I guess first off, thank you for taking the time to consider reading this. Introductions aren’t my strong suit, and if I ever decide to make a channel video, I doubt I can make it short and concise yet convey the little details and nuances that make it difficult for me to quickly introduce myself. Though I guess for starters, you can call me Amari Elder or A.C.E. As a little reward for reading this, Amari Elder does eventually become A.C.E.; The History of the Archaistic Library occurs in the world around a young Amari just really getting started in life while The Synthetic Utopia covers Amari in a far future long after those establishing events. In that light, Amari is just a young and inexperienced A.C.E. and while I’m currently using Amari to represent me, some year I might also design and use A.C.E., so until then it’s probably safest to just refer to me as Amari. If you’d like to know more, I made a summary of the events around Amari here on WordPress and I plan to contribute more to this Wiki, so additional information will make its way there. Anyways, while Amari is fun and all and I enjoy talking about the narratives I make, this is an introduction for me, the writer hiding behind the persona Amari Elder.

I’ll concede that I’m probably a bit of an oddball in the VTuber space, mostly because I’m not interested in drawing in crowds of people or anything of that nature. Many people were born to be entertaining, I admire those traits and respect the work a lot of VTubers put into creating their content of choice. It’s all art and various methods of expressing creativity, creativity I personally lack in many ways, but that’s okay because I get to enjoy the experiences they put together.

No, I’m here because I saw a gap in the space, one that I know I can help to fill. See, I’m a bit of a junky when it comes to technology. I love knowing how things work, building systems that meet peoples’ needs giving them protection or capabilities they otherwise would not have had through technology, and as such I’ve been tinkering with computers for most of 2 decades at this point. I love sharing that knowledge to help people troubleshoot issues or build systems that work for them. I also tinker around with component level repairs of electronics so I can keep old hardware going or give what would otherwise be e-waste new life. I love tinkering with hardware and I’m well versed enough with software to help feel around and also explain how things work and why, and I’m here to share that knowledge and experience.

As such, my goals are a bit nebulous and likely very different from other content creators; I want to educate and empower, and you can’t really measure that without some kind of feedback mechanism. But also I’m a data person, and I’m well aware that getting quality data about something so nebulous would be complicated at best, so, at least in my mind, it is what it is. Eventually I’ll write up my goals, but they probably won’t be good from a measurable standpoint, but the idea behind them is I want people to learn, to watch what I do and understand that they don’t have to be some 10 thousand IQ genius to do something a little different that may benefit them when it comes to computers or fixing things you own.

As an example that perhaps a lot of you can relate to, let’s talk about my Steam Library. While technically I’ve not really suffered from the problem of having more games than I have space for on my secondary storage drive, having a local drive where your games are installed necessarily imposes limitations such as if you run out of space, you need to either start uninstalling games or buy more storage which is more components you need to have space for in your computer and now multiple drives you have to balance for space, like say if one game you had installed gets a major update, but that new data would put you beyond the size of the drive that game is currently sitting on, you’ll have to shuffle games between the drives to make space. I am able to avoid all of this by having my Steam Library sit on a storage array on a separate computer. Following this video guide from Craft Computing, I configured a space on that storage array and made it available to my computer using the protocol iSCSI and it’s worked basically flawlessly as Jeff advertised. I configured it with 2 TB of space available, and then oh no, I started running out, but I was able to just assign more space to the ZVol and expand the “disk” into that space within Windows, so now my 2 TB drive is a 3 TB drive:

Note that it’s 2.99 TB instead of the typical 2.72 TB of a standard 3 TB drive? Pretty cool right? My storage server is a relatively high powered machine for what it does, but that’s because I like and can make use of the high powered old enterprise equipment I work with; you can do the same thing with a low powered system you keep in a closet, so you don’t need a ton of money to set up something like this. Also, streaming is a way of me testing it out and showcasing that it works mostly without issue. I’m sure some of the weird behavior I occassionally come across in games stems from accessing data across the network, but it’s typically consistent enough that I’m sure anybody watching would be surprised to find out my setup isn’t typical. This is the type of thing I want to share with people, partially because it’s cool and gives you flexibility and even some protections that don’t exist with having your data just on single physical drives depending on how complicated you want to go, but also because backing up and protecting your data as a content creator is massive in my eyes, so any time I can convince somebody to make a backup using a solution like this that feels seamless is a massive win in my book. Speaking of, I have a separate iSCSI device (called a LUN in the Synology operating system) that I use for Windows backups; it backs up individual files in specific locations hourly and my entire system weekly:

This is just configured to delete oldest files when low on space so it looks low on space but it’s fine. Again, this sits on a separate machine with parity protection so one of the drives in it could fail and my data would be fine as opposed to losing everything if I had it on one physical drive that failed.

So that’s one example of the type of thing I’d like to encourage and see more in the world. Even in my relatively short time in the space, I’ve seen people lose a drive and a swath of their precious data that they often can’t (or can’t afford to) recover. I mean, even I’ve been in that position as out of high school, I had a fancy external drive I used to share data around with my friends, then suddenly it stopped working one day, but I held onto it for like a decade and eventually sent it off for a data recovery job with Rossmann Group. It was around $1,500, a lot more expensive than it would have been to have an extra drive around that I backed that data up to regularly, and while very little of the data was ultimately useable, I did find I had pictures of a friend that died that I didn’t remember were on the drive, memories that I have once again thanks to that process. While the recovery felt worth the cost to me, that’s enough cash to build 2 or 3 backup machines with plenty of storage and keep them in separate locations once again proving the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I want to help people avoid that pain.

Another example is that a friend of mine had a screen tablet that typically retails for around $1,000 and it had stopped working. I asked him to bring it up so I could look at it because it wasn’t like I could break it more than not working at all. He brought it up, I looked over the internal circuitry and couldn’t find anything that looked obviously wrong, but he described the symptoms and I identified what I felt was likely the board component causing the problem. While the chip looked fine, I decided to redo the solder holding the legs to the PCB and BAM! It worked the next time he plugged it in and it’s been working just fine ever since. All it took was some time, a soldering iron, and probably a few millimeters of a razor thin line of solder. I’m sure that was a massive weight off his shoulders because commission work was part of his income and his drawing tablet was an important tool in completing that work. If I were a prideful person, I’d boast about that because that’s a lot of money saved at my hands, but that’s not who I am; really I’m just happy to help and quite honestly surprised my amateur level knowledge served us so well.

But that’s the kind of mentality I want to encourage. If you have something that broke? Well you can’t break it more than not working; may as well take it apart and learn as long as it’s not going to be dangerous to you (power supplies and old CRTs are examples of dangerous items if you don’t understand what you’re doing though also a big part of the DIY mentality is understanding what you’re fussing with before you go and do something potentially dangerous). At a minimum, if you have say a controller that doesn’t work, you can take it apart and better understand how it works so that you may say prevent something from breaking if you notice a spot of poor design where a component ends up breaking prematurely for example. When you buy that new controller, you can use that knowledge to extend its life that much more. I want people to learn about the tools they use, to understand when you can be a little risky to gain important knowledge and insights and also understand when to demonstrate caution and why. That knowledge will make you a better consumer even if you never crack open your own hardware to learn with your own hands.

So yeah, I’m a bit of an oddity in the VTuber space. I stream, sure, I play games well enough, at least in my biased opinion, but the main point of my streaming games is to showcase that the tech works. My PNG application and the associated files sit on an SMB share which is over the network again and hosted on that storage server, which is really cool. The bot I use is a self-hosted solution I found on the Unraid app store that’s open source. I have a small series of self-hosted applications from the very WordPress instance you’re reading this on to a Wiki and art gallery. I host a number of dedicated game servers. I’ve jumped into the world of 3D printing. I picked up soldering after watching way to many videos from Louis Rossmann. The list of things go on and I don’t necessarily want to demonstrate my knowledge or skills with any of these; I want to share that knowledge and experience so others can follow my footsteps if they so desire.

So yeah, if you have a tech question, feel free to ask me and I’ll do my best to at least point you towards the right answer if I’m not aware of it out-of-hand or if I suspect my knowledge is outdated. If you’re looking to build your own computer or would like consulting with regards to doing an upgrade, I’d love to help you in that journey. If you want to me to build you a custom machine? I mean, we can talk as I’m not opposed to working on contract to build and configure systems for other people, I’ve built machines for a lot of people in my life, but I’m not exactly known for making the prettiest computers because my personal machine has been a solid black box ever since I started maintaining it myself.

So to circle back to the beginning of this piece, why I’m here is really to enable those who are creative to be able to continue being creative. To help them get their technology working for them and out of the way because while I may not have the creativity to write an emotionally impactful piece or the vision to draw up a masterpiece that conveys a story or sensation or sing words both original and well rehashed, I can help other people realize and share that creativity easier and I feel like that’s worth adventuring out a bit to do.

If you’d like to find me on social media, the root domain archaisticlibrary.net has a list of all the important links you can use to find me across the internet or access content across the different self hosted applications I run. Thank you for reading!