Trainguyrom

I wish I could clean and organize my stuff like a normal human and not have my brain turn it into a Big Thing. But I'm clearly making progress!

Some of these boxes were from a couple of moves ago, a couple were much newer. But surprisingly I was able to eliminate 7 boxes just by sorting items out that I have places for and putting them away, sorting some items into a separate tote and repacking the remaining contents into 2 similarly old doom boxes that were previously half full as well.

I now have a neat stack of doom boxes and totes where I previously had a much larger wild pile of collapsing doom boxes and stuff stacked on top of said boxes since it's in a bedroom that we haven't used for anything other than storage since my youngest started sleeping through the night, and the cats like to climb on the boxes and make the mess worse!

My small garage was built in the 40s and has wood siding which was damaged by a recent hail storm. Insurance cut us a settlement check and I decided to challenge myself to repaint the garage myself

The hail mostly damaged the paint, with some small chips in a couple of spots. My plan is to sand the portions that are to be repainted, fill the chips with wood filler and repaint

I'm looking at getting an air compressor (Partly as I'm seeing commentary on it being far easier and faster than rollers, and partly out of buying a tool I might not ever have a decent enough reason to buy in the future that'll be useful to have on hand) and a sprayer to do the bulk of the painting

Given I'm mostly looking to repair some quarter size damage to the paint splottered all over 2 sides of the garage, do I need to sand all of the old paint off before repainting or can I simply paint over the old paint? The old paint is in pretty good shape where the hail didn't sand it away. Looks like its been repainted within the century, possibly even within the last decade, and I'm not changing colors dramatically, just doing a flat "white" over a flat "white" which shouldn't be a very obvious difference after weathering. Basically am I reducing the durability of the paint job if I paint over the existing undamaged matte paint?

Additionally, any other gotchas I should be aware of?

I can provide photos tomorrow of the damage and existing paint if needed

Update: I ended up putting wood filler into the cracks, dents and gouges, sanding flat only where I put in wood filler and then painting over the existing paint and it turned out brilliantly. I only painted two sides of the garage as the other two were not damaged by the hail and have a bunch of overgrowth in the way so I'm planning on coming back this spring to cut back that overgrowth and paint the other two sides so they look just as good. The new paint so far has not shown any care for the sun, extreme heat, strong winds, rain, Aurora Borealis, snow, sleet, ice, extreme cold nor flash-freezes that mother nature has thrown at it since and the new paint simply continues to exist without any visual change

A recent storm damaged the siding of my house so I'll have to have it replaced. The thought occurred to me to run some network cabling behind the new siding (and likely new insulation) while its all pulled off. Should I run standard riser cabling or outdoor-rated cabling if I do so?

Obviously the most ideal solution is standard in-wall but I don't have the appetite for such a project given half the house was built in the 19th century and I know such an undertaking would involve quite a few surprises that I almost definitely lack the know-how to handle, and I'll probably be moving in a couple of years so I don't want to invest too much time or money into the endeavor.

Alternatively is there a good type of conduit I could run instead?

I placed a low bid on an auction for 25 Elitedesk 800 G1s on a government auction and unexpectedly won (ultimately paying less than $20 per computer)

In the long run I plan on selling 15 or so of them to friends and family for cheap, and I'll probably have 4 with Proxmox, 3 for a lab cluster and 1 for the always-on home server and keep a few for spares and random desktops around the house where I could use one.

But while I have all 25 of them what crazy clustering software/configurations should I run? Any fun benchmarks I should know about that I could run for the lolz?

Edit to add:

Specs based on the auction listing and looking computer models:

• 4th gen i5s (probably i5-4560s or similar)
• 8GB of DDR3 RAM
• 256GB SSDs
• Windows 10 Pro (no mention of licenses, so that remains to be seen)
• Looks like 3 PCIe Slots (2 1x and 2 16x physically, presumably half-height)

Possible projects I plan on doing:

• Proxmox cluster
• Baremetal Kubernetes cluster
• Harvester HCI cluster (which has the benefit of also being a Rancher cluster)
• Automated Windows Image creation, deployment and testing
• Pentesting lab
• Multi-site enterprise network setup and maintenance
• Linpack benchmark then compare to previous TOP500 lists

I'm currently decluttering and reducing to get a handle on my home, and I've come to a conundrum of how many plates/bowls/cups/etc do I actually need? I have 2 young kids that we'd prefer not to have to run to the store at 8pm to buy more plates because someone ruined a plate, but very limited cupboard space (small 120-something year old house with a kitchen that was built in the 50s)