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My home was undergoing reconstruction during 2022, and with a fresh start you get the opportunity to fix problems that plagued you before. The old building was constructed in the 1980s and with the brick and cement walls in India it is impossible to get a good Wi-Fi connection or add cabling to add additional access points. This time, I made sure to have at least one CAT6 cable going to each room, in order to be able to fix any dead spots by simply adding in access points in problem spots, and turning a bundle of wire into a home network system that handles terabytes of data each month has been a learning experience. ...

My house has outdoor lights on the front façade as part of the overall design of the house. These lights were currently turned on manually at a regular time everyday, but someone had to go to turn them off for the night. This proved to be very inconvenient, and resulted in my dad asking me to create some sort of solution to automate the task. I started mapping out the problem in order to understand it better and to break it down into components in order to understand how this would be solved, and concluded the following things: ...

After running a homelab on an old laptop for many years, I finally decided to bite the bullet and finally part out a PC to use as my home server, to run my websites, cloud storage, home automation using Home Assistant, and local DNS resolution on my network. The specs of the final build were as follows: AMD Ryzen 4600G 4x8 GB DDR4 3200 by Crucial Gigabyte Gaming X B450 Motherboard 1TB SSD storage 12TB HDD storage Cooler Master MWE 450 Bronze V2 450W PSU Despite the current silicon shortages, acquiring the parts was surprisingly quick and painless. After collecting all the components that were ordered, I begun the simple process of assembling it all together only to discover that I got no sign of life upon pressing the power button. Now, it was my first time building a PC but it wasn’t my first time taking on a project like this, which made it all the more confusing as to why there was a problem. I was reading the motherboard’s manual and scratching my head when suddenly it hit me. The motherboard was manufactured in October 2020, which meant that the BIOS revision on the motherboard was much older than what was required in order for it to support my CPU. This was quite a big problem. I had no older CPU which I could use to update the motherboard, and without this, the build was completely halted. I tried looking around local shops in order to find anyone who would update the BIOS but could not find anyone willing to take the project on, leaving my only option being taking the 45 minute drive to the closest service center in order to get it updated. ...