What an incredible setup! Really wonderful house overall, to be honest.
Aside from all of the extremely epic technology and whatnot - I have got to say, the elevated view and outlook of your place is sensational. Congratulations on putting together such a terrific place to raise a family.
Oh and worth mentioning; I sincerely appreciated and enjoyed reading your comprehensive Q&A section beyond the images (which themselves, had really awesome annotations included). Thanks for sharing!
As the former proprietor of LanParty.com (which I mistakenly included in a sale to IGN) I must salute you. The absolute genius of the provided lan equipment and particularly the management thereof is an inspiration.
I think the lack of any standing offerings of variations of Quake is a glaring mistake but easily rectified. :)
It's really heartening to see lan gaming continued and offered in such a way that the amount of hassle and setup is minimized and the gaming is maximized. We spent far too much time in the 90's and 2000's dealing with driver issues, etc etc. Bravo.
That's a sweet LAN setup you've got! The only few things that rub me the wrong way is the choice of peripherals and the lack of headsets. Must be pretty noisy in here!
The tabletops also seems a bit too thin and wiggly for my taste, but, honestly, for LAN parties with chill people you personally know — it's ok
As for the actual host setup with a singular disk image — great job! LAN gaming centres do something similar with their setups, with some differences (a lot of centres either use Windows-based diskless solutions that mount vhdx files as drives remotely over iSCSI, or use ZFS-based snapshotting, which is my personal favourite)
But all in all, seems like my dream house :)
I own a chain of LAN gaming centres, so the feedback is definitely skewered into the business perspective quite a bit
Wow, this is beyond badass. Not only is the LAN and home network setup top-notch, that location is excellent too - what a view! Congrats on the amazing LAN setup and such a fun place to enjoy some gaming with your friends & family. Truly worthy of some envy, that's for sure :) Looks like it was a good chunk of work, but 110% worth it!
This is neat, but as a $NET shareholder and someone with another ~$1m in net worth that can't afford to buy a house for at least another 6 years this makes me think we should significantly increase taxation.
Housing price issues in the US are fundamentally the result of every major city making it expensive or impossible to actually build enough housing. Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all. What's needed are local zoning changes and significant revamps of permitting and approval processes to remove endless discretionary roadblocks from anyone who doesn't like medium density housing.
The global housing crisis is the result of international organised crime owning or operating most of the large construction conglomerates, using real estate as a fiat currency to wash the proceeds from all their illicit business, and (org crime infested) private equity companies cashing in on the former situation, pumping assets by buying up available real estate just to make it unavailable.
CRIME is the real reason worldwide for people not being able to afford a house.
Even if we take your premise as a given, the entire reason real estate is so valuable is that there isn't enough housing in the first place. Real estate is, by its nature, a bad investment; it's only the scarcity of it that makes the value continue to go up exponentially.
> buying up available real estate just to make it unavailable
There isn't actually any available housing in the first place, at the point of cities even approving projects, compared to the number of people who need housing. That's the problem. The most extreme example is San Francisco, where as of this July the entire city had approved only 16 housing units [1] out of an already comically poor goal of only about 10,000 housing units per year.
This is absurd. Does it happen? Yes. But this is not the primary driver.
We turned housing into retirement funds. The median family's wealth is their primary residence. We cannot have these assets depreciate in nominal terms for this reason, and we actually need them to appreciate in real terms for people to have a nest egg.
That's logical yes, but I'd prefer to see them punished (at least 50% of them has a Stanford undergrad and thus thinks of the rest of us as subhuman scum anyway so I think it's perfectly fair).
OP lives in Austin. If you have $1M net worth, you can probably buy a house there and live there. If you don't go do that, I think you're just punishing yourself.
You need to move, yesterday. Yes, moving sucks. No, ideally you wouldn't have to. But at the end of the day you are just plain shooting yourself in the foot if you continue to live in a place that absurdly expensive.
Like dude, you could buy an awesome house in just about any other part of the country if you truly have $1m in liquid wealth. You have options to own a house, you just have to act on them.
It’s someone who owns shares in Cloudflare (their market ticker being ‘NET’), but everyone here thinks they’re a financial wonk when talking about big tech and finance so they insist on making it opaque like that. It’s a dumb and cringey trend. Just say “as a Cloudflare shareholder”, I promise you the six bytes you save won’t be missed!
This is so cool.
But the keyboard disturbed me, wouldn’t you at least want a mechanical keyboard?
> Keyboard: Logitech K120 Wired — The world's cheapest keyboard at $13 a pop. Works perfectly fine for all gaming needs.
I can’t imagine playing stuff like overwatch on a membrane office keyboard for $13 when having spent more than 100k on the setup. Especially when cheap mechanical keyboards are not that much more expensive either.
I guess it depends on what sort of games you're playing, but isn't it possible for the lack of n-key rollover to be a problem? My understanding is that many of these keyboards fail to register inputs if too many keys are pressed at the same time.
We generally don't play competitively but we do play fast-paced FPS and such and I just don't recall this ever having come up. (We had the same keyboards in the last house FWIW.)
For starters, it's a generic choice that's likely similar to what many used in school computer labs. No bikeshedding over which type of switches to get; that can be a very taste-specific choice. I might have missed it but wonder if there are any house rules against bringing your own mouse/keyboard.
Edit: kentonv replied answered before I hit submit. BYOK/M if you want, nice.
I use TTC Silent Bluish White switches which produce a muted "thock" sound, rather than the loud "clickety-clack" that you're probably thinking of. They're only slightly louder than a typical membrane keyboard.
> Jade and I needed a bigger house, but we really could not afford to buy (much less build) anything bigger in Palo Alto.
I’m really surprised about this, really shows how ludicrous the housing market is in the Bay Area. How high does your income need to be to afford a bigger house?!
Also considering 1400 sq ft (130 sq m) too small to raise a family is peak American... That's bigger than 99.9% of apartments people live in in Europe and raise a family just fine.
I suppose if you want to raise a family AND have a huge dedicated lan party area, then maybe 130 sqm isn't enough.
But I do agree with you. We live in a 4 bedroom detached house approx 120 sqm and this is plenty of space for a family. In fact, it's above average space out of all the families I know...
The cat room fans are standard bathroom fans. At present we just leave them on all the time -- you can see the switches taped down in the photos. I suppose it might be a good idea to rig up a sensor...
Constant fans are sucking outside air into your house. Could be part of your Heat/AC efficiency problem mentioned in your post. A timer to run every 10th minute would be a simple improvement.
Might be able to use a flipper zero as the sensor, if the cats are chipped. Then you'll have data to catch any unusual usage, like a urinary blockage, before it becomes a serious problem! At that point you're a smart switch and Home Assistant script away from fan control.
It feels pretty similar, but more chill. Distances are shorter. The sky doesn't fill with smoke for a week every year. The weather is much more interesting -- honestly I got really bored with Bay Area weather after 15 years. I even like the heat in the summer, in short intervals. There are enough tech people here to be interesting, but not enough that a random person you meet on the street is likely to be in tech.
One thing I appreciate is that there is tons of building happening. Housing prices went up during the pandemic, but there is new housing being built everywhere you look, and as a result the prices are now going down quite a bit! (Which I'm fine with, even as a homeowner, because I wasn't planning to sell anytime soon anyway and I like to see problems getting solved.) The downtown skyline keeps changing -- the tallest tower when I arrived is now hardly notable!
All that said I'm not sure I personally am very affected by where I live. When I moved from Minneapolis to the Bay Area, people asked me if it was a culture shock, but all I really noticed was less snow and more left turn lanes...
Having lived in the Midwest, Texas and Bay Area I can soundly say there is no comparison which can be made about the natural splendor. Bay Area, even with smoke in the air for a week, is orders of magnitude more comfortable and interesting. In Texas people cloister into giant houses and say goodbye to enjoying nature, it’s really sad that people prefer such a reality. It lets them forget just how grand a world there is worth saving and fighting for instead of letting it all become privatized and exploited unsustainably.
I do a lot of biking, and TBH I've had an easier time finding enjoyable bike routes near my house in Austin than I did in Palo Alto. During the summer I go biking at dawn and it's great, and during the winter there are usually 70-degree days regularly enough.
Of course, on that measure, Minneapolis blows both of them out of the water -- at least during the half of the year when biking is enjoyable.
> [High AC cost.] Perhaps we have too many windows letting in too much sunlight...
My office has automatic blinds that open and close according to some climate control system. The blinds are within the double glazing, so they can't be damaged by weather (or cats). The nice version for a home would be something like [1].
I'm sure the owner could program the automation so they only change position if no-one is in the room. There's no point having sunlight streaming into an empty room.
Yeah good idea. We do have electric shades on many of the windows... I just need to rig up some software control of them. I suppose as an experiment I could leave them all down for a day and see how much power it saves. The shades are on the inside of the glass, but light-colored, so should reflect back a fair amount of light.
> I've never heard of anyone else having done anything like this. This surprises me! But, surely, if someone else did it, someone would have told me about it? If you know of another, please let me know!
I never had the tenacity to consider my build "finished," and definitely didn't have your budget, but I built a 5-player room[1] for DotA 2 back in 2013.
I got really lucky with hardware selection and ended up fighting with various bugs over the years... diagnosing a broken video card was an exercise in frustration because the virtualization layer made BSODs impossible to see.
I went with local disk-per-VM because latency matters more than throughput, and I'd been doing iSCSI boot for such a long time that I was intimately familiar with the downsides.
I love your setup (thanks for taking the time to share this BTW) and would love to know if you ever get the local CoW working.
My only tech-related comment is that I will also confirm that those 10G cards are indeed trash, and would humbly suggest an Intel-based eBay special. You could still load iPXE (I assume you're using it) from the onboard NIC, continue using it for WoL, but shift the netboot over to the add-in card via a script, and probably get better stability and performance.
Hah, you really did the VM thing? A lot of people have suggested that to me but I didn't think it'd actually work. Pretty cool!
Yeah I'm pretty sure my onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet is the source of most of my stability woes. About half the time any of these machines boot up, Windows bluescreens within the first couple minutes, and I think it has something to do with the iSCSI service crashing. Never had trouble in the old house where the machines had 1G network -- but load times were painful.
Luckily if the machines don't crash in the first couple minutes, then they settle down and work fine...
Yeah I could get higher-quality 10G cards and put them in all the machines but they seem expensive...
I'm building out a 10G LAN in my house (8k VR video files are ludicrously enormous) and while it's mostly Mac, where I use Thunderbolt to SFP fiber adapters, for my Windows PC I'm looking around at what PCI options to get, and haven't pulled the trigger.
If you make a decision on a 10G card (SFP or ethernet) I'd like to hear what you picked.
> Yeah I could get higher-quality 10G cards and put them in all the machines but they seem expensive...
Bulk buying is probably hard, but ex-enterprise Intel 10G on eBay tends to be pretty inexpensive. Dual spf+ x520 cards are regularly available for $10. Dual 10g-base-t x540 cards run a bit more, with more variance, $15-$25. No 2.5/5Gb support, but my 10g network equipment can't do those speeds either, so no big deal. These are almost all x8 cards, so you need a slot that can accomidate them, but x4 electrical should be fine (I've seen reports that some enterprise gear has trouble working properly in x1/x4 slots beyond bandwidth restrictions which shouldn't be a problem; if a dual port card needs x8 and you only have x4 and only use a single port, that should be fine)
I think all of mine can pxeboot, but sometimes you have to fiddle with the eeprom tools, and they might be legacy only, no uefi pxe, but that's fine for me.
And you usually have to be ok with running them with no brackets, cause they usually come with low profile brackets only.
How did you deal with the length of the USB and display cables? I thought after 5m or so things would start falling apart. Are there active extenders and can they can handle 240+ Hz?
Yes, Monoprice sells a brand called "SlimRun" which actually convert the signal to fiber optic and can handle 100ft runs for USB, DisplayPort, and HDMI. They are pricey but they work.
I haven't tried 240Hz, but I have successfully run 7680x2160 wide screen at 120Hz (using HDMI), and 4k144Hz (using DisplayPort).
Amazing setup, thanks for the write-up! My dream house if I was rich would have a LAN party room like this (plus a mini fridge stocked with Bawls Guarana). Stretch goal would be a movie theater like Brandon Sanderson has in his lair.
The biggest surprise for me was seeing the desks with no mouse pads (or if you wanted to build it into the cabinet you'd probably want to stick down a desk pad).
But I also in my circles everyone takes their own keyboard/mouse/pad/headphones as those are the things it's hard to adjust to - admittedly my priorities could be completely different.
I mostly haven't used a mouse pad in decades... until recently. I now have a mouse pad on my main work desk because the wood where my mouse was kept attracting weird black spots. They were easy to clean off but weirded me out. And I guess it would be sad if I ended up with a permanent wear spot...
But I think the LAN parties don't really happen often enough to cause much wear. In 10 years at the old place no one used mouse pads and it was never an issue.
In 9 years in the Palo Alto house, the only things I ever upgraded were GPU and RAM, and things seemed to work out fine. So I'm not too worried about it, no.
That said, I do regret the motherboard choice, and I suppose if I ever resort to replacing them then it's a fine time to upgrade everything else. Hope it doesn't come to that though.
> Normally, maintaining twelve machines used by random guests would have two huge problems:
Maybe you did this with your other house but I would have thought guests would bring their own computer to a LAN party. All you have to do is provide the space and network capability?
My lan parties were more adhoc. Plan to play at some dudes/gals house, bring pcs/laptops/consoles and other gear, run cat5 cable between rooms, hook them up to some shitty switch and go to town. Many hours of sweaty gameplay. Piss off the neighbors. Trip a few circuit breakers.
This “lan party” has such a corporate feel to it. Almost reminds me of a typical work office. Just what I need after grinding it for 5 hrs and commuting home for another 1-2 hr — to experience the work environment again!
I’m actually more interested in the dedicated cat walk and doors that lead into various rooms.
It’s one thing to build a house like this, if you can actually host a LAN party with friends and max out occupancy at every game station you are rich in life.
Younger me thinks this is really awesome. This was my DREAM during Halo 2 years. Kudos. The design, the hardware, the room itself. The house is beautiful. The pictures and write ups are fantastic.
Feel free to ignore the next part of my comment:
Current me with lived experiences and knowledge of the world thinks it’s a little disgusting. I don’t think it’s your fault, or you’re intending to do that. I don’t think YOU’RE disgusting. Just flaunting wealth in your own nerdy gamer way which many wealthy people are wont to do. I don’t blame you. If I could afford a 7 figure house and 150k for an adult playhouse I don’t think I’d say no. The computer hardware alone being outdated and turning into e-waste soon enough while people including children sleep and starve in the streets just rubs me the wrong way.
Anybody remember Rich Kids of IG?
Anyway. I wouldn’t feel right with myself if I didn’t say something. I don’t think you did anything wrong, you are a product of your environment as am I. I won’t check responses to this comment just putting it out there is enough for me. Enjoy your LAN parties dude!
Normally, I’d be equally upset with excess but the fact that this is somewhat of a community building thing is actually refreshing to see from the wealthy (even if by community, it is just friends).
It’s mild in comparison to the ultra rich. Jeff bezos, Larry Ellison, and Elon musk have more wealth than half of America. That fact is what we should truly be upset about. In comparison this is a drop on the ocean.
The server is Linux but the game machines are Windows.
But I am going to try switching the game machines to Linux at some point. I can't tell you how many times I've run into what were almost showstopper problems with the whole iSCSI netboot thing with Windows, only to get really lucky with some registry hack that worked around it. I'm sure it's going to just stop working at some point. Whereas with Linux I can dig into the stack and make things work however I want.
In fact, in the old Palo Alto house, when I first completed it in 2011, the game stations were Linux for the first six months. In theory it was a better setup because the machines were able to use their local disks for the copy-on-write overlay (this was easy to set up with an initrd script and Device Mapper). With Windows, I haven't figured out how to utilize the local disk at all -- so all the copy-on-write overlays are on the server side, which of course wastes server resources.
Of course, the problem with Linux is game support. We got a long way with WINE in 2011 but there were just a few too many issues. Here in 2024, Linux is ostensibly a much more capable gaming platform, with Steam support, Proton, etc. So maybe it'll work better this time?
A really neat thing about the netboot setup is it takes zero time to clone the image to all the machines. As soon as I'm done installing updates on one machine, I shut down, run one command that completes instantly, and now I can boot all the machines immediately with that image.
There have been a decent number of times when I actually did this during a party to fix an issue, or between parties just to keep the machines maintained for the family to play with, etc. It'd be hard to do that if I have to spend hours transferring a large image every time.
Aside from the stability issues at boot time, there isn't really a down side. I don't have any problems with load times. So I'm pretty happy with the setup.
This is amazing. In today's world, I'm not sure what's more prohibitive though. Finding 20 friends who play video games and would be into LAN parties or being able to pay for this kind of setup.
Hahaha, the anecdote about the subcontractor is great.
What a thoughtfully designed space for your family and friends! I feel like going this custom is pretty rare, and you’re clearly getting the value out of it. I also love that you did the math on the cable runs making essentially no difference.
So we have an ongoing debate in the white collar world - work in the office or work at home. I am firmly on the “teams work better in physical proximity camp” but there are still many better ways to arrange that physical space
And this - the hideaway desks that fold down to become a table top gaming session, well that could make much more flexible office spaces. (Don’t get me started on offices with one or two desks and doors that shut !)
But yeah, I like it, even if my house has that many people in I would probably just hide in the kitchen all night
Extraordinary home! Great design. Especially love the cat stuff. I have to say, it’s wild that something “moderate” like an i5 / 4070 build is so powerful these days. It’s middle of the line in this era but it’s enough to play practically anything.
Also, this is a classic example of the power of leverage. $200k down on a $1m home, home goes to $2m gives you a $1m profit on ~$240k. Accidental, in this case, but nice.
to see that upside on a home requires you 1. sell and 2. buy somewhere cheaper (or not buy at all) ... Otherwise it's a zero sum game. Home for a home.
Indeed that’s what OP did. Bought in the Bay low, then sold high and moved to Austin, where presumably the increase in value is again sufficiently high because Austin prices skyrocketed in the last 5 years.
You can get that size of home for 2 million in Austin. The work to make it a LAN party home is not that expensive in comparison. The magic for him is that his dad is an architect. The home is very well designed and if you want that kind of design you’ll be paying more. Especially if you want the whole thing ready built.
> The magic for him is that his dad is an architect.
Yes. I could never have done any of this without that fact. When you hire an architect, especially for a high-end house, they are incentivized to make expensive design decisions in order to make the house more impressive for their portfolio, and of course the contractor is not going to stop them because they want the money. And if you're just a normal person not experienced in homebuilding, you will not be able to spot what they're doing. I'm sure I would have been taken advantage of if the architect wasn't a family member.
What an incredible setup! Really wonderful house overall, to be honest.
Aside from all of the extremely epic technology and whatnot - I have got to say, the elevated view and outlook of your place is sensational. Congratulations on putting together such a terrific place to raise a family.
Oh and worth mentioning; I sincerely appreciated and enjoyed reading your comprehensive Q&A section beyond the images (which themselves, had really awesome annotations included). Thanks for sharing!
As the former proprietor of LanParty.com (which I mistakenly included in a sale to IGN) I must salute you. The absolute genius of the provided lan equipment and particularly the management thereof is an inspiration.
I think the lack of any standing offerings of variations of Quake is a glaring mistake but easily rectified. :)
It's really heartening to see lan gaming continued and offered in such a way that the amount of hassle and setup is minimized and the gaming is maximized. We spent far too much time in the 90's and 2000's dealing with driver issues, etc etc. Bravo.
That's a sweet LAN setup you've got! The only few things that rub me the wrong way is the choice of peripherals and the lack of headsets. Must be pretty noisy in here!
The tabletops also seems a bit too thin and wiggly for my taste, but, honestly, for LAN parties with chill people you personally know — it's ok
As for the actual host setup with a singular disk image — great job! LAN gaming centres do something similar with their setups, with some differences (a lot of centres either use Windows-based diskless solutions that mount vhdx files as drives remotely over iSCSI, or use ZFS-based snapshotting, which is my personal favourite)
But all in all, seems like my dream house :)
I own a chain of LAN gaming centres, so the feedback is definitely skewered into the business perspective quite a bit
I'm curious, what are the popular products/solutions that LAN centers use for this?
I ended up putting together my own thing. I saw various products that seemed like they might be what I wanted but they always seemed... sketchy.
Wow, this is beyond badass. Not only is the LAN and home network setup top-notch, that location is excellent too - what a view! Congrats on the amazing LAN setup and such a fun place to enjoy some gaming with your friends & family. Truly worthy of some envy, that's for sure :) Looks like it was a good chunk of work, but 110% worth it!
This is neat, but as a $NET shareholder and someone with another ~$1m in net worth that can't afford to buy a house for at least another 6 years this makes me think we should significantly increase taxation.
Housing price issues in the US are fundamentally the result of every major city making it expensive or impossible to actually build enough housing. Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all. What's needed are local zoning changes and significant revamps of permitting and approval processes to remove endless discretionary roadblocks from anyone who doesn't like medium density housing.
No.
The global housing crisis is the result of international organised crime owning or operating most of the large construction conglomerates, using real estate as a fiat currency to wash the proceeds from all their illicit business, and (org crime infested) private equity companies cashing in on the former situation, pumping assets by buying up available real estate just to make it unavailable.
CRIME is the real reason worldwide for people not being able to afford a house.
> using real estate as a fiat currency
Even if we take your premise as a given, the entire reason real estate is so valuable is that there isn't enough housing in the first place. Real estate is, by its nature, a bad investment; it's only the scarcity of it that makes the value continue to go up exponentially.
> buying up available real estate just to make it unavailable
There isn't actually any available housing in the first place, at the point of cities even approving projects, compared to the number of people who need housing. That's the problem. The most extreme example is San Francisco, where as of this July the entire city had approved only 16 housing units [1] out of an already comically poor goal of only about 10,000 housing units per year.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-only-agreed-build-16-...
This is absurd. Does it happen? Yes. But this is not the primary driver.
We turned housing into retirement funds. The median family's wealth is their primary residence. We cannot have these assets depreciate in nominal terms for this reason, and we actually need them to appreciate in real terms for people to have a nest egg.
It's awful, but it's the truth.
That's logical yes, but I'd prefer to see them punished (at least 50% of them has a Stanford undergrad and thus thinks of the rest of us as subhuman scum anyway so I think it's perfectly fair).
OP lives in Austin. If you have $1M net worth, you can probably buy a house there and live there. If you don't go do that, I think you're just punishing yourself.
If you can't afford to buy a house, what you want is zoning reform, not increased taxation.
(I want both, but I don't want more taxes to solve the housing problem, because they won't.)
I want both too, but neither is going to happen in the next 4-12 years so I can only fantasize about punitive measures
You have $1M of net worth that isn’t a house (and is therefore likely to be liquid) and you can’t afford to buy a house? Where and how much?
I spend about $3.2k a month for a studio apartment in an HCOL area. I don’t even own a car.
You need to move, yesterday. Yes, moving sucks. No, ideally you wouldn't have to. But at the end of the day you are just plain shooting yourself in the foot if you continue to live in a place that absurdly expensive.
Like dude, you could buy an awesome house in just about any other part of the country if you truly have $1m in liquid wealth. You have options to own a house, you just have to act on them.
When have increased taxes directly contributed to your take home pay?
It doesn’t. They’re just expressing their jealousy in a thinly veiled and highly embarrassing way.
It truly is embarrassing. Imagine seeing something and thinking, "how can I get the government to forcefully take some of that for my benefit?"
It’s not for my benefit, I just want to see Stanford grads get punished. I could get more punitive but I keep that for yelling at strangers in person.
Where did the Stanford thing come from? I went to the University of Minnesota.
It’s not very thinly veiled
What's a $NET shareholder?
It’s someone who owns shares in Cloudflare (their market ticker being ‘NET’), but everyone here thinks they’re a financial wonk when talking about big tech and finance so they insist on making it opaque like that. It’s a dumb and cringey trend. Just say “as a Cloudflare shareholder”, I promise you the six bytes you save won’t be missed!
A somewhat small subset of my net worth is Cloudflare, which has the ticker symbol $NET
Must be nice to be stinking rich
Where is the guy duck taped to the ceiling?
This is so cool. But the keyboard disturbed me, wouldn’t you at least want a mechanical keyboard?
> Keyboard: Logitech K120 Wired — The world's cheapest keyboard at $13 a pop. Works perfectly fine for all gaming needs.
I can’t imagine playing stuff like overwatch on a membrane office keyboard for $13 when having spent more than 100k on the setup. Especially when cheap mechanical keyboards are not that much more expensive either.
Honestly I've never felt it made any difference to me when gaming. I would never code on such a keyboard but for the old WASD it seems fine.
That said, guests are welcome to bring any peripherals they want. There's a USB hub at each station to plug stuff in.
I guess it depends on what sort of games you're playing, but isn't it possible for the lack of n-key rollover to be a problem? My understanding is that many of these keyboards fail to register inputs if too many keys are pressed at the same time.
Hmm, I've never had an issue with this.
We generally don't play competitively but we do play fast-paced FPS and such and I just don't recall this ever having come up. (We had the same keyboards in the last house FWIW.)
he said they don't play competitive games.
For starters, it's a generic choice that's likely similar to what many used in school computer labs. No bikeshedding over which type of switches to get; that can be a very taste-specific choice. I might have missed it but wonder if there are any house rules against bringing your own mouse/keyboard.
Edit: kentonv replied answered before I hit submit. BYOK/M if you want, nice.
The noise of a room full of mechanical keyboards, dear god.
Me, I bought a mechanical keyboard but I despise it. Switched to a Logitech Keys.
Not all mechanical keyboards are noisy.
I use TTC Silent Bluish White switches which produce a muted "thock" sound, rather than the loud "clickety-clack" that you're probably thinking of. They're only slightly louder than a typical membrane keyboard.
True. Only 98% of mechanical keyboards are noisy.
> Jade and I needed a bigger house, but we really could not afford to buy (much less build) anything bigger in Palo Alto.
I’m really surprised about this, really shows how ludicrous the housing market is in the Bay Area. How high does your income need to be to afford a bigger house?!
Also considering 1400 sq ft (130 sq m) too small to raise a family is peak American... That's bigger than 99.9% of apartments people live in in Europe and raise a family just fine.
I suppose if you want to raise a family AND have a huge dedicated lan party area, then maybe 130 sqm isn't enough.
But I do agree with you. We live in a 4 bedroom detached house approx 120 sqm and this is plenty of space for a family. In fact, it's above average space out of all the families I know...
At first, my jaw was open looking at the photos.
Then I remembered… oh yeah, everything is bigger in America (especially in Texas)!
This is truely living the dream, well done mate! It is indeed crazy that cabinetry costs the same as the technology.
How does the cat restroom exhaust work? Always on or does it have a sensor?
Do the cat doors prevent sound getting into the kids' rooms from the living room?
The cat room fans are standard bathroom fans. At present we just leave them on all the time -- you can see the switches taped down in the photos. I suppose it might be a good idea to rig up a sensor...
Constant fans are sucking outside air into your house. Could be part of your Heat/AC efficiency problem mentioned in your post. A timer to run every 10th minute would be a simple improvement.
Yeah that's a good point, I should turn off the fans for a day and see if it changes the power use...
Might be able to use a flipper zero as the sensor, if the cats are chipped. Then you'll have data to catch any unusual usage, like a urinary blockage, before it becomes a serious problem! At that point you're a smart switch and Home Assistant script away from fan control.
Garply had a blockage once and he did a remarkably good job of communicating the problem to us directly!
I would recommend to use an TVOC sensor that detects smell very easily and then automatically switch on a fan. Could be a fun project.
Just need: - TVOC sensor like the SGP41
- ESP32 microcontroller
- Electric Relay
This is super freaking cool. I'm curious how you feel about Austin vs Bay Area in terms of general quality of life, culture, things like that?
Related to culture, I moved to Austin in 2012 and that was the first time I saw a restaurant advertising that their water had no fluoride.
It feels pretty similar, but more chill. Distances are shorter. The sky doesn't fill with smoke for a week every year. The weather is much more interesting -- honestly I got really bored with Bay Area weather after 15 years. I even like the heat in the summer, in short intervals. There are enough tech people here to be interesting, but not enough that a random person you meet on the street is likely to be in tech.
One thing I appreciate is that there is tons of building happening. Housing prices went up during the pandemic, but there is new housing being built everywhere you look, and as a result the prices are now going down quite a bit! (Which I'm fine with, even as a homeowner, because I wasn't planning to sell anytime soon anyway and I like to see problems getting solved.) The downtown skyline keeps changing -- the tallest tower when I arrived is now hardly notable!
All that said I'm not sure I personally am very affected by where I live. When I moved from Minneapolis to the Bay Area, people asked me if it was a culture shock, but all I really noticed was less snow and more left turn lanes...
Having lived in the Midwest, Texas and Bay Area I can soundly say there is no comparison which can be made about the natural splendor. Bay Area, even with smoke in the air for a week, is orders of magnitude more comfortable and interesting. In Texas people cloister into giant houses and say goodbye to enjoying nature, it’s really sad that people prefer such a reality. It lets them forget just how grand a world there is worth saving and fighting for instead of letting it all become privatized and exploited unsustainably.
I do a lot of biking, and TBH I've had an easier time finding enjoyable bike routes near my house in Austin than I did in Palo Alto. During the summer I go biking at dawn and it's great, and during the winter there are usually 70-degree days regularly enough.
Of course, on that measure, Minneapolis blows both of them out of the water -- at least during the half of the year when biking is enjoyable.
> [High AC cost.] Perhaps we have too many windows letting in too much sunlight...
My office has automatic blinds that open and close according to some climate control system. The blinds are within the double glazing, so they can't be damaged by weather (or cats). The nice version for a home would be something like [1].
I'm sure the owner could program the automation so they only change position if no-one is in the room. There's no point having sunlight streaming into an empty room.
[1] https://www.betweenglassblinds.co.uk/
In the winter in a normal European/northern US climate, you probably want sunlight streaming into an empty room to reduce the heating bill.
Possibly never in Austin, TX: I am not too privy to the temperatures it gets down to in the winter, though heating was brought up too.
Yeah good idea. We do have electric shades on many of the windows... I just need to rig up some software control of them. I suppose as an experiment I could leave them all down for a day and see how much power it saves. The shades are on the inside of the glass, but light-colored, so should reflect back a fair amount of light.
> I've never heard of anyone else having done anything like this. This surprises me! But, surely, if someone else did it, someone would have told me about it? If you know of another, please let me know!
I never had the tenacity to consider my build "finished," and definitely didn't have your budget, but I built a 5-player room[1] for DotA 2 back in 2013.
I got really lucky with hardware selection and ended up fighting with various bugs over the years... diagnosing a broken video card was an exercise in frustration because the virtualization layer made BSODs impossible to see.
I went with local disk-per-VM because latency matters more than throughput, and I'd been doing iSCSI boot for such a long time that I was intimately familiar with the downsides.
I love your setup (thanks for taking the time to share this BTW) and would love to know if you ever get the local CoW working.
My only tech-related comment is that I will also confirm that those 10G cards are indeed trash, and would humbly suggest an Intel-based eBay special. You could still load iPXE (I assume you're using it) from the onboard NIC, continue using it for WoL, but shift the netboot over to the add-in card via a script, and probably get better stability and performance.
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/4x4-four-desktops-one-system-kWyH4
Hah, you really did the VM thing? A lot of people have suggested that to me but I didn't think it'd actually work. Pretty cool!
Yeah I'm pretty sure my onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet is the source of most of my stability woes. About half the time any of these machines boot up, Windows bluescreens within the first couple minutes, and I think it has something to do with the iSCSI service crashing. Never had trouble in the old house where the machines had 1G network -- but load times were painful.
Luckily if the machines don't crash in the first couple minutes, then they settle down and work fine...
Yeah I could get higher-quality 10G cards and put them in all the machines but they seem expensive...
I'm building out a 10G LAN in my house (8k VR video files are ludicrously enormous) and while it's mostly Mac, where I use Thunderbolt to SFP fiber adapters, for my Windows PC I'm looking around at what PCI options to get, and haven't pulled the trigger.
If you make a decision on a 10G card (SFP or ethernet) I'd like to hear what you picked.
> Yeah I could get higher-quality 10G cards and put them in all the machines but they seem expensive...
Bulk buying is probably hard, but ex-enterprise Intel 10G on eBay tends to be pretty inexpensive. Dual spf+ x520 cards are regularly available for $10. Dual 10g-base-t x540 cards run a bit more, with more variance, $15-$25. No 2.5/5Gb support, but my 10g network equipment can't do those speeds either, so no big deal. These are almost all x8 cards, so you need a slot that can accomidate them, but x4 electrical should be fine (I've seen reports that some enterprise gear has trouble working properly in x1/x4 slots beyond bandwidth restrictions which shouldn't be a problem; if a dual port card needs x8 and you only have x4 and only use a single port, that should be fine)
I think all of mine can pxeboot, but sometimes you have to fiddle with the eeprom tools, and they might be legacy only, no uefi pxe, but that's fine for me.
And you usually have to be ok with running them with no brackets, cause they usually come with low profile brackets only.
How did you deal with the length of the USB and display cables? I thought after 5m or so things would start falling apart. Are there active extenders and can they can handle 240+ Hz?
Yes, Monoprice sells a brand called "SlimRun" which actually convert the signal to fiber optic and can handle 100ft runs for USB, DisplayPort, and HDMI. They are pricey but they work.
I haven't tried 240Hz, but I have successfully run 7680x2160 wide screen at 120Hz (using HDMI), and 4k144Hz (using DisplayPort).
Not OP, but he website addresses this: https://lanparty.house/#cable-latency
The amount of thought that's gone into that cat lavatory really makes me envy your belief in yourself. Here I am rewriting my dB schema 4 times.
I think these are cool and seeing the NetBoot + CoW setup for gaming is fun.
Thanks for sharing!
LAN party game room by night, Cybersyn II by day?
But where are the ceiling duct tape hammocks? http://octanecreative.com/ducttape/walltapings/images/german...
Has anyone done this on smaller scale? Say 4 or 8 stations?
We have space in our basement. And with our kids getting into pre-teen/teen years, I think it'd be fun to have a place for lan parties.
how do I join? :D are you guys hiring at cloudflare per chance?
Amazing setup, thanks for the write-up! My dream house if I was rich would have a LAN party room like this (plus a mini fridge stocked with Bawls Guarana). Stretch goal would be a movie theater like Brandon Sanderson has in his lair.
The biggest surprise for me was seeing the desks with no mouse pads (or if you wanted to build it into the cabinet you'd probably want to stick down a desk pad).
But I also in my circles everyone takes their own keyboard/mouse/pad/headphones as those are the things it's hard to adjust to - admittedly my priorities could be completely different.
I mostly haven't used a mouse pad in decades... until recently. I now have a mouse pad on my main work desk because the wood where my mouse was kept attracting weird black spots. They were easy to clean off but weirded me out. And I guess it would be sad if I ended up with a permanent wear spot...
But I think the LAN parties don't really happen often enough to cause much wear. In 10 years at the old place no one used mouse pads and it was never an issue.
May I recommend the 3M Precise Mouse Pad with Repositionable Adhesive Backing? Dumb name, good product.
https://www.amazon.com/3M-Precise-Repositionable-Adhesive-MP...
> the wood where my mouse was kept attracting weird black spots
Have the same issue, but can't subscribe to mousepads. I believe that's dust getting in the crevices of the wood.
Or oils from your hand, perhaps?
I assume this is also a CF PoP?
Extraordinary and beautiful house, thanks for sharing.
Do you worry about the upgrade cycle on the hardware? Can't be fun replacing the CPU in lots of machines :D
In 9 years in the Palo Alto house, the only things I ever upgraded were GPU and RAM, and things seemed to work out fine. So I'm not too worried about it, no.
That said, I do regret the motherboard choice, and I suppose if I ever resort to replacing them then it's a fine time to upgrade everything else. Hope it doesn't come to that though.
> Normally, maintaining twelve machines used by random guests would have two huge problems:
Maybe you did this with your other house but I would have thought guests would bring their own computer to a LAN party. All you have to do is provide the space and network capability?
See: https://lanparty.house/#why-build-in
Awesome! The fold up mechanism is a great idea to make it look clean, when there is no party and it also saves the hardware from dust :D
Beautiful. All of it. I love it when tech brings people together.
I’m surprised people still have LAN parties.
My lan parties were more adhoc. Plan to play at some dudes/gals house, bring pcs/laptops/consoles and other gear, run cat5 cable between rooms, hook them up to some shitty switch and go to town. Many hours of sweaty gameplay. Piss off the neighbors. Trip a few circuit breakers.
This “lan party” has such a corporate feel to it. Almost reminds me of a typical work office. Just what I need after grinding it for 5 hrs and commuting home for another 1-2 hr — to experience the work environment again!
I’m actually more interested in the dedicated cat walk and doors that lead into various rooms.
It’s one thing to build a house like this, if you can actually host a LAN party with friends and max out occupancy at every game station you are rich in life.
What DDR pads are those? Are they custom made?
They are L-TEK Ex Pro X. Shipped all the way from Poland!
They seem to work pretty well. Have been using them frequently for more than a year with no issues yet.
Thanks, those were the main recommendation the last time I looked into it (a few years ago), good to hear you recommend them too!
Younger me thinks this is really awesome. This was my DREAM during Halo 2 years. Kudos. The design, the hardware, the room itself. The house is beautiful. The pictures and write ups are fantastic.
Feel free to ignore the next part of my comment:
Current me with lived experiences and knowledge of the world thinks it’s a little disgusting. I don’t think it’s your fault, or you’re intending to do that. I don’t think YOU’RE disgusting. Just flaunting wealth in your own nerdy gamer way which many wealthy people are wont to do. I don’t blame you. If I could afford a 7 figure house and 150k for an adult playhouse I don’t think I’d say no. The computer hardware alone being outdated and turning into e-waste soon enough while people including children sleep and starve in the streets just rubs me the wrong way.
Anybody remember Rich Kids of IG?
Anyway. I wouldn’t feel right with myself if I didn’t say something. I don’t think you did anything wrong, you are a product of your environment as am I. I won’t check responses to this comment just putting it out there is enough for me. Enjoy your LAN parties dude!
> I wouldn’t feel right with myself if I didn’t say something.
Many people live with not feeling right with themselves.
Normally, I’d be equally upset with excess but the fact that this is somewhat of a community building thing is actually refreshing to see from the wealthy (even if by community, it is just friends).
It’s mild in comparison to the ultra rich. Jeff bezos, Larry Ellison, and Elon musk have more wealth than half of America. That fact is what we should truly be upset about. In comparison this is a drop on the ocean.
my favorite part is the cat walk with the doors to the rooms, how cool! treehouse vibes.
> I miss the old MX518.
Truely the peak of mouse design.
Wait, why do you have the same living room as Bojack Horseman?
Lol, never seen it before, but looking now, yeah it looks kinda similar!
You're living the dream, man.
Love the creativity and dedication to the project. And really cool house.
Do you run Linux or Windows?
The server is Linux but the game machines are Windows.
But I am going to try switching the game machines to Linux at some point. I can't tell you how many times I've run into what were almost showstopper problems with the whole iSCSI netboot thing with Windows, only to get really lucky with some registry hack that worked around it. I'm sure it's going to just stop working at some point. Whereas with Linux I can dig into the stack and make things work however I want.
In fact, in the old Palo Alto house, when I first completed it in 2011, the game stations were Linux for the first six months. In theory it was a better setup because the machines were able to use their local disks for the copy-on-write overlay (this was easy to set up with an initrd script and Device Mapper). With Windows, I haven't figured out how to utilize the local disk at all -- so all the copy-on-write overlays are on the server side, which of course wastes server resources.
Of course, the problem with Linux is game support. We got a long way with WINE in 2011 but there were just a few too many issues. Here in 2024, Linux is ostensibly a much more capable gaming platform, with Steam support, Proton, etc. So maybe it'll work better this time?
Anyway, just another project on the todo list...
Have you thought about using Clonezilla and broadcasting out an image using PXE boot?
Would completely bypass the iSCSI setup, and each machine would still get the latest image from your server before the lan party begins.
A really neat thing about the netboot setup is it takes zero time to clone the image to all the machines. As soon as I'm done installing updates on one machine, I shut down, run one command that completes instantly, and now I can boot all the machines immediately with that image.
There have been a decent number of times when I actually did this during a party to fix an issue, or between parties just to keep the machines maintained for the family to play with, etc. It'd be hard to do that if I have to spend hours transferring a large image every time.
Aside from the stability issues at boot time, there isn't really a down side. I don't have any problems with load times. So I'm pretty happy with the setup.
With multicast, you only need to send the image once to all 20 machines. With 10 gig Ethernet, a 1tb image should be sent in approx 15 minutes.
Also, maybe having a steam cache server and using the local disks as a game store might help with installation of games?
Definitely can see the benefits of the netboot setup, though!
This is amazing. In today's world, I'm not sure what's more prohibitive though. Finding 20 friends who play video games and would be into LAN parties or being able to pay for this kind of setup.
Nice, can you guys help me with a down payment? I don’t need dozens of 4070s, just four walls and a roof
Hahaha, the anecdote about the subcontractor is great.
What a thoughtfully designed space for your family and friends! I feel like going this custom is pretty rare, and you’re clearly getting the value out of it. I also love that you did the math on the cable runs making essentially no difference.
Thanks for sharing :)
House, or room?
So we have an ongoing debate in the white collar world - work in the office or work at home. I am firmly on the “teams work better in physical proximity camp” but there are still many better ways to arrange that physical space
And this - the hideaway desks that fold down to become a table top gaming session, well that could make much more flexible office spaces. (Don’t get me started on offices with one or two desks and doors that shut !)
But yeah, I like it, even if my house has that many people in I would probably just hide in the kitchen all night
This is super awesome, congrats!
Beautiful house, great ideas, love the stow-away workstations -- no patch panel in the network rack facepalm
Extraordinary home! Great design. Especially love the cat stuff. I have to say, it’s wild that something “moderate” like an i5 / 4070 build is so powerful these days. It’s middle of the line in this era but it’s enough to play practically anything.
Also, this is a classic example of the power of leverage. $200k down on a $1m home, home goes to $2m gives you a $1m profit on ~$240k. Accidental, in this case, but nice.
to see that upside on a home requires you 1. sell and 2. buy somewhere cheaper (or not buy at all) ... Otherwise it's a zero sum game. Home for a home.
Indeed that’s what OP did. Bought in the Bay low, then sold high and moved to Austin, where presumably the increase in value is again sufficiently high because Austin prices skyrocketed in the last 5 years.
Such a cool house, too bad it’s in Texas
I wish I was rich too.
He seems like he has a really good attitude about it.
How much does it cost? Probably can only be pay be Musk, Wall and Gates
Nope, USD 150k (for stations & cabinetry): https://lanparty.house/#cost
Fake news.
> The house overall was a 7-digit number. Sorry, I'm not comfortable being any more specific than that.
You can get that size of home for 2 million in Austin. The work to make it a LAN party home is not that expensive in comparison. The magic for him is that his dad is an architect. The home is very well designed and if you want that kind of design you’ll be paying more. Especially if you want the whole thing ready built.
> The magic for him is that his dad is an architect.
Yes. I could never have done any of this without that fact. When you hire an architect, especially for a high-end house, they are incentivized to make expensive design decisions in order to make the house more impressive for their portfolio, and of course the contractor is not going to stop them because they want the money. And if you're just a normal person not experienced in homebuilding, you will not be able to spot what they're doing. I'm sure I would have been taken advantage of if the architect wasn't a family member.
Not just those, but probably not too far off, either.
Not the best use of resources considering we are in a housing crisis. Another thing on the list of things wealthy people think they need...