New Keyboard

I picked up a Feker Alice98 in an attempt to get something a little more "ergonomic" than my previous keyboard. It's an "Alice" layout, with the interesting distinction of having two "B" keys.
This keyboard is also compatible with VIA, making keymapping, backlighting, and macros easy to manage. This keyboard isn't listed on VIA's website, though, so it requires manually importing the keyboard definition file (attached to this post). Hopefully VIA will add it officially, eventually.  

"New" SSDs for the cluster

I also picked up some gently-used Intel TLC SSDs for my main Proxmox nodes.

I had noticed before that the IO delay ^[1] on my nodes would creep in to the 80%+ range when running any reasonably write-intensive task, like a system update. I also received feedback that this blog seemed slow, which I suspected might be caused by the same issue.  While the consumer QLC SSDs I was previously using seem fast for normal desktop use, their short-comings become quite noticeable when running multiple VMs. Here's a screen shot of the IO delay during fairly normal use before, compared to the the IO delay now while running updates:

(blue is the IO delay)

While the old ones would routinely creep in to the 50% or higher range while running fairly simple tasks, the new SSDs peaked around 5%, even when under load.