Ian

Welcome to my blog page, this is where you can find all of my posts.

New PC Build

Below are my chosen specs for my every 5 year PC refresh. I plan to document the build and the final product when it is ready. I am excited build a custom PC. It has been roughly 10 years since I have done so for myself.

Type Item
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D 4.4 GHz 12-Core Processor
CPU Cooler ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 280 72.8 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
Motherboard Asus ROG STRIX X870E-E GAMING WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard
Memory Corsair Vengeance 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory
Storage Samsung 990 Pro w/Heatsink 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
Storage Samsung 990 Pro w/Heatsink 4 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
Video Card Asus ROG Astral OC GeForce RTX 5080 16 GB Video Card
Case Corsair 4000D Airflow ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply Asus ROG Strix Aura Edition 1200 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
Operating System Microsoft Windows 11 Pro OEM – DVD 64-bit
Generated by PCPartPicker 2025-03-31 18:29 EDT-0400

I Just Built My First Flask Web App: Vacation Optimizer!

Excited to share my first Flask web app, built to help you maximize vacation days by strategically planning around weekends and holidays!

Key Features:
Optimize Vacation Days: Get the best days off based on your preferences (extend weekends or maximize time off).
Visual Calendar: See weekends, holidays, and optimized days at a glance.
Export: Download your vacation days as a .ics file for your calendar.
Dark Mode: Switch themes to match your style.

Why I Built It:
I struggled with planning vacation days effectively and saw an opportunity to learn Flask while solving this problem.

What I Learned
Flask Basics: Setting up routes, handling forms, and rendering templates.
Templating with Jinja2: Passing data from the backend to the frontend.
Working with Dates: Manipulating dates and calculating date ranges in Python.
Frontend Skills: Improved my HTML, CSS, and JS skills, especially with Bootstrap.
Debugging: Learned how to read error logs and debug issues both locally and on a live server.
User Experience: Importance of making the app user-friendly and intuitive.

Try It Out!
Vacation Optimizer Web App

I’d love for you all to try it out and let me know what you think. Any feedback, suggestions, or tips would be greatly appreciated!

Leia’s Violin Recital

Leia did great in her first Violin recital at Carpe Artista. This is six months of her learning the parts of the violin, how to handle the instrument, and learning timing and pitch. I can’t wait to see how she continues to grow musically.

Fan Remastering an Electronic Metal Album: My Process

I took it upon myself to do a “fan remaster” of one of my favorite electronic metal albums of the mid 2000’s. This album is not available to purchase or stream on any of the large platforms (Spotify, Amazon, ect.) I wanted to re-upload my take on a fantastic electronical metal album. I always thought the original was overly compressed and very mid heavy. Using Presonus Studio One, I reigned in the smashed limiter, Equalized some things to clean it up and then reprocessed a new master. If you enjoy this album, I hope you enjoy my take on it.

Here are a few screenshots of the audio EQ changes made to each track:

This EQ is assigned to the Mix Bus: (Used to clean up midrange frequencies and add more low end)

Here is my Master Post effects applying to all tracks using Ozone 9:

Here is my final remaster:

Here is the original artist master from 2011:

Pumpkin Carving

We took Leia to her second pumpkin carving yesterday. She had lots of fun, scooping out the pumpkin seeds, and painting her pumpkin. Our pumpkins are now sitting on the porch patently waiting for Halloween!

Leia’s first time Bowling

Today we took Leia to the Smyrna Bowling Alley. This was her very first time bowling. She had a great time!


Web Server Migrated

Over the weekend I successfully migrated my web server from my local PC in VMware workstation, to my newly deployed ProxMox host. The website should be much faster to load! I also deployed an Ant Media Server to facilitate live streaming into my WordPress website into the future. I did test this integration and it worked great! Looking forward to using that in the future.

ProxMox Server in Production

I have installed both 2TB M.2 SSD’s, upgraded the RAM to 64GB total. I have my drives configured in a ZFS RAID1, and have already imported two of my VM’s from my desktop computer over to my new hypervisor. Next step, and it is a big one! To setup VLAN’s on my network to isolate network traffic of these VM’s. I will be testing that hopefully tomorrow. Once I get that configured, the final piece to the puzzle will be migrating the webserver hosting this very website to my new ProxMox environment.

Website Migration

I purchased a BeeLink SER6 to run ProxMox. Going to upgrade it to 64GB of RAM. Then will work to migrate my Ubuntu VM hosting this website over to it. This will give more resources to work with, as well as better reliability for the website and security.

The Beginning

This is the first official post to kick off my “blog” here on our family website. I’m eager to start using this and hope to get better at it as time goes on. I built this website as a way to give my entire family a place to share thoughts, photos, and anything else they desire. It makes it a lot easier to backup and owning everything ourselves we aren’t reliant on Facebook or anyone else to maintain our data. As an “IT guy” it also gives me a little passion project to work on and expand my abilities. See you on the next one!

– Ian Arsenault