In the past year or so, I’ve been getting into macro photography, posting my best to Flickr. I’ve tried out a few different kit configurations, diffusers and flashes, but following is a description of what I’m currently using most.

I do some bird photography, using a Sigma 150-600C Contemporary lens with my Canon R7. There’s a few issues with the Sigma and the R7 - focus pulses in and out, however it can be dealt with by some adjustments. It’s not perfect, but it does perform much better.

If you happen to be using a Protectli VP2420, equipped with a Celeron J6412 CPU, and you’re having random KVM virtual machine crashes when running Proxmox, notably with crashes that produce an ‘internal-error’ message in Proxmox, have I got the post for you!

Sometimes with virtual machines, it’s necessary to have a watchdog timer that monitors the VM and automatically restarts it in the case of any serious problems such as hangs. I have that need, and need such a configuration for both KVM and for Proxmox guests. Fortunately this is easy to set up.

Leaning on vmWare PowerCLI for much of my day-to-day system administration needs, I also have need for running PowerCLI scripts regularly. There are many ways to do this, but since I have an OpenShift cluster available, why not run those scripts in containers so you can simply set up a cronjob manifest to run them?

A quick snippet. Sometimes it is necessary to have a very old browser kicking around somewhere with all the security hooks turned off and with an old version of Java on it. The usual use case for this is getting access to some kind of embedded console, and you certainly do not want to be using that as your standard browser. A throwaway container that can run the browser for you on demand is exactly what is needed in that situation.