Thunder Nerds
Thunder Nerds
Frederick Philip Von Weiss, and Brian Hinton
Episodes
About
Reviews
Promote
277 – 🤖 How to Build a HomeLab with Jared Rhodes
53 minutes Posted Mar 13, 2021 at 10:53 pm.
] Brian Hinton: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome
] Frederick Weiss: [00:00:02] And
] Brian Hinton: [00:00:15] good
] Frederick Weiss: [00:00:17] ha.
] We'll answer them in the order they are received. And additionally, if
] Brian Hinton: [00:00:39] Brian. Yeah,
]Yeah, we'd like to thank the return of auth0  as this season
] Developer resources and streams. They also run avocado labs, which is an
] Frederick Weiss: [00:01:18] Yeah,
] We have Microsoft MVP, Pluralsight author. Jared Rhodes, welcome to the
] Yeah, we had a bunch of amazing guests. We had a Baskar Rao Dandlamudi .
] Brian Hinton: [00:01:56] Yeah. It was
] Frederick Weiss: [00:02:00] Yeah.
] How, how are you surviving with the COVID? I know you can't do any of
] Jared Rhodes: [00:02:21] So yeah,
] And I personally did the really shunned away from doing any of the, the
] I've, I've cut down every tree in my yard and dug plenty of holes.
] Brian Hinton: [00:02:54] like you
] There it looks like there's a monkey, a flashlight and a
] Frederick Weiss: [00:03:10]
] Brian Hinton: [00:03:12] No, no,
] Okay. Oh, camera monkey and fly and
] Jared Rhodes: [00:03:26] fliers.
] I can just. Override the firmware. And I also want to rip it apart to see
] Frederick Weiss: [00:03:52] I
]Jared Rhodes: [00:03:55] Xamarin
] Frederick Weiss: [00:03:58] I do not.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:04:00] us, Jared. I
] Frederick Weiss: [00:04:07] Yeah.
] Brian Hinton: [00:04:13] Oh, okay.
] That's great. It's very interesting.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:04:24] I don't
] Brian Hinton: [00:04:37] Yeah. We
] Frederick Weiss: [00:04:47] I dunno.
] Like, they were just so excited about it. Like,
] Brian Hinton: [00:04:56] okay. I
] Frederick Weiss: [00:05:07] put up
] They are his spirit, animals and Alton Brown Alton Brown is also
] Jared Rhodes: [00:05:28] like?
]Usually if there was a, someone had to step out, I would step in at the
] Brian Hinton: [00:05:48] I don't
] Yeah.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:05:53] I said, I
] So she didn't like it. What about your experiences
] Frederick Weiss: [00:06:16] with the
] So, do you have any such advice.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:06:36] No, no,
] Wait, we skipped out. So I personally, I, I haven't run my user group
] Brian Hinton: [00:07:13] I'm
] And yeah, just not hugely into it because there's no one-on-one
] Frederick Weiss: [00:07:31] work. You
] So they, they, they got really creative with that and that's.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:07:59]
] I'm not developing anymore right now. So basically right as COVID hit,
] So between, you know, stuff that was happening in healthcare, the
] I kind of wanted to take a break, really examine why I didn't, why I
]Brian Hinton: [00:08:50] I'm
] How she, how she been well, with all
] Jared Rhodes: [00:08:58] this,
] And she's been doing that since April or whatever. So every Tuesday at
AM, she has to go open that pharmacy. And at this point, no one even shows up, right? None of the
] They're shooting, you know, they're shooting people up with the
] Frederick Weiss: [00:09:37] Yeah, I
] So crossing my fingers. I could get even sooner than that, but you know,
] I'm excited. So why don't we talk about a little bit more work
]Jared Rhodes: [00:10:36] For brevity
] There's a lot of content generation and a lot of presentations. So
] Frederick Weiss: [00:10:57]
] And from my understanding, your main thing is a business that you run,
] Jared Rhodes: [00:11:11] Qimata.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:11:13] Qimata
] Can you tell us what Phil Collins, the Genesis of this company, was and
]Jared Rhodes: [00:11:34] I'm not
] Gotcha. Under that banner, I've done tons of Azure work and mobile
] Frederick Weiss: [00:11:57] name?
] Jared Rhodes: [00:11:58] name mean?
] So I was on my phone trying to figure out a name for a company. And it
] And the funny ending of that story is that it's actually the English
] Frederick Weiss: [00:12:39] so
] Brian Hinton: [00:12:45] I think a C
] Frederick Weiss: [00:12:47] is like
] Yeah. I don't even know if one could purchase that with our geographic
]Jared Rhodes: [00:13:09] I would say I
] And I usually get pulled in. I go and I try to help them figure out
] And I mean, everything, it didn't start fast. It didn't, it
] Like if I'm trying to ship something through three different
] They had a private cloud, they had a huge cloud initiative and they
] Brian Hinton: [00:14:30] I'm
] What is this?
] Frederick Weiss: [00:14:38] The
] Brian Hinton: [00:14:42] I mean, on
] Jared Rhodes: [00:14:55] Yeah. Think
] And that's basically what a private cloud is. They just have their own
] Whereas the public cloud. It's supposed to be a little bit easier. You
] Frederick Weiss: [00:15:27] let me
] The dangers and the value of one having a private location, like a private
] Jared Rhodes: [00:15:55] Okay, so go
] I'm kind of confused by it. It's about how do I convince them to
] Frederick Weiss: [00:16:05] Not
] Basically what I'm getting at is the, the second, the latter of the
] Jared Rhodes: [00:16:39] Well for a
] They had data centers in South America. I see. So they're really big.
] Whereas if you go to the public cloud, you have a lot of operational
] So you are talking about the private and public cloud. Whereas what a lot
] It's my backup, right? Because backups are so much simpler and easier
] It's not exactly that they need that redundancy. And if you're
] And for some reason, it just never really comes to fruition easily. A lot
] And these public clouds are so large that for you to not have access to
] Brian Hinton: [00:19:01] Like the
]What, that's one of our, our topics today is building a home lab. What,
] Frederick Weiss: [00:19:14] Yeah, I
] Brian Hinton: [00:19:29] like, you
] know,
] Frederick Weiss: [00:19:31] Oh, you
] There's a lab. That's exactly it. Right.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:19:41] So a home
] You can do more than that though. I run it as sort of a test lab for a
] Frederick Weiss: [00:20:29] Okay, go
] Brian Hinton: [00:20:31] I've
] Frederick Weiss: [00:20:52] Just put
] Brian Hinton: [00:20:54] Yeah,
] Jared Rhodes: [00:20:57] Yeah. I
] So when you go to hell not work at all, Well, we'll make you click 15
] Brian Hinton: [00:21:23] they tend to
] And I was just like, this is insane. Like, that's ridiculous. Like,
] Jared Rhodes: [00:21:44] She was the
] Brian Hinton: [00:21:48] Yeah. Yeah.
] Let's I guess I'll do this. So what, what got you into it?
] Jared Rhodes: [00:21:58] That's
] And so I went and I, the first place I went was the there's a
] Cause I have so many raspberry pies. I honestly just not, I think I just
] And that's where, when I was looking at the home lab, I learned like,
] Frederick Weiss: [00:22:59] Yeah.
] And some of the advice they have is to actually reach out to some of these
] Oh, you want this? Here you go. It's kind of like one man's
] Jared Rhodes: [00:23:50] for
] So the original amount when I bought the first five servers let's see,
] Six, $700 for that whole setup. I went and bought a router and the router
] Frederick Weiss: [00:24:14] So you
] Jared Rhodes: [00:24:29] as far as
] Yeah. And that was actually before I learned how to really cut costs. What
] But now I've gotten to where my prices are super low, because I know
]Both for this. And if you do mobile development for test phones, because
] So the recycler, the recycler gave me the racks for a hundred dollars a
] And it's a full. Private cloud for me now in there.
] Brian Hinton: [00:25:46] Yeah. These
] Super cheap, like 20, $30 and like this server that was used. And it's
] Frederick Weiss: [00:26:17] Let me
] I mean, obviously one, like you said, the equipment's really heavy, so
] Now, what comes to my mind is documenting these things in an advantageous
] Possibly. What do you say to that
] Jared Rhodes: [00:27:19] jury? I
] I feel like I can give insights to things that are very much opaque to
] But I think for people that do that, it might be simple and blah, blah,
] But I also feel like a lot of this stuff I'm learning now. Like
] Frederick Weiss: [00:28:33] I see
] I don't know what's going to happen, but let's explore this
] Brian Hinton: [00:29:03] So
] Frederick Weiss: [00:29:08] literally
] Brian Hinton: [00:29:16] Yeah, yeah.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:29:21] just
] It's a little bit more roomier than my coffin, but I think Brian looks
] Or can you obtain a lot of this? Brian says, yes, Jerry, just so you know
]Jared Rhodes: [00:30:02] Not from
] Brian Hinton: [00:30:12] and
] Frederick Weiss: [00:30:13]
] Jared Rhodes: [00:30:14] You will,
] Brian Hinton: [00:30:30] your
] Jared Rhodes: [00:30:31] Yes. So, as
]Just as talking about things like Linux and things that run on Linux, there
] I'm not a lawyer. So check this, but you can run ESX PSI for free. As
]Microsoft used to have some. Easier to access free versions of. Microsoft
] And since you're using this home lab as a home lab, you know, again,
] Brian Hinton: [00:32:17] Jared says
] Frederick Weiss: [00:32:21] is a
] J K JK K.
]Jared Rhodes: [00:32:32] But yeah, you
] Cause it's the same thing that runs in Azure. So building local builds
] Brian Hinton: [00:32:55] just because
] You can make sense with xynthia. I'm also big into music and have
] If you're locking in a cave and want to do some cool, like a hardware
] Frederick Weiss: [00:33:30]
] Like you know automation of things which doesn't stand for attack on
]Jared Rhodes: [00:34:00] One of the
] is trying to play around with it. There are some open source videos.
]I was trying to revisit a DJI drone, the little, well known, really
] Brian Hinton: [00:34:50] that's
] That's not feathers.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:34:53] That did
] Brian Hinton: [00:34:56] feathers.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:34:59] Explain
]Jared Rhodes: [00:35:00] Yeah, sorry.
]As far he's got beehives, like he got into bees during the lockdown.
] Brian Hinton: [00:35:20] Cool.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:35:22] honey. Yeah,
] And so we're trying to do that with as beehives and we want to see
] Deploy to two of these and then ha or three of these, excuse me. And then
] Brian Hinton: [00:36:14] Hmm. I got
] And I don't know what it does, but I w I want it
] Frederick Weiss: [00:36:36] super
] Brian Hinton: [00:36:37] No, no.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:36:41] cool.
]Brian Hinton: [00:36:43] I can't,
] Yeah. Well, let's try this. I'll go over here. Wait, actually, let
] Jared Rhodes: [00:37:03] these sounds
] Brian Hinton: [00:37:05] new to do.
] I mean, I don't know what I'd use it for, but I would like it
] Frederick Weiss: [00:37:20] cool
]Jared Rhodes: [00:37:27] Well, this
] Brian Hinton: [00:37:35] Yeah.
] Right. Yeah,
] Frederick Weiss: [00:37:53] dude, I
] Jared Rhodes: [00:37:55] In Atlanta.
] It was, you could sew and then you put the battery on the end of it. And
] Yeah, that'd be
] Brian Hinton: [00:38:32] pretty cool.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:38:49] The only
] Brian Hinton: [00:38:57] That's
] Did you have something happen to yourself?
] Jared Rhodes: [00:39:05] So, yeah, I
] So for like six months, every time we went to bed, the house was fully
] Brian Hinton: [00:39:27] nicely
] Frederick Weiss: [00:39:35]
] Yeah.
] Brian Hinton: [00:39:41] Let's
] Jared Rhodes: [00:39:57] Ooh. Video
] Frederick Weiss: [00:40:01] Okay.
]Jared Rhodes: [00:40:07] New
] Brian Hinton: [00:40:13] Yeah. So,
]Jared Rhodes: [00:40:23] Lion's
] Brian Hinton: [00:40:27] It's a
] Frederick Weiss: [00:40:29] If you
] Jared Rhodes: [00:40:34] One bug. I
] Brian Hinton: [00:40:40] That's
] Frederick Weiss: [00:40:42] Yeah, I
] Brian Hinton: [00:40:45] What if
] Have you re
] Frederick Weiss: [00:40:48] gifted?
] Jared Rhodes: [00:40:50] Oh, all
] Frederick Weiss: [00:41:05] Jerry,
]Jared Rhodes: [00:41:10] I was a
] Brian Hinton: [00:41:24] awesome.
]Jared Rhodes: [00:41:29] Cleaning my
] Frederick Weiss: [00:41:38] I like
] Jared Rhodes: [00:41:44] the sleeve.
] And so this is a nice sleek robot. But when it gets to where I have nerve
] Brian Hinton: [00:42:00] And you got
] Frederick Weiss: [00:42:03] whatever
] Brian Hinton: [00:42:05] Brian, did
] Jared Rhodes: [00:42:09] No, no, no.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:42:17] at this
] Brian Hinton: [00:42:25] Yeah. I
] Frederick Weiss: [00:42:28]
] I went back in time to push you. I, I got a little sloppy, but go ahead,
] Brian Hinton: [00:42:33] What, what
]Jared Rhodes: [00:42:36] Not being as
] Frederick Weiss: [00:42:38] Okay.
]Jared Rhodes: [00:42:49] For some
] I am very good at navigating situations.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:01]
] Brian Hinton: [00:43:02] Okay. Think
] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:10] taco
] Brian Hinton: [00:43:12] Oh, I'd
] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:19] Jared, do
] Jared Rhodes: [00:43:20] play you, do
] Brian Hinton: [00:43:23] are you? Oh,
] I mean, there's people at work who are going to be very adamantly
] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:31] I support
] Jared Rhodes: [00:43:32] I work with
] Brian Hinton: [00:43:36] share
] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:36] that
]Do you play an instrument? And if you do, what is that instrument?
] Jared Rhodes: [00:43:49] Not anymore.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:53] Did you
] Jared Rhodes: [00:43:59] Sure. No,
] You see, my brother did.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:44:07] Super
] Jared Rhodes: [00:44:15] We
] Frederick Weiss: [00:44:17] Okay. I
]Brian Hinton: [00:44:20] Would, okay.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:44:29] copy and
] Kind of all right. Because mistakes. No, it's a whole new thing. What
] Frederick Weiss: [00:44:39] All
] Jared Rhodes: [00:44:54] Well, my,
] Frederick Weiss: [00:45:03] Wait,
] Jared Rhodes: [00:45:12] mean, I am,
] Brian Hinton: [00:45:20] That's
] We're going to use that every episode,
] Frederick Weiss: [00:45:23] every
] Brian Hinton: [00:45:35] stealing my
] So what fact amazes you every time you think about it?
]Jared Rhodes: [00:45:42] Honestly, the
] Frederick Weiss: [00:45:55] Yeah,
] You're like, huh? Jared, you see a ghost. What do you do? Shoot it.
] Brian Hinton: [00:46:25] Double dead.
] What's the one thing you keep?
] Frederick Weiss: [00:46:45] Oh, I
]Jared Rhodes: [00:46:46] How to sell
] Brian Hinton: [00:46:51] All right,
] Frederick Weiss: [00:46:57] You
] Jared, if you could not be on a computer hypothetically for the rest of
]Jared Rhodes: [00:47:11] Probably some
] Frederick Weiss: [00:47:14] Hmm.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:47:16] I don't
] Brian Hinton: [00:47:19] Okay. You
] Outside of anything? We've talked about IOT. What's your other
] Jared Rhodes: [00:47:29] Well, I
] Frederick Weiss: [00:47:41]
] Say it's 2025. What's the first thing you're going to do?
]Jared Rhodes: [00:48:00] It depends on
] And I like walking around and seeing all these people's crazy costumes
] Frederick Weiss: [00:48:20] Nice,
] Brian Hinton: [00:48:22] What is one
] Frederick Weiss: [00:48:29] worry.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:48:32] one
]Your rational fear. I don't know. It seems rational to me. I, I do get
] Frederick Weiss: [00:48:51] right?
] I think that's a fair one. I mean, a lot of people are totally. Fine
] Jared Rhodes: [00:49:03] I also, I
] Frederick Weiss: [00:49:12] working
] Yeah. Right. That's when you get across the Rubicon of adulthood and
] And everybody's people, we're all people, we're not robots. I
] Brian Hinton: [00:49:50] Okay. This
] It just waived.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:50:01] If
] Jared Rhodes: [00:50:13] I don't
] Frederick Weiss: [00:50:15] He got it
] So, Jared, let's we're right about the end of the show. Let's
] So I'll let you say it
] right.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:50:40] Kim
] Frederick Weiss: [00:50:42] Qimata
]Jared Rhodes: [00:50:58] Meetup. So I
] So I run the Atlanta intelligent devices group. I help out with the.net
] For some reason, I get more of that on LinkedIn than I do on Twitter.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:51:28] Yeah.
] Brian Hinton: [00:51:41] It's all
] Frederick Weiss: [00:51:44] Is that
] Brian Hinton: [00:51:46] that joke,
]So thanks for joining us.
] Frederick Weiss: [00:51:59] Yeah. You
] Jared Rhodes: [00:52:02] it. Yeah,
] Frederick Weiss: [00:52:09] we'll
] So we have to do it around the exact same time to keep the consistency of
]Jared Rhodes: [00:52:37] Yes. If you
] If you go and you get, and you talk at a user group or something like
] Frederick Weiss: [00:52:57] Nice. I
] And thanks everyone, buddy, for watching the show. Really appreciate it
]Everyone. Thank you, Jared. Thank you so much.
] Jared Rhodes: [00:53:43] Super
] Frederick Weiss: [00:53:47] Take
0:00
53:52
Download MP3
Show notes
In this episode, we get to speak with Jared Rhodes: Microsoft MVP, and Pluralsight Author. We discuss what it takes to build a HomeLab. We review the technology, hardware, software, and economic logistics to get you started.
Episode Sponsor
Auth0 https://auth0.comAuth0 on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/auth0Auth0 on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/auth0Auth0 Avocado Labs online meetup events: https://avocadolabs.dev/
Episode Links
Website: https://jaredrhodes.com/Twitter:  https://twitter.com/QiMataLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/qimata/MeetUp: https://www.meetup.com/atlantaIntelligentDevices/Conf-migos 4 Life: https://www.thundernerds.io/2020/06/conf-migos-life/Pi-hole: https://pi-hole.netReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/Github lists of great software:https://github.com/n1trux/awesome-sysadminhttps://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhostedZynthian: https://zynthian.orgFeather: https://www.adafruit.com/featherHosts: Frederick Weiss: https://twitter.com/frederickweiss​Brian Hinton: https://twitter.com/mrbrianhinton
Transcript
[00:00:00] Brian Hinton: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome
to Thunder Nerds. I'm Brian Hinton.
[00:00:02] Frederick Weiss: [00:00:02] And
I'm Frederick Phillip Von Weiss. And thank you so much for consuming the Thunder Nerds, a conversation
with the people behind the technology that love what they do and do tech
[00:00:15] Brian Hinton: [00:00:15] good
[00:00:17] Frederick Weiss: [00:00:17] ha.
Thanks everybody for joining again. Please ask your questions.
[
you can go to the YouTube, go to youtube.com/thundernerds  and subscribe click on that the notification
bell, throw some likes and hearts our way we would deeply appreciate it. Thank you so much,
[00:00:39] Brian Hinton: [00:00:39] Brian. Yeah,
deeply. Appreciate it, please, please subscribe.
[
sponsor. They make it easy for developers to build a custom secure, and standards-based know if I login by
providing authentication and authorization as a service to try it out, go to Auth0.com  as can see on
the screen today. Also on both YouTube and Twitch under username Auth0 with some great.
[
online destination, our developer advocates run, organizing some great meetup events. Again, remember to
check out Auth0.com today. Thanks again.
[00:01:18] Frederick Weiss: [00:01:18] Yeah,
thanks everybody. So let's go ahead and get to our super cool guest today.
[
show, Jared, or welcome back rather. Good to be here. Yeah. Good to have you, yeah. You were on the show.
God sometime last year, a look at the exact date when we had the con Migos. It was in June, was the June
last year. Okay, cool.
[
The, your doppelganger, Jared. Janell Michael Todd Libby. Vincent Tang, Faisal Abid.
[00:01:56] Brian Hinton: [00:01:56] Yeah. It was
a big show too, we'll link to it in our show notes. It's a great show.
[00:02:00] Frederick Weiss: [00:02:00] Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. Great idea, Brian. So Jared let's let's start off by talking a little bit about
you and what's going on?
[
the traveling you normally do with all of your speaking events, talking about all kinds of super cool Neato
things around the world. What's going on, buddy.
[00:02:21] Jared Rhodes: [00:02:21] So yeah,
can't do any of that. Can't travel, can't know the speaking gigs or anything.
[
online talks or anything, unless like directly asked to to do one for a group. So for me personally, I have
been. A cave nerd, I guess, like I've just been in my office, you know, building out different pieces of
technology to entertain myself.
[
And other than that, it's just been sitting in front of this keyboard for
[00:02:54] Brian Hinton: [00:02:54] like you
gotcha. He actually is in a cave for our audio listeners. You're missing out. It's a great cave.
It's like great lighting. And I'm curious. Okay. I saw in the background just now I just noticed
this and I want to know what's going on.
[
supplier's. So I'm looking
[00:03:10] Frederick Weiss: [00:03:10]
considering specific. Brian's saying a real monkey.
[00:03:12] Brian Hinton: [00:03:12] No, no,
it's not a real monkey, a real monkey. But why is there a monkey? I think it's a flashlight and
pliers in the background. What's going on there? This is not a flashlight.
[
[00:03:26] Jared Rhodes: [00:03:26] fliers.
Okay. That's a camera from an IOT company that basically sold all those cameras and then turn their app
off. So you can't use them anymore. So I'm trying both, it had so many security holes. I think I
can, I can still use it like it was that badly secured.
[
what the parts inside would be worth and see if I can't just buy them off of people who don't want
them anymore and sell the parts.
[00:03:52] Frederick Weiss: [00:03:52] I
don't believe we answered the monkey question is
[00:03:55]Jared Rhodes: [00:03:55] Xamarin
 monkey. Do not know the Xamarin monkey.
[00:03:58] Frederick Weiss: [00:03:58] I do not.
I'm not aware of what you enlightened
[00:04:00] Jared Rhodes: [00:04:00] us, Jared. I
don't know why, but Xamarin is mascot was a monkey. And so there's Xamarin monkey was.
[00:04:07] Frederick Weiss: [00:04:07] Yeah.
What happened to the monkey? They chose to move away from said monkey, lack of bananas in the COVID.
[00:04:13] Brian Hinton: [00:04:13] Oh, okay.
Yeah. There's even a blog spot called Xamarin and monkeys.
[
[00:04:24] Jared Rhodes: [00:04:24] I don't
know where the muscle came from, but. I dunno, I, I started with Xamarin like eight years ago and it was
like every, you know, how companies do that? Where they've got like a mascot or something. So everything
has it in it. They had like the monkey app demo and the monkey, this and the monkey that it was
there.
[00:04:37] Brian Hinton: [00:04:37] Yeah. We
used to have the, a Firefox stuffed animal when we'd go to conferences back when, you know, we could go
to conferences, we put it on top of the camera. So we'd look at the Firefox like, Oh shit.
[00:04:47] Frederick Weiss: [00:04:47] I dunno.
Know how many companies back in the day, when I first started out, had like way too many of the Linux
penguins everywhere.
[
[00:04:56] Brian Hinton: [00:04:56] okay. I
love, I love penguins. In fact a spirit animal of a cool like Prince thing that I'm going to put behind
me eventually, because I love penguins. Let me, let me
[00:05:07] Frederick Weiss: [00:05:07] put up
this chart. If you don't know him actually. Yeah, he's very much into penguins.
[
Brian's spirit animal. Don't ask me why, but Jared, again the COVID is you can't go out, you
can't do the talks. Are you doing any of the virtual events? And if you are, what do those look
[00:05:28] Jared Rhodes: [00:05:28] like?
I've only done a few and that was one directly asked.
[
last minute and do a talk and. And for me personally, I've really shunned away from doing it though.
Cause it's, it's really not the same. I don't have any drive to do them at all. Like literally
at all,
[00:05:48] Brian Hinton: [00:05:48] I don't
even have to drive.
[
[00:05:53] Jared Rhodes: [00:05:53] I said, I
don't feel like doing any of that. The virtual events really, I feel like you could make something
better. Prerecorded and, and a lot better edited. But yeah, I just did a few of them and I don't, I
don't really like it either. Like trying it, you have no interaction. I half the time I would miss my
cues when people would raise their hands to ask questions or anything like that.
[
[00:06:16] Frederick Weiss: [00:06:16] with the
attending? Some of these, have you been. Going to any of these interesting events, have you partaken in any
of these talks and anything that you found successful working for other people? A lot of people are coming
to us asking about how I put on these virtual events and if we have any advice.
[
[00:06:36] Jared Rhodes: [00:06:36] No, no,
because we actually have a team member, so I helped run the Atlanta code camp as well. And so we have a team
member that's been putting together all kinds of events for I Tripoli virtual. And honestly, when the
idea of doing code camp virtually was presented to our group of organizers, it was like a collective side
and then no one will do it.
[
virtually after the first month. And then I haven't done anything else virtually, so I really. I wish I
could help people out to do this, but I am so interested in doing the virtual meetings.
[00:07:13] Brian Hinton: [00:07:13] I'm
just, I'm the same way. I mean, I run the Figma Tampa Bay meetup, and I've only done like maybe one
or two since COVID started.
[
interaction and, you know, Rachel bakes cupcakes, I can't bring virtual cupcakes to people that
doesn't
[00:07:31] Frederick Weiss: [00:07:31] work. You
could program that. Brian, come on your slot. I'll tell you what though. Who does some good events is
the people at advent apart, they do some pretty interesting things where you have a lot of deep interaction
with the presenters.
[
That's as good on them. That's a great Avenue to to explore and try that out. We'll put a link
in the show notes as well. What about courses, Jared? You mentioned courses. Are you developing courses
right now? And if you are, what are those
[00:07:59] Jared Rhodes: [00:07:59]
courses?
[
I had started a new contract for a company based out of New York that I was flying to. So that was back in
March. And at the same time I was finishing up my last two or three courses for Pluralsight. And there were
some Xamarin courses and between my wife's a pharmacist.
[
traveling stopped my contract suddenly going from on-site to remote. It was chaos and I wasn't, to be
honest, I just wasn't happy with what I produced in my last couple of courses. So I've kind of,
I've steered clear of it for a while.
[
wasn't happy with those courses so that I could maybe make some that, that people wanted, you know?
[00:08:50]Brian Hinton: [00:08:50] I'm
curious, how is your family doing? How's your wife doing, being a pharmacist with healthcare and all
this stuff going on?
[
[00:08:58] Jared Rhodes: [00:08:58] this,
she's been fine. The first a month and a half of people literally walking up to the pharmacy and coffin
get them. They installed the place glass and everyone started wearing a mask and she somehow drew the short
straw and had to open the pharmacy for senior hours.
[
seniors go to senior hours anymore. Yes. I don't know. It's been okay in that aspect that she's
had some easier work on, on top of that, but now vaccines are coming out.
[
vaccines. So she's got tons of more work and has to learn a lot of things quickly.
[00:09:37] Frederick Weiss: [00:09:37] Yeah, I
heard not I heard, but I read on May 1st. Apparently that's like the national, everybody over 18 could
get a vaccine according to CNN and what Bindin project.
[
I'll, I'll take what I could get. I'm very excited. Put it in my, I don't care wherever you
need it. I really don't care where you put the vaccine, as long as I could get it. If you have to stick
a needle in my teeth, go for it. I just gave me this damn vaccine.
[
related things, Jared, let's get to know you a little bit. What do you, what do you do exactly on a day
to day? I know you are a Microsoft MVP. You are a plural site. Author, what do those two things mean? If you
could, just for the sake of brevity, if you could just quickly go over those and I want to ask you something
a little bit more deeper,
[00:10:36]Jared Rhodes: [00:10:36] For brevity
sake, what that usually means in non COVID times.
[
generating content, blog posts obviously the courses videos doing the in-person meetings, running the code
camps. That's what those things mean outside of work. And for work, I'm just a cloud solution
architect right now.
[00:10:57] Frederick Weiss: [00:10:57]
Yeah.
[
which is the well, there's your website. Let me find the right slide here, which is Humana. If I'm
saying that correct. Is that, is that right? Humana?
[00:11:11] Jared Rhodes: [00:11:11] Qimata.
[00:11:13] Frederick Weiss: [00:11:13] Qimata
excuse me. Camada correction.  dot com. So that's Q I M a T a.com for audio listeners, go back and
watch we'll have it in the show notes.
[
why you actually started it? And what are some of the verticals that you serve? What are some of the
solutions that you provide?
[00:11:34]Jared Rhodes: [00:11:34] I'm not
going to oversell it. I mean, it's just the company I started so that there was a company between me as
a consultant and basically, so I could 10 99 through a company.
[
work. So Xamarin mobile, and mainly Azure, either automation or architecture. Why the
[00:11:57] Frederick Weiss: [00:11:57] name?
What's the, what's the
[00:11:58] Jared Rhodes: [00:11:58] name mean?
It means nothing. So funny enough, I was in, I was with my wife and we were in India and we were going
around and we were trying to figure out a name because I was stuck in the car for 16 hours a day with my
in-laws.
[
just happened to be, it was a play on a word that was the only word that wasn't taken in. As a domain
name, right? I want something weird, but I just wanted something that was like six letters. There was a play
on a word and boom, those are the letters that fit together.
[
name of a city in China. So most of my traffic actually comes from people in that name.com. That's
[00:12:39] Frederick Weiss: [00:12:39] so
awesome. You should get the the the level domain for the China, the China version of that,
[00:12:45] Brian Hinton: [00:12:45] I think a C
H yeah. Something like that
[00:12:47] Frederick Weiss: [00:12:47] is like
that.
[
challenge and all that. Great. So what kind of, what kind of challenges do you help? Resolve for customers.
Do you, do you have people come to you for several specific things and what are those specific things that
you specialize in?
[00:13:09]Jared Rhodes: [00:13:09] I would say I
usually get two types of customer requests and that'll be both with Azure and Xamarin. Usually it's
someone that has used the technology on a project or as a team, you know, they're building out some
solution for about six to 10 months and they come to me and go something's wrong.
[
what's wrong. I could say one here in Atlanta was a They make cash registers. You can figure out who it
is. So they make cash registers and they came to me after six to 10 months on his Amerind project and
everything was wrong.
[
didn't stay on. It crashed all the time, blah, blah, blah. So I went in and over the course of a couple
of months, we fixed it for. The current client, they are the, I think they're the world's largest,
largest insurance company. They do weird insurances that you don't think about.
[
languages. Countries, what are they, you know, whatever, or from Walmart, ensuring every location across the
world, that kind of thing, big insurance. And they want it to get into new markets. So they wanted a cloud
solution architect to try to help them walk through like, Oh, and they weren't in the cloud.
[
brought me in to help with that cloud initiative. As they built out this new business line to try to figure
out how they could use this enterprise Azure contract to their benefit.
[00:14:30] Brian Hinton: [00:14:30] I'm
laughing. Cause I can just think of my, if my parents were listening to this, they'd be like, get a
private cloud because they would have no idea.
[
[00:14:38] Frederick Weiss: [00:14:38] The
Jetsons? I don't get it.
[00:14:42] Brian Hinton: [00:14:42] I mean, on
that point, like for, for people who aren't familiar, like, what does that mean to like like how would
you explain that to layman's terms like private versus like what you're doing? Yeah. Private cloud
versus public cloud.
[00:14:55] Jared Rhodes: [00:14:55] Yeah. Think
about everything before the public cloud.
[
servers and they have a lot of them and they have teams that manage them. So in their world, you either send
an email, go to a little portal or something and you request this whatever access to whatever thing, or to
create a thing within that private cloud.
[
can just log in and there's already a portal and you can self-service your way to turning on your
website or your database, just through a few clicks. So do you, how do you,
[00:15:27] Frederick Weiss: [00:15:27] let me
ask this because this pertains to this communication.
[
cloud, opposed to something like, you know, a Google or an Amazon service. And two, how do you sell people
on maybe a cloud redundant solution just in case if they have that private have some kind of redundancy.
[00:15:55] Jared Rhodes: [00:15:55] Okay, so go
over the first question again.
[
move to the public cloud, even though it may be less secure.
[00:16:05] Frederick Weiss: [00:16:05] Not
specifically that it might be, it might be less secure to have a private cloud just for the fact that if all
your stuff is in this you know, and, and again, they can have a private cloud in multiple geographic
locations, but say something goes wrong with this cloud service.
[
question really, which is the redundancy of. Redundant clouds and what that means and how that can best
ensure service.
[00:16:39] Jared Rhodes: [00:16:39] Well for a
company like this, it's so large that it's private cloud is actually one of those multi-region. And
I mean, when I say multi-region they had data centers in Hong Kong, they had data centers in Zurich.
[
And their private cloud was very large. They're moved to the public cloud wasn't necessarily for
that redundant cloud per se, per purpose. I believe if I could guess it was a cost cutting measure. When you
invest in a private cloud, you have a lot of capital expenditure.
[
expenditure and for a company that large, that spends that much on the cloud, that's usually the driving
force behind it is to ship. It's a shift from CapEx to OPEX. However, to address the idea of the
redundant cloud, there's two two things that come to mind when you say redundant clouds.
[
of companies are looking at is the public public cloud. So first is the private to public cloud. It's
like me personally, if we go into talking about the home lab, I use the public cloud as an offload for my
private home lab.
[
there. And I just get the easy geo-redundant security and all that kind of stuff for my backups. Right. For
a company that was that large and had that large of an internal private cloud, the public cloud just offers
something different.
[
talking about redundancy, when we go to Amazon and Azure, that is something that companies. Okay. How so?
How do I put it? It's if you, if you've done this long enough, you've seen it where you've,
you've gone through a client and that client will have spent millions and millions of dollars with an
idea in mind, like a redundant cloud.
[
of companies are now trying to do that with Kubernetes because I can just do Kubernetes and Azure and, and
do Kubernetes and Google. And I can do Kubernetes and Amazon. But at the end of the day, there'll be
these minor differences and they don't want to spend the extra a hundred thousand dollars to get those
minor differences out of the way.
[
your resources and something as big as Azure would require something as catastrophic as either one
certificate going bad or governments falling. It's just that large.
[00:19:01] Brian Hinton: [00:19:01] Like the
government's falling. I found it interesting, you mentioned your, your home lab.
[
what the heck are you talking about when you were mentioning home lab?
[00:19:14] Frederick Weiss: [00:19:14] Yeah, I
guess just to, just to even set this up further, we, we, we, we need to there, I'm sure there's a
lot of people that don't have some kind of concept that appears in their head when, when Brian said home
lab, like they think there's like girls,
[00:19:29] Brian Hinton: [00:19:29] like, you
[
[00:19:31] Frederick Weiss: [00:19:31] Oh, you
went for an actual lab.
[
[00:19:41] Jared Rhodes: [00:19:41] So a home
lab, no. Sarcasm depends on what you want to do with it. So like there's these found these, these
groups. So again, they, you know, I got locked inside for a year and my outlet for creativity when I
couldn't talk to people in groups was to apparently just go and buy old computer hardware and create my
own little It'd be too much to call it a private call, but my own little data center server set or a
home lab in a home lab is just whatever where you want it to be 90% of the people that I see doing it are
doing it so they can run their own multimedia server, which seems to be the thing everyone in technology
likes to do.
[
bunch of different projects and to learn different technologies like Kubernetes, you know, you can do
whatever you want to with it.
[00:20:29] Frederick Weiss: [00:20:29] Okay, go
ahead, bro. Okay.
[00:20:31] Brian Hinton: [00:20:31] I've
been debating I'm getting a raspberry PI and doing the whole, I can't remember the name of the
software, but there's a software you can use that basically intercepts ad traffic before it like gets to
your computer and PI yes, yes. Pile. I've been wanting to try that out just cause it seems like it would
be, it's just a smart thing to have in between my computers and everything else.
[00:20:52] Frederick Weiss: [00:20:52] Just put
the link in the show notes to that.
[00:20:54] Brian Hinton: [00:20:54] Yeah,
it's pretty cool.
[00:20:57] Jared Rhodes: [00:20:57] Yeah. I
looked at doing that too. So mine was just, I had, I had routing equipment, so I went ahead and did the The
no lookup BNS for those ad sites in that, but a pothole is also another very popular one. But do note that
when you do that, when you turn off all the ads, a lot of websites know that you turned off their
ads.
[
things to let you know, Hey, your browser seems to be,
[00:21:23] Brian Hinton: [00:21:23] they tend to
not like it. Yeah, it's crazy. How much, how insane it's gotten. Like, I mean, the verge has always
been notorious for ads, but I watched a video the other day. There were, there were in the first four
minutes, like five ads.
[
come on guys.
[00:21:44] Jared Rhodes: [00:21:44] She was the
same YouTube. Doesn't want you to listen to music anymore. It wants ads.
[00:21:48] Brian Hinton: [00:21:48] Yeah. Yeah.
So tell us a little bit more about your lab. Like what you're doing. Like, how did you like it? Where
you like, Oh, well I'm stuck at home.
[
[00:21:58] Jared Rhodes: [00:21:58] That's
pretty much it. I was stuck at home and I'm I'm you know, I've, I've done Azure for so long
and technically I'm supposed to know a lot about edge computing and IOT. Right. So I needed a bunch of
servers in my house to really try that kind of stuff out.
[
subreddit. So reddit.com/r/home lab. And I went to the home lab and I looked over stuff there. And that,
that kind of helped guide me down the path of figuring out, like, you know, you're talking about doing
the raspberry PI and doing a pie hole.
[
kind of knew that it was like 23. Some of them, you know, so old that I don't even want to plug them in,
but I had a lot of those and I didn't really want to wire together, a bunch of raspberry pies. I wanted
to look at some sort of older hardware and try it out.
[
you know, you, you can get this stuff pretty cheap. A lot of companies are getting rid of their servers and
they just ended up in the, you know, like eBay and you can just buy them really cheap.
[00:22:59] Frederick Weiss: [00:22:59] Yeah.
I've actually looked at some of the videos of people that are putting these things together.
[
companies, maybe even some of the OEMs and ask them about, you know what are you not using? What are you
getting rid of, et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of times there'll, they'll, they'll provide
these things to you. They'll just, yeah.
[
garbage is another man's. I dunno how to build a robot. Some of the things are a lot more accessible to
get. You don't need to have a hundred thousand dollars to do this. And, and speaking of which would you
mind sharing if it's not a something very ostentatious, like like a number to what your home lab is
like, what, how much did you pay
[00:23:50] Jared Rhodes: [00:23:50] for
this?
[
each server costs me around a hundred dollars and that's full shipping and everything, but it had no
hard drives. So then the hard drives themselves, cost me about 30 bucks a piece. So there were five of them.
So we're looking at a what?
[
was like 30 bucks.
[00:24:14] Frederick Weiss: [00:24:14] So you
did this for well, under a thousand dollars. It didn't cost you like 20 grand. You didn't have to
take a loan out. It didn't have to give anybody blood. Yeah, it was fairly Easy to obtain these things
[00:24:29] Jared Rhodes: [00:24:29] as far as
cost goes, right?
[
I did for those was I went and I found some like server refurbishing websites. So that's what they do.
They refurbished servers and you buy them, you can configure them and they'll send them to you.
That's what I did first.
[
enough about hardware to really. Why are these things together and kind of figure out what's wrong with
them and be like, you're talking about the guy who said you can call the OEM. If I could give advice for
anyone who wants to pick this up, it's a check with your local electronics recycler.
[
the electronics recyclers, what happened, what happened for me that that worked out was there was a merger
between two banks locally here in Atlanta. Those two banks then closed down a bunch of branches. Those
branches all had servers with server racks in them.
[
piece, and then like the power backup, power supplies and all the other stuff for, you know, $20 here, $50
there. And now I've got stuff. That'll never leave the room in this office because it's way too
heavy, but enough, I still am under like a thousand dollars for that set.
[
[00:25:46] Brian Hinton: [00:25:46] Yeah. These
are also a great resource. I, I used to buy little setups when I was younger, from the local university, the
university of Florida. They have actually, if you look, if you Google, you'll find websites for like Oh,
old hardware and you can like buy them, like.
[
pretty, pretty good deals out there. Even Goodwill is a good, good place. If you go to the right Goodwill
and are in the right city, like surprisingly I've come across some interesting things.
[00:26:17] Frederick Weiss: [00:26:17] Let me
ask you about the advantage of doing this.
[
you could use it as a pseudo gym for nerds too. You could really gain a lot of experience and, and, and many
different kinds of realms of technology, right. Not just putting these things together, but exploring all
the ways that you could leverage these pieces of technology.
[
way, such as a blog or a tech talk, I don't know, whatever the kids use, right? Like document the stuff,
not only to help the community. And get the word out about how to do these things. Cause I'm sure
there's many people that want to have this knowledge, but also it's advantages for yourself to be
able to put hooks in the water to be you know, not just like, look at me, I'm the expert, but it could
help with career opportunities down the road.
[
[00:27:19] Jared Rhodes: [00:27:19] jury? I
haven't about this particular today was the first day where I really felt like I did something that was
something that I could write an article about. But for most of it, I am learning as I like to write my
articles about Azure. I've been using Azure for 10 years, blah, blah, blah.
[
even seasoned people that use it. This stuff. I mean, I feel so lost sometimes when I'm trying to, I
just configure the networks and Linux, when there's two ports, you know, to either net ports, it took me
long enough to figure out how to do that, that I could write an article on it.
[
blah. The only thing I did re I even felt like I could blog about was I. I had set up this Postgres cluster
and it took like weeks because every article on how to do it with a red hat. And I did it on DVN. And again,
I feel like it as far as blogging about this stuff so people could know maybe I should blog about it a
little bit more being locked inside, kept me from blogging as much.
[
I'm not teaching, I am in the learning phase of, of a lot of this. And so I'm not so sure I should
be teaching actively to like, know what I'm doing.
[00:28:33] Frederick Weiss: [00:28:33] I see
what you're saying, but there's also a lot of value in being honest and authentic with doing this as
learning like, Hey, I'm going to pick up this wrench and I have this piece of wood.
[
together. I've seen a lot of videos like that, and I think they're really interesting to see
somebody's experience of learning and, and their thought process, looking at them, at the work at the
math problems and see how they figure it out.
[00:29:03] Brian Hinton: [00:29:03] So
you're saying Jerry should start Tik TOK for this stuff is what you're saying. If that's
[00:29:08] Frederick Weiss: [00:29:08] literally
what you got from what I said then. Absolutely. I agree with you and your purple wouldn't coffin, Brian.
Yes.
[00:29:16] Brian Hinton: [00:29:16] Yeah, yeah.
That's good. Yeah. Let me
[00:29:21] Frederick Weiss: [00:29:21] just
focus on you really quick so everybody can see you and your purple winning coffin.
[
beautiful in it and he's a handsome young vampire. Speaking of vampires, Jared, let's talk about
free software. Soft wheat. We've talked so much about hardware and how to, to start this. Let's talk
about things like freemium, et cetera, like does one need to spend again an absorbent amount of you know,
dollars to, to do this?
[
where he weighs in. But does one need to spend an absorbent amount of dollars to do this?
[00:30:02]Jared Rhodes: [00:30:02] Not from
software. So from the software perspective, one thing you'll do is you'll learn, you'll learn
Linux. I mean, that is just something that will happen after you've plugged in enough
[00:30:12] Brian Hinton: [00:30:12] and
you'll cry a
[00:30:13] Frederick Weiss: [00:30:13]
lot.
[00:30:14] Jared Rhodes: [00:30:14] You will,
I'm a fan of crying, just so you know, I 'm even going back to the block. One of the reasons you
don't blog as much when you're doing this, because you broke your network so many times and none of
your servers are up like, okay, it just keeps you, you can't post your blog. Right. So And
[00:30:30] Brian Hinton: [00:30:30] your
keyboard won't connect.
[00:30:31] Jared Rhodes: [00:30:31] Yes. So, as
far as software goes, you'll learn Linux, but if you go, and I think I put some stuff in, in our, in our
doc at least like github lists, there are lists that people make specifically for like awesome server
software, free software. That you can run. And some of them are just people's personal github projects
where some of them are full fledged, like things you know, like Postgris like huge enterprise database
software that you can just install for free, even going beyond the free stuff that you can get.
[
is. Close to free Virgin of VMware. You can get a look into that. If you're a listener and you're
really wanting to learn VMware, they have this very close to free version. I should actually take it back so
first you can actually run ESX PSI for.
[
far as I know, unlike a up to like a hundred machines that have no more than eight cores and that's just
ESX size. So it's not like they're big, like vSphere or anything like that. But if you run ESX PSI
and you use something like a VMware workstation, I mean, you've got a full setup right there just to log
into your server and start building VMs and testing and learning things that way.
[
software. They do have them, or at least they did have like dream spark and they used to have BizSpark,
which was really helpful. I don't know if they still have a dream spark. Hopefully they do. Other than
that check to see if you get a visual studio license through work.
[
I'm not a lawyer to check your licenses before you come back at me.
[00:32:17] Brian Hinton: [00:32:17] Jared says
everything. He is legal. He
[00:32:21] Frederick Weiss: [00:32:21] is a
lawyer, just so you know, the link in the show notes. If you actually go to Jared's website slash
lawyer, you'll learn, he is a lawyer just putting that out there.
[
[00:32:32]Jared Rhodes: [00:32:32] But yeah, you
can, you can check your license at work. See if you get a visual studio license and that should allow you to
download some stuff from Microsoft. If you'd like to try it locally. I still use a team foundation
server, or what do you call it? Azure dev ops server nowadays just for work tracking and stuff like that,
just to be familiar with it.
[
is good practice. And, and
[00:32:55] Brian Hinton: [00:32:55] just because
I'm a nerd, I want to mention something that's With rabbis disputing that everyone knows I'm in
there, a raspberry PI, because I'm excited by this, you know, the pies and small, like little computer
things.
[
like, I think six or seven synthesizes around me. And  xinjian was an open sense platform where he
could just take a raspberry PI and create a synthesizer that can do all sorts of amazing sounds. So I'd
say, check that out too.
[
stuff.
[00:33:30] Frederick Weiss: [00:33:30]
That's all I know, Jared. Oh, fun stuff. There's this idea, there's this idea of fun. I mean,
you, you said it, so I don't associate you with fun, Brian, but let me get to the real point. What about
fun stuff that you do with this?
[
Titan, but AOT automation of things, IOT, what, what kind of fun stuff are you doing with this? What kind
of. Exploration are you diving into with your candles lit on a Sunday morning?
[00:34:00]Jared Rhodes: [00:34:00] One of the
things is like I showed you that little camera with the, the monkey and the pliers or whatever, back there
in my, in the back
[
Processing like image detection, security style stuff, servers. I want to see if I can get the cameras on
that, to work with those and do some video and audio recognition with those. Just because I can buy a bunch
of them for cheap and see what I can do with them, but trying that out.
[
expensive camera drone. I've got one of those. And I was trying to play around with some automated
processing of its imagery, but I'm having some trouble with it right now, due to how it's SDKs work.
And I've got Oh, I got these little I think they're feathers, the feathers and I
[00:34:50] Brian Hinton: [00:34:50] that's
clearly a circuit board of some sort.
[
[00:34:53] Frederick Weiss: [00:34:53] That did
not come from a bird
[00:34:56] Brian Hinton: [00:34:56] feathers.
Tell me more.
[00:34:59] Frederick Weiss: [00:34:59] Explain
to the audience.
[00:35:00]Jared Rhodes: [00:35:00] Yeah, sorry.
So I got these eight fruit feathers. They are just 1915, make a Hertz, a little radio. And I am trying to
just build out an automation on the build. So I've been building libraries so that a friend of mine can
work on something.
[
[00:35:20] Brian Hinton: [00:35:20] Cool.
That's a good thing to get into
[00:35:22] Jared Rhodes: [00:35:22] honey. Yeah,
he really likes it. And we, one of the things we want to do is he's an, he's a professional
electrical engineer. And so we're going to try to put some sensors in his beehives and then put them on,
on these long range wireless cause we can get. We can get a couple of miles out of these if they aren't
if, as long as they've got a clear line of sight.
[
what we can do as far as automating, like, you know, just reading out the temperature, see if they're
getting too hot, see if they're moving that kind of stuff. And we also want to see a for at least, for
me, as far as the automated build portion of it, I've got a bunch of code and I want to be able to check
that when I start auto altering the firmware that I can run a bill.
[
have those three in different configurations and messages. And that I didn't break the firmware during
the build.
[00:36:14] Brian Hinton: [00:36:14] Hmm. I got
completely distracted by everything you said, because I went to add a fruit and they have a hollow and Otter
for Halloween and for express Halloween orange Halloween edition, that has a screen with an eye on
it.
[
[00:36:36] Frederick Weiss: [00:36:36] super
thrilling. Thank you, bro.
[00:36:37] Brian Hinton: [00:36:37] No, no.
Check it out. Orange Halloween did out. I'll put a link. It's really
[00:36:41] Frederick Weiss: [00:36:41] cool.
It's like always share your screen too.
[00:36:43]Brian Hinton: [00:36:43] I can't,
Hey, let's try this out. I've never done this before so we could shut down the entire podcast
probably.
[
me not have all my hundreds of browser tabs visible for everyone. This is riveting for everyone listening.
I'm sure. Due to
[00:37:03] Jared Rhodes: [00:37:03] these sounds
like
[00:37:05] Brian Hinton: [00:37:05] new to do.
Okay. Is it sharing? I can't tell. Oh, it is sweet. Look at this. This is awesome. It's like an eye
that Just like looks around.
[
maybe on my wall or something because that's a super
[00:37:20] Frederick Weiss: [00:37:20] cool
Jared, can we use this to help? I don't know. Keep the humans in check when the robots take over, what
is this form?
[00:37:27]Jared Rhodes: [00:37:27] Well, this
looks like, and I'm just guessing by the skull shape of the circuit board, that it is a
decoration.
[00:37:35] Brian Hinton: [00:37:35] Yeah.
It's purely for sure. It's purely executive, but I mean, it's pretty awesome because it has like
a screen for displays. It looks like it has light sensors, so you could probably have it turned on and look,
look around when people walk by, it's only $40, like $40. You can have something cool to play with,
like, why not?
[
[00:37:53] Frederick Weiss: [00:37:53] dude, I
get it. That looks fun.
[00:37:55] Jared Rhodes: [00:37:55] In Atlanta.
I went to a, so I go to dragon con every year in Atlanta. We're, you know, it's a big cosplay thing.
They're like everyone they build the costumes is the, is like a central theme. And I think it was eight
of the fruits that were actually there. And they did a presentation and they handed out like a, a, a
thread.
[
it will have lights through the thing, but they actually, they sent one of their evangelists and I gave out
free stuff at, like, not a tech. Things. Just so people could cosplay like this first thing, eyeball was
like, I could take a costume and just put eyeballs on the back for whatever reason.
[
[00:38:32] Brian Hinton: [00:38:32] pretty cool.
Yeah. Some of the costumes at the cosplay stuff, I mean, a hundred percent are off topic, but are pretty
awesome. But yeah. Last thoughts on IOT, we're going to switch to our nuts round of questions. We call
lightning round, but I want to make sure if you have anything else you want to talk about before we
go.
[00:38:49] Jared Rhodes: [00:38:49] The only
other thing I want to bring up is when you start doing the home lab, make sure you know where you're
putting them because they put out heat, they can be loud and they usually have lights on.
[00:38:57] Brian Hinton: [00:38:57] That's
very true. Yeah. Heat is a big thing with all the computers. Get, wait there, is there a story with
this?
[
[00:39:05] Jared Rhodes: [00:39:05] So, yeah, I
mean, I guess when COVID hit, I hadn't, I wasn't in this office, I was in a separate office. I left
that office, moved everything back into my house, which meant that now my closet, that my wife's closet
really now has blue lights and fans in it. And it's just like that all the time now.
[
blue and lit up and
[00:39:27] Brian Hinton: [00:39:27] nicely
heated. Yes. Awesome. So now lightning round time, which is my favorite time. Where's where's the
thing, Frederick,
[00:39:35] Frederick Weiss: [00:39:35]
where's the graphic. No, I don't have it for some reason, then you'll have to deal without
it.
[
[00:39:41] Brian Hinton: [00:39:41] Let's
see. Previous episodes for lightning, your own graphic. So we ask you a question. I go, Frederick goes, you,
we answer like, you know, back and forth pretty quickly. My first one for you is what's one pet peeve of
yours that you wish you could get rid of because it would make your entire life easier.
[00:39:57] Jared Rhodes: [00:39:57] Ooh. Video
conferencing.
[00:40:01] Frederick Weiss: [00:40:01] Okay.
Fair enough. New technology. Are you excited about,
[00:40:07]Jared Rhodes: [00:40:07] New
technology that I am excited about? I don't know. Quantum computing seems pretty interesting. Oh yeah.
[00:40:13] Brian Hinton: [00:40:13] Yeah. So,
okay. Jared you're in the circus. Would you rather be the person who puts their head in the lion's
mouth or the one that gets shot out of the cannon?
[00:40:23]Jared Rhodes: [00:40:23] Lion's
mouth just cause I get to interact with nature. Oh, nice.
[00:40:27] Brian Hinton: [00:40:27] It's a
good way to look at it.
[00:40:29] Frederick Weiss: [00:40:29] If you
could eat one bug, what would it be?
[00:40:34] Jared Rhodes: [00:40:34] One bug. I
would have to say one of those giant tarantulas, just so I'd feel full.
[00:40:40] Brian Hinton: [00:40:40] That's
true. That's a good point.
[00:40:42] Frederick Weiss: [00:40:42] Yeah, I
totally see that.
[00:40:45] Brian Hinton: [00:40:45] What if
anything?
[
[00:40:48] Frederick Weiss: [00:40:48] gifted?
[00:40:50] Jared Rhodes: [00:40:50] Oh, all
kinds of hardware. Like IOT hardware. I go to, I've got so many Bluetooth speakers. I could, I sell them
on eBay at this point, get Bluetooth speakers from me that have some company's logo on it.
[00:41:05] Frederick Weiss: [00:41:05] Jerry,
you could answer this with a little bit of brevity. You don't have to jump into the full story, but what
got you into technology?
[00:41:10]Jared Rhodes: [00:41:10] I was a
physics major friends were on the submarine team. They needed someone to program how they wanted to do the
sonar. Oh yeah. I wrote it out for them. They said we don't know what that does. And then I had to write
it and see, so I learned how to. Okay,
[00:41:24] Brian Hinton: [00:41:24] awesome.
Awesome. What chore do you hate doing?
[00:41:29]Jared Rhodes: [00:41:29] Cleaning my
bathtub. That's a good one new house, some reason that thing collects dirt, like it's a hobby.
[00:41:38] Frederick Weiss: [00:41:38] I like
that. I hear that. Jared. Let's see. What, what, what kind of tats you got there? What's on,
what's on
[00:41:44] Jared Rhodes: [00:41:44] the sleeve.
Oh this is so I have a lot of nerve damage in my right arm due to an accident when I was really
young.
[
damage, there's a alien growing in it and it's all broken and messed up.
[00:42:00] Brian Hinton: [00:42:00] And you got
to, after obviously, after whatever,
[00:42:03] Frederick Weiss: [00:42:03] whatever
happened, you didn't fall out of a tree like
[00:42:05] Brian Hinton: [00:42:05] Brian, did
you? I did fall out of a tree from the very top.
[00:42:09] Jared Rhodes: [00:42:09] No, no, no.
I had a different accident. Not, it's not a happy accident so we don't want the viewers to be like,
what? Yeah. If you look
[00:42:17] Frederick Weiss: [00:42:17] at this
Brian chart at the very bottom, it says fell out of a tree. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:25] Brian Hinton: [00:42:25] Yeah. I
missed the chain link fence, so thank you, Frederick. I keep reminding
[00:42:28] Frederick Weiss: [00:42:28]
everyone.
[
Brian.
[00:42:33] Brian Hinton: [00:42:33] What, what
do you miss most? About being a kid,
[00:42:36]Jared Rhodes: [00:42:36] Not being as
fat.
[00:42:38] Frederick Weiss: [00:42:38] Okay.
Fair enough. Question, Jared. This, this sounds goofy, but what is your favorite thing about yourself? Your
favorite trait about yourself?
[00:42:49]Jared Rhodes: [00:42:49] For some
reason, I guess it was because I have to . I'm very short and both of my brothers are six foot or, or
larger.
[
[00:43:01] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:01]
That's very fair.
[00:43:02] Brian Hinton: [00:43:02] Okay. Think
carefully about this. This question is for my coworkers. This is very serious. Taco or burrito,
[00:43:10] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:10] taco
easy.
[00:43:12] Brian Hinton: [00:43:12] Oh, I'd
have to agree with them there. Ah, two tacos. Okay.
[00:43:19] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:19] Jared, do
you
[00:43:20] Jared Rhodes: [00:43:20] play you, do
you think Beretta? Like why
[00:43:23] Brian Hinton: [00:43:23] are you? Oh,
no, no.
[
unhappy with your choice, but it's okay. It's okay.
[00:43:31] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:31] I support
you, Jared.
[00:43:32] Jared Rhodes: [00:43:32] I work with
people who don't know things to
[00:43:36] Brian Hinton: [00:43:36] share
[00:43:36] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:36] that
that's great. Too hot to handle too cold, too cold, too cold to hold something like that. Bobby Brown,
look it up, Jared.
[
[00:43:49] Jared Rhodes: [00:43:49] Not anymore.
I played the saxophone when I was younger, but I don't play it anymore.
[00:43:53] Frederick Weiss: [00:43:53] Did you
want to be that guy from the lost boys without a shirt? Just like, cause I could see that about you.
[00:43:59] Jared Rhodes: [00:43:59] Sure. No,
no, no. The reason I played the saxophone is a very interesting story.
[
[00:44:07] Frederick Weiss: [00:44:07] Super
interesting. It's a lot of context and I know I, did you have your own read or did you guys share a
read? Because that's gross.
[00:44:15] Jared Rhodes: [00:44:15] We
didn't share.
[00:44:17] Frederick Weiss: [00:44:17] Okay. I
just want to put that out there, Brian,
[00:44:20]Brian Hinton: [00:44:20] Would, okay.
Would you rather be able to copy and paste in real life or undo,
[00:44:29] Jared Rhodes: [00:44:29] copy and
paste?
[
would I undo? Except for the copy and paste.
[00:44:39] Frederick Weiss: [00:44:39] All
right. Oh man. Yeah, you must we'll cut the eraser off your pencils, Jared favorite podcasts that
you're listening to right now, purely for enjoyment. That's educational and enjoyable.
[00:44:54] Jared Rhodes: [00:44:54] Well, my,
one of your favorites was lightning heats. It was a real lightning peak. Did you say geeks? Lightening?
[00:45:03] Frederick Weiss: [00:45:03] Wait,
wait a second. Here. I believe you're making a funny L O L F. If I'm saying that right. I
[00:45:12] Jared Rhodes: [00:45:12] mean, I am,
I enjoy the best podcast for technology out there and that is Thunder Nerds.
[00:45:20] Brian Hinton: [00:45:20] That's
great.
[
[00:45:23] Frederick Weiss: [00:45:23] every
episode, ah, that and Lisa singing, we've gotta get that all put together. Right? Thank you, Jerry.
That's very nice of you. Well, let me ask you again, because actually, nevermind, go ahead, Brian.
It's your church. That's
[00:45:35] Brian Hinton: [00:45:35] stealing my
turn. You did multiple times earlier.
[
[00:45:42]Jared Rhodes: [00:45:42] Honestly, the
thing that actually was something I learned when I was getting my degree. So when a light travels from its
own reference frame, everything is instantaneous.
[00:45:55] Frederick Weiss: [00:45:55] Yeah,
that makes sense. I've seen, I've seen Picard on paramount. I understand that Jared, Magine you come
home. It's probably one in the morning. It is raining outside. You just want to get in the door, you
drop your keys, like three times, just trying to get in. You get in, you take off your shoes.
[
There you go, dead ghost. Don't good.
[00:46:25] Brian Hinton: [00:46:25] Double dead.
Oh, okay. My question, you shoot the ghost. The ghost is really angry and chases you away. You end up
tripping and falling, hit your head. You'll wake up, but you only keep one thing. Like career-wise that
you remember?
[
[00:46:45] Frederick Weiss: [00:46:45] Oh, I
couldn't keep up with that.
[00:46:46]Jared Rhodes: [00:46:46] How to sell
myself in an interview.
[00:46:51] Brian Hinton: [00:46:51] All right,
but you don't know any of the work I can do the job.
[00:46:57] Frederick Weiss: [00:46:57] You
can't stack stuff on top of your question. You need 3d Brian,
[
your life what would you be doing professionally?
[00:47:11]Jared Rhodes: [00:47:11] Probably some
sort of electrical work.
[00:47:14] Frederick Weiss: [00:47:14] Hmm.
[00:47:16] Jared Rhodes: [00:47:16] I don't
know. I guess I like electronics. I don't know, man.
[00:47:19] Brian Hinton: [00:47:19] Okay. You
have 30 minutes of free time. How do you pass the time outside?
[
thing that you do?
[00:47:29] Jared Rhodes: [00:47:29] Well, I
don't remember, but during lockdown again, I've cut down every tree in the yard and I've
landscaped it. Everything inside. Okay.
[00:47:41] Frederick Weiss: [00:47:41]
What's the, what's the first thing Jared, that you're going to do once we're able to escape,
once we're able to move around freely and everything is in a state of not, not a semi normal, but in an
actual normal, I don't, I don't know when that is.
[
[00:48:00]Jared Rhodes: [00:48:00] It depends on
when exactly you mean one of the things we'll be seeing in the part of my family that sorta has to be
locked away until they are fully vaccinated. If you're talking about way after that, when it's much
more normal, if you go back to dragon con they have to cancel it, do the thing.
[
and getting together with nerds and drinking a lot.
[00:48:20] Frederick Weiss: [00:48:20] Nice,
nice.
[00:48:22] Brian Hinton: [00:48:22] What is one
irrational fear that you have? We won't use it against you. Don't
[00:48:29] Frederick Weiss: [00:48:29] worry.
No, we definitely will. But keep going
[00:48:32] Jared Rhodes: [00:48:32] one
irrational fear that I have. Write this down, Brian.
[
freaked out as, for, as a person who flies as much as I did, at least I do get freaked out, man. Every time
we get in that plane, I mean, it shakes a little bit. I'm like, well, I guess that was that's it.
That's how it is,
[00:48:51] Frederick Weiss: [00:48:51] right?
Yeah.
[
with planes. And I know a lot of people that just freak them out when they get ever near any of that shit.
So totally get it.
[00:49:03] Jared Rhodes: [00:49:03] I also, I
know a couple of pilots and like have drank with them and God it's like, when you get to know engineers
or programmers, you're like, how does any of this stuff stay
[00:49:12] Frederick Weiss: [00:49:12] working
well, that's, that's the lesson.
[
you realize that. Most people don't know what they're doing. We're all making it up as we go.
And we're all trying to not, not fake it till we make it, but you realize, you know, maybe I'm not
the best of something and you just, you, you kind of learn on the job and you become that leader or that
person that does that thing.
[
mean, not until 2045. When you know, we're legitimately all robots, doc, thanks to Ilan. And you know,
everything goes horrible. But yeah, on a happier note, Brian.
[00:49:50] Brian Hinton: [00:49:50] Okay. This
is my last one for you. What did the ocean say to the beach? Oh, God splash nothing.
[
[00:50:01] Frederick Weiss: [00:50:01] If
you're going to do that, then I got to get one in. Okay, go Jared. The frog was driving down the road
and his car broke down. What did he do?
[00:50:13] Jared Rhodes: [00:50:13] I don't
know. What did he do?
[00:50:15] Frederick Weiss: [00:50:15] He got it
towed.
[
talk about where people could find you. Then, I imagine some of the best places are your website, which is
Jared roads.com. Of course we'll have the link in all these spots in the show notes. We have the,
I'm not going to say it, right.
[
[
[00:50:40] Jared Rhodes: [00:50:40] Kim
technologies
[00:50:42] Frederick Weiss: [00:50:42] Qimata
technologies was Qimata.com and also, which would correlate to your Twitter handle, which is Q Mada.
That's it. Yeah.  so all the great places, anywhere else that you want people to to find you on the
internets,
[00:50:58]Jared Rhodes: [00:50:58] Meetup. So I
run a couple of talks about that and help a couple of groups.
[
users group. So you can find me on meetup on both of those. And I also help run the Gwinnett, Georgia,
Microsoft users group. So any of those, you can find me on meetup. And then obviously the same Kimaya name
on LinkedIn. If you just want to reach out and ask some questions.
[
Really?
[00:51:28] Frederick Weiss: [00:51:28] Yeah.
Hmm. Yeah. It's interesting how the, all the, all the plethora platforms have their own kind of
personalities and questions that go with it in unpredictable ways.
[00:51:41] Brian Hinton: [00:51:41] It's all
those IOT connections.
[00:51:44] Frederick Weiss: [00:51:44] Is that
what it is
[00:51:46] Brian Hinton: [00:51:46] that joke,
sorry, I just want to say Jared, I appreciate you taking the time with us and spending it, you know,
it's the most important thing then that we have in our life is time.
[
[00:51:59] Frederick Weiss: [00:51:59] Yeah. You
really spend your time. Really appreciate
[00:52:02] Jared Rhodes: [00:52:02] it. Yeah,
man. Thanks guys. Yeah. Thanks for having me on another one. Like we did for the Amigos. Yeah. Oh yeah,
[00:52:09] Frederick Weiss: [00:52:09] we'll
definitely do another con Migos episode that is going to be a yearly thing. We're going to do another
one, I guess in June.
[
the yearly thing. Which makes sense. Last question that we enjoy asking our guests. Jared is, do you have
any parting words of wisdom, any advice that you could, but never lightly bestow upon the audience?
[00:52:37]Jared Rhodes: [00:52:37] Yes. If you
want to learn something, try to start teaching it.
[
that. You're not being judged. People know that you are learning it and you are talking to people who
probably know less than you do, because by the time you get up there, you have learned more than you ever
thought you would have.
[00:52:57] Frederick Weiss: [00:52:57] Nice. I
just want to put on here that Shiva said hi. Hey Shiva. Hi. Hi Jared. Hi Brian. Hi frantic, which is
possible on the cough Migos. Hey, I'll be getting in touch with you, cause we're all gonna do that
again. Shiva. But yeah, that's that? That's great advice. Thank you so much Jered, and I guess
that's it.
[
again. If you could do us a solid and go to the youtube.com/Thunder Nerds and subscribe, really appreciate
it. And for more on Jared, you know, obviously you could go to, again, Jared roads.com. You could go. Qimata
on Twitter and the website qimata.com and we'll have a link to everything in the show notes.
[
[00:53:43] Jared Rhodes: [00:53:43] Super
appreciate it. Alright, thanks for everyone.
[00:53:47] Frederick Weiss: [00:53:47] Take
care, everybody. Thanks. And we'll see you again. Bye.
This podcast uses Blubrry for stats, and dynamic audio. Learn more on this podcast's About tab. Dynamic Audio may cause this episode's timestamps to be slightly off.
← See all 100 episodes of Thunder Nerds
Podbay © 2026 Fancy Soups
About