How can I help you?

Do you want a fancy new Smart Home?

...complete with a recording studio?

I could single-handedly design/engineer, build and maintain one.

Seriously every single facet. From the literal ground, up to custom software. Even hosting a VPS for remote VPN connection and control/monitoring of your home systems. :)

Of course I'm not going to, because that is alot of work for one person over a very long time. Even on a tiny home project. Speaking from experience, as I was actually crazy enough to do such a thing once upon a time.

That's a good summary of my knowledge/experience.
So a better question might be; what can't I do?

Windows.

Well, actually I can do that too. The building kind or the software. Prefer not to though. ;)

Interested mostly in Linux centric projects but any remote IT work really. I'd rather be sailing (still working on masts though) so onsite is quite limited unless convenient to dock/anchor; preferably in the south east US/Caribbean. Travel costs equal to nautical distance x current diesel $/gallon + 20%.

[And here we interrupt this general background experience copy with some direct sales copy...]
I invested a lot of time and money to manage surviving the past year without any revenue and spending very little on expenses. Alas, it still costs money to live. I really only need to work one day a week, or about one week per month. Even at my rate that's equal to just above poverty level. But, it would be enough to keep food on the table and cover most living expenses. If you're not going to offer me a six digit salary IT position, or equivalent; then you can at least pull out the petty cash or charitable gifts credit card, read a sad story and send a few dollars, I'm sure my daughter would appreciate it. If it makes you feel better, make it a consulting engagement...send an email, ask some questions, pay an invoice. I currently have a special on "How to NOT live paycheck to paycheck on $100k+/yr" consulting.
[end public service announcement : we now return to our story, already in progress]

Slackware has been my OS of choice since the 90's when everyone was compiling kernels for their Xwindows desktop...had NetWare and Redhat servers running at home... ran their own Quake servers across dialup connections and occasionally lugged their gaming tower to the office after hours for the T1 connection to play deathmatches...

What's that you say? It wasn't everyone that did that? hmm.. well that's interesting...

Since the late 80's I've used/worked on Dos, Amiga, Unix, Vax, Aix, HPUX, BSD, Netware, Linux (Slackware, RedHat, Mandrake, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Dd-wrt, OpenWRT, and quite a few others including LinuxFromScratch), and even Windows systems which I hear people still use for some odd reason. Personally, I couldn't find a reason to use any Microsoft products about 20 years ago. Appears that it hasn't changed much and still takes more constant maintenance to secure and keep running than anything else. But maybe more people use AutoCad now then back when I did, IDK. Lately running Debian and derivates (Raspbian, Mobian, Mendel) on more devices; and running more services in docker stacks/containers.

I started programming in BASIC on a Tandy 1000 IIRC, or was it a Sinclair ZX81? Learned AutoLISP and C/C++ around 1990 or so. At some point, to some degree or another (incidental to job/contract, specific programming projects, personal interests), have also worked on code in VB (the classic variety), perl(and miniperl), python, java, php and probably a few others I can't recall now. I guess batch files, bash scripting, awk/sed/regex, et. al. would fall under the programming category as well. I have a couple docker projects on github. Github isn't what it used to be, could have something to do with Microsoft buying it. Maybe at some point I'll make my gitea server public. Til then I'll clone repos to Codeberg. The bms2sk project can be found there. It's a C program that reads data from a JBD BMS (a common LifePo4 Battery Management System) via bluetooth and sends the json Delta to SignalK.

In the 90's I worked with data in FilemakerPro, Access, Oracle, Informix, Delphi, mysql, crystal reports... More recently, mariadb and postgres. Have run redis, solr, etc. as services in docker fwiw. I guess Grafana would fall into the db category. How about some message queuing/protocol stuff that I run at home/boat - Mqtt, signalk, 1wire, nmea... or we could just move on to network protocols. Like an onion, there's layers...Well nevermind, I forgot how to rattle off the OSI model a long time ago and there's a website or two somewhere for reference... Got the hurricane electric ipv6 certification when ip6 started rollout. I've setup/admin'ed my own and numerous others' servers for file, print, app, web, mail, DNS, etc. etc.

And then there's the security of all this stuff - user permissions, firewalls, vpns, ids, WAF, proxies... the stories of questionable hacking activity in the days of AOL, keystroke loggers, recording and analyzing packet captures, elevating privileges and creating hidden backdoor admin accounts in netware... Yeah, I'm what some have called a first generation hacker ... But now even I'm getting bored with this, though before I forget, since I'm on the subject... Here's my rates for penetration testing. .... And in closing: kudos to you if you actually read all of this.

Basically anything in IT (and the construction field as mentioned on the 1st gen hacker page above* and my resume includes to demonstrate general business/management experience) I have either done or have the experience/knowledge to do.

* - Some links may be missing. I lost many webpages (including a newer revision of this one), a couple databases and all Hubzilla posts when my previous web/VPS provider's entire infrastructure just disappeared from the internet without warning. A reminder that online backup options are no good if those servers suddenly go away. Offline backups are important.

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