I have been studying for several technical certifications and recently an online MBA program with Exams that require studying. A goal in the back of my mind was to study for those using an application that replicates the certification and exam process. With that in mind, I started looking around for a simple test or quiz web application that lets me plugin a pile of questions in multiple-choice format with a timer as a baseline.

While, I did find a couple of promising projects, found in the Research section below, each had some downside or gaps that would require a good bit of rework to make them usable for what I wanted to accomplish. A secondary requirement is to have a somewhat modern web interface and to use a tech stack that I can use to refresh my full-stack programming skills with modern tools.

Another goal is to use this as something that is a break from studying. This little project might be the ticket by having a second thing that keeps my brain from imploding. I cannot use my proxmox clusters or ceph or even networking as those spiral out of control at every chance. This project has to be something infinitely interruptable.

My super lean Proxmox 8.3 testbed cluster running Ceph occasionally just decides to lockup a node based on it being incredibly limited on RAM and CPU. As much as I hate rebooting Linux/UNIX systems, this is a case where a nightly reboot of the nodes might help with reliability.

My past write up for a Backlog of Posts had all the things that I wanted to write about in mid-2024. It has been updated with links to the released posts that covered each as I finished up in 2024. I got a lot of them written but the backlog of drafts and things I wanted to write about also grew as I picked off drafts and added new posts.

I want an extra ~350w of power available for a GPU that cannot run off PCIe bus power of 75w or 25w in some very old Dell Optiplex 990 Mini Tower nodes in my Proxmox cluster.

When one of my power supplies died earlier and I bought on eBay a NEW 750W Dell OptiPlex 9010 990 790 Power Supply Replace / Upgrade that was ~750w and the same form factor as those nodes PSU. This was just fast purchase to grab something that would ship the next day with no plan for an upgrade but I did pay attention that was both better and newer with a warranty.

So I have one machine that has the extra wattage available for a much better GPU like a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12Gb.