Hey — I'm Brendan.

Everything on here started as a short. The videos are quick — a build, a fix, something I brought home from work. The posts are the same thing written down, so you can actually read the part list or the command instead of pausing the video every three seconds.

The home lab

Most of my stuff was free. My college gave me a networking switch that was sitting in a trash pile, and a couple of storage servers that hold 24 hard drives each. I brought home two 24 bay drive bays from work. The oldest piece is a 2017 desktop with a 7th gen i5 that's been running my modded Minecraft servers for a couple years now.

The plan is one of the big chassis for Plex and Jellyfin, the other one as a NAS, and the switch tying it all together. That's the project I actually care about, and most of what I post is me working toward it.

Networking

I'm studying for my Network+ and there's a real deadline on it — if I don't pass, I could lose my job. So I'm posting what I learn as I go. Explaining it to a camera turns out to be a pretty good way to make it stick.

PCs

I build them, I fix them, and sometimes I build one just to flip it — I did a $600 gaming PC for jawa.gg. I've been through my brother's PC twice now: once to reapply thermal paste after it started overheating, once to rebuild it into a new case, where I might have gone a little light on the paste again.

The thing I end up saying most: keep your parts balanced. A $1,200 motherboard in a $600 PC doesn't make it faster. And only upgrade when you're actually unhappy with the performance.

Still figuring plenty out

I put Linux on an 8 year old laptop recently and I'm not going to pretend I knew what I was doing. Mint, because it's lightweight and good for beginners. It went better than I expected. That's most of what's on this site — trying something, saying what actually happened, and asking what I should do next.

Get in touch

The fastest way to reach me is a reply on any of the accounts below. For anything longer, email works too.