astral0pitek's blog

Enough has happened since my last work post (12 January 2025) to make for a very long post where I'll talk about where I've been spending my energy and why it's been so long since I've posted on this blog.

Job

Naturally, as soon as I got the job, I had to make every effort to learn how to work in a new company with new colleagues, a job I'd never done before. I got a job as a “server and storage system tester and repairman.” I'll say right away that asking me how it compares to my old job is completely pointless, because the new company doesn't compare at all to my old job. It's simply ten times better in absolutely every way.

At my new job, I spent most of my energy for the first six months getting to know my coworkers (even those from other related departments), learning how to work in a new environment, and adjusting to a new work schedule. I still sometimes struggle with it due to my own lack of sleep and wasted time, but I'm still struggling with it, and quite successfully. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by stress (from my observations and feelings), and I simply want to relieve it by playing games with friends until late. This is my main problem, which sometimes leads to severe sleep deprivation, which can make me a few minutes late for work.

After working for the new company for so long, I've noticed many classic stereotypes about various jobs (I won't mention these stereotypes, but stereotypes are always there for a reason), which generally prevent any company from producing products more efficiently than they currently do. However, I think these situations exist in the vast majority of companies. Again, I'll remind you that I still have nothing to compare it to. The main thing is that my new job is much better than my old one.

Hardware upgrade for my local services

Somewhere around the beginning of September 2025, I had already saved up enough money to feel confident, and despite how much I like the Synology web interface, I still want a lot more power for some of my services, like PeerTube. Around the beginning of September 2025, I had already saved enough money to feel confident, and despite how much I like Synology's web interface, I still wanted significantly more power for some of my services, like PeerTube. Around the same time, the Chinese company Minisforum released a 5-bay NAS server with very powerful hardware for such a small device, especially for a NAS device. Considering that it was a Chinese company (China, in my personal opinion, still isn't renowned for the quality and support of its devices compared to almost any other company), buying a new, more powerful server from a Chinese company was quite a risky decision for me, but I decided to buy it anyway, and now I have two servers at home.

Synology: – Processor: Celeron J4125 – RAM: 10GB – SATA slots: 2 slots – M.2 slots: 2 slots

Minisforum N5 Pro: – Processor: Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 370 – RAM: 96GB – SATA slots: 5 slots – M.2 slots: 3 slots

Yes, compared to the Synology, the new server's power is impressive! After I got the new server, installed the operating system (the details of choosing an operating system for a server are worth a separate post), and configured it, I successfully migrated some of my services to this new server, which had enough power and RAM to speed up my services. At first, I moved PeerTube and my automatic media center to the new server, but as my desires grew with the new features (of which the new server had plenty and even more), I eventually added a couple of game servers for myself, Owncast, and even deployed koboldai with a local Behemoth-123V-v2.2-GGUF AI. Yes, the speed still leaves much to be desired, but this proves that I have the opportunity to be less dependent on services blocked in my country these days. I even finally got to play Steam games on the new server with the ability to play through the browser!

Live Streams

Another activity that has gradually begun to consume almost all my remaining free time is live streaming, where I stream various games. I've been trying to develop this for a very long time and have given up many times for various reasons, but this time everything is working out very well. Initially, I streamed exclusively on my PeerTube instance because we all know Twitch's incredibly hypocritical policies, and I absolutely didn't want to go back there. People even started watching me on my server, and I received my first donation for streaming development from a stream on my PeerTube instance!

Eventually, closer to 2026, my viewers finally convinced me to return to Twitch, and I think it was worth it. I started streaming on Twitch and PeerTube simultaneously, and I was watched by both people who were into Fediverse and regular people who didn't care about all the hassle that surrounds Fediverse. Regular people started finding me over time, and I even developed a loyal audience, which after so many years, is a wonderful feeling. And from that moment on, I decided to take on the additional challenge of developing my streaming business on top of everything I already had, and from that point on, I had little or no time left for myself. While exploring streaming development opportunities that I could easily handle on my own, I accumulated a rather massive to-do list, which, as it turned out, included not just stream development but even trying to figure out how to independently host the services that support my socialstream.ninja chat aggregator. All of these tasks required so much time and effort that for a while, I was unable to even manage simple tasks like adding the “!—more—” tag to tidy up some super-long posts like this one. But eventually, I overcame a moment of procrastination, dealt with the accumulated household chores, structured my list, making it step-by-step, and this gave me the strength to continue developing, albeit at a very slow pace (I'm still the only one handling such a huge amount of work).