I don’t think I have anything too flashy to show yet, but I was thinking I could bring in some spare Cat6 cable and connectors, and we could make up a few Ethernet cables. It’s one of those things that seems tricky until you’ve done it once, then it’s pretty straightforward.
I could also possibly do a quick chat or presentation about some future projects I’ve had floating around in my head, but that might also work better as a group brainstorm.
My rack is mostly a collection of learning experiences at this point — a few failed attempts at trying to do things the “right” way 
One project I’d love to learn more about is setting up a high-availability Proxmox cluster with Ceph storage. I haven’t done Ceph or a proper HA Proxmox setup yet, but it’s definitely something I’m interested in.
I’m also curious whether there’s a good way to balance workloads based on efficiency and demand. For example, running idle or low-load LXCs on a more power-efficient machine, then moving them over to a more powerful server as the load increases. I’m not sure how practical that is, but it’s something I’d like to understand better.
Another thing I’d really like to learn more about is proper firewall setup: layouts, best practices, and how that all ties in with VLANs. I’m especially interested in doing VLANs properly, where a new or unknown device connects into an isolated area first, then gets allocated to the correct VLAN so the network stays properly segregated.
For the next online session, if Tech Man is familiar with it, I’d be keen to learn more about UART and Modbus protocols.
I’d also be interested in learning more about PNP/NPN MOSFETs. I have a few ideas where I’d like to piggyback off existing equipment — mainly reading indicator lights and switching buttons electronically.
Another area I’d like to understand better is powering components properly, especially using buck converters. I’ve used them for small components before, but I’m now looking at powering 19V mini PCs. I’m still learning everyone’s names, but the gentleman working with the atomic clocks might also be interested in the power-supply side of things, especially if power quality can affect timing accuracy.
I’m also looking into NUT — Network UPS Tools — for managing UPS shutdown protocols. Does anyone have something like that set up with home batteries, where everything can safely soft-shutdown if the batteries get too low? I know it’s a bit of a niche scenario because we don’t get many power outages, but I was thinking about cases like a long stretch of rainy weather followed by a power outage when the batteries are already low.
Also, if anyone is bored during the week or next week and is willing to run me through VS Code with Home Assistant, I’d really appreciate it. I’ve already managed to break it once, but luckily I had backups.
GitHub is also something that still feels pretty foreign to me. I’d really like to understand how it works properly, especially how to use it for Home Assistant, config backups, version control, and collaborating or sharing projects.
At the moment I understand the rough idea, but I’d love a beginner-friendly walkthrough of the normal workflow — things like repositories, commits, branches, pull requests, cloning, pushing changes, and how to recover when I inevitably break something.
File structure is another thing I’d really like to understand better. Matt was showing me how he has some of his files set up in VS Code, but I don’t fully understand what’s inside those files yet, or what each one is actually for.
That probably comes down to me having no coding experience at all, so even the basic structure of projects, folders, config files, and how everything links together still feels pretty foreign to me.
I’d really appreciate a beginner-friendly walkthrough of how VS Code actually edits Home Assistant. I’d like to understand what files I’m looking at, what they’re for, what’s safe to change, and how to avoid breaking things while I’m learning.
From our first meeting, we were also talking about compressing movie files. There’s a tool called Tdarr that can scan your storage and compress or transcode media. I haven’t used it myself, but I’ve heard good things.
Matt was also showing me his Pi-hole setup with reverse proxies. I gave something similar a go on my UniFi router, but I’m still not really sure what I’m doing there yet.
Sorry for the brain dump. Haven’t had a lot of time recently.