a large pier, a nice beach, and a lot of places to get Ice Cream. It’s also got some decent scenery and a decent place to take shots of the sunset.

There were lots of other things going around the area, some birds that stood still long enough to get a decent photo.

The occasional train slipping through.

And a very large white rock.

Overall not a bad place to sit and just enjoy the area, provided that it’s not pissing rain down at the time.

Back when Broadcom bought VMWare a pile of changes were implemented on their end that resulted in some sweeping increases in price and the dropping of several free options from their stack of offerings.

Once this info started flowing and we realized that the cost to keep their products around were going to jump 300% we jumped off that platform and moved to something else. From what I’m hearing we were not the only ones to jump and now there are reports that VMWare is now trying to win people back.

VMware "win-back initiative" is an insult to our intelligence
byu/Trelfar insysadmin

Given what’s been going on with VMWare and Broadcom I don’t really know what to think here. Even if we were big enough for VMWare to care about what we do (we aren’t) I don’t think that we would be moving off of their stack into something else if we had completed the process of migration to a new stack. Even if I was interested we moved everything over well over two years ago and regardless of what they would do for pricing we wouldn’t be able to recoup the costs of moving away from them in the first place.

Honestly this whole situation may go down as a case study in how to burn a company to the ground.

For a long time I didn’t bother having any type of media server at home, I just had the machine that had copies of my media hooked up to the TV directly or had a computer sitting on that TV accessing the media through a SMB share or something along those lines. However since that didn’t really provide a user friendly interface I eventually wound up looking into options.

For a long time I ran Plex internally, it was well supported and worked on my Apple TV devices, as well as the Chromecast devices that I used for a long time. The one thing that started to be a issue was Plex pushing subscriptions more and more aggressively over time. Now to be fair, I wasn’t paying anything for the service so it’s not something that I can really complain about however when I started looking at getting hardware encoding enabled and found out that it and the mobile apps were paywalled behind a plex pass or some other type of payment I wound up setting up a Jellyfin instance to see if that worked better.

Install for either was pretty simple because both were installed in Docker containers on the server where my media lives, so for the most part it was just pick the correct image, set where the media lives, and go. Now, if you where installing on something other than a Docker host things might be a bit more involved and in that case Plex would probably have the advantage depending on what you are running on. The UI for both is good enough, but Plex is a bit more polished. That said, i’m using this as a media player so I won’t be spending a lot of time in that UI (hopefully).

The biggest thing that Plex seems to do well is support for various platforms. From what I’ve seen it’s got clients for most everything out there where Jellyfin is a bit more… selective in what it supports. In my case the streaming devices that I’m working with at home are supported so there’s no huge difference for me. It does however mean that if I’m replacing a TV or streaming box that I need to make sure that a client for Jellyfin is available for the device. Right now that’s somewhat limited, but at least Android and Google TV are supported so there’s decent selections of devices around. Plex however supported a lot more devices at the time, so if you aren’t willing to look at replacing your Device that might be the deciding factor.

In the end Jellyfin did everything that I need, and it supports the devices that I have around the house so I’ve moved everything over and shut down the Plex instance that I was running.

Your milage may vary, however when I can use a free, open source, option over something that potentially costs me a fair plile of money I generally lean towards the free option. That said I did pay for a Unraid license instead of going with TrueNAS on my primary storage server for a reason.