As an introvert it's my favorite volunteer org. A lot of the other people are retired logging dudes who show up, work super hard while saying perhaps 5 words in total before having a cup of coffee and dipping out until next time, heh. Great great people.
More pics?
Yep -- alleviate heating insecurity by providing free, seasoned firewood to local households in need. Trying to cut & split 160 cords of wood to season outside this season, then we can give away 80 cords in the fall. The 2nd 80 cords rolls over into year 2 to sustain ~80 cords/year giveaway
I get outside, sometimes.
Bethel Woodbank going strong. #maine
If you do #HPC on #AWS via #ParallelCluster then check your versions. A ton of old HPC clusters are gonna fall over in June 2026 when AWS deprecates an old python runtime in Lamda. I've done 3 client upgrades this month and expect more to come ...
#meshcore repeater and #meshtastic router_late role solar fixed nodes up and running in west bethel #maine — trying to grow the LORa mesh in western Maine. Also picked up a pair of Thinknode M5 portable units to use as my Bluetooth tethered clients
Blog post covering some recent experimentation with AWS ParallelCluster monitoring/alerting via Cloudwatch Subscription Filters wired up to a Slack channel via webhook
Claude code is surprisingly good at sanity checking AWS ParallelCluster HPC config files.
When paired with the MCP that queries instances.vantage.sh it can validate ec2 server config and even provide summarized cost updates on what each compute node config change will cost.
Timelapse from the volunteer wood bank splitting session.
24 cords cut and split. Goal is to get to 80 cords this year. Lots more trees on the way so clearing the current pile of rounds was a huge milestone.
Cory with another banger. Coding a rude agentic AI responder to the marketers overusing mail campaign automation. His AI Platypus named Billie can reply rudely in his place
TImelapse Art: Idiot on Tractor, 2025
I lit myself and the tractor up to be super high viz for the trip, heh
Timelapse of the drive to the wood bank. First time I’ve taken a tractor on open road
Been volunteering at a new local firewood bank in Bethel, ME that is just gettting off the ground. Drove our tractor there 6mi over main roads which was a first.
This is a Timelapse of the “rounds crew” who saw full length trees into rounds. The wood splitter teams than process the rounds.
Someome awesome is feeding our little free library box with these handouts
This was a fun review. I don't think folks realize how big a deal the DGX Spark is. A year ago an #Nvidia #workstation with 128GB+ of VRAM cost tens of thousands of dollars. Is it better than AMD's Strix Halo? Now that's the real question.
#DGXSpark #AI
www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/d...
Used the US long holiday weekend to run #AWS #ParallelCluster build-pipeline and cluster deploy through a logging squid HTTP proxy to document internet destinations used -- this helps set firewall rules for orgs that block egress by default in research VPCs
Western Maine chores
any #AWS #HPC folks familiar with the managed PCS service who can confirm that when using AWS PCS you can't configure Slurm to be aware of software licenses?
Adding license at CLI does not persist & API guide seems to confirm that "SlurmCustomSetting" does not support the "License" param ...
Mural progress. West Bethel, Maine
... but not as much money as owning and depreciating premise HPC and storage and running those workloads in a colo or on-prem.
It's the monthly cloud charges for provisioned storage that are killers at petabyte+ scale
Specific win in my niche is for CroyoEM where it is common to ingest & persist petabytes of data but only run analytical pipelines during certain defined periods.
Keeping data in standard tier S3 storage class and only creating a POSIX filesystem (and HPC cluster!) when needed saves lots of $$
biggest thing on-prem: not paying every month for the full raw storage!
For PB scale stuff the cloud math is scary. Keeping it in S3 and making lustre "when needed" has become semi viable for certain workloads in my niche. Contorting infra to keep cost down has diminishing returns ...
the link between fsx/lustre & S3 via DRAs is magic - being able to create parallel filesystems off of a bucket or bucket prefix & then persist changes & POSIX stuff into S3 so you can destroy the lustre filesystem when the pipeline completes is transformative. My favorite AWS thing at the moment!
some cryoEM validation runs via cryosparc.com software integrated with #AWS parallelcluster HPC and using an FSX/Lustre parallel filesystem built from S3 input cryodata bucket via Lustre/S3 data repository associations. Can't do that on-prem!
todays remote office
demo pics; former weed grow. all the drywall and insulation was wet, moldy and full of animal droppings. rented scissor lift goes poof this week so we gotta finish up
indoor & outdoor chores this weekend
