Air Conditioning Sheldon !!exclusive!! May 2026
And to those who say, "Just open a window," I say: You have invited in humidity, noise, and, potentially, a moth. I rest my case. Now if you’ll excuse me, my thermostat has drifted 0.2 degrees. I need to recalibrate before the universe ends.
The result is not merely "discomfort." Discomfort is what I feel when Leonard uses my toothbrush. No, what we are discussing is a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Heat spontaneously flows from a hotter object to a cooler object. In summer, that means the outside world wishes to transfer its oppressive thermal energy directly into my living room, where I am trying to calculate the spin of a quantum particle. This is unacceptable. air conditioning sheldon
Let us begin with a simple premise: The human body is a biological machine of staggering inefficiency. On a warm day, it produces approximately 100 watts of waste heat just by sitting still—roughly equivalent to an incandescent light bulb, which, I’ll note, has been largely outlawed for its profligacy. Now add physical activity, poor insulation (i.e., clothing), and the suffocating hubris of living in a region like Houston or, heaven forbid, Pasadena in July. And to those who say, "Just open a
Enter air conditioning. The common misconception is that it "adds coolness." This is the kind of intellectual laziness I expect from a toddler or, say, Howard Wolowitz. Air conditioning does not create cool; it relocates heat. It is a heat pump. It takes the thermal energy from inside an enclosed volume—my sanctuary, my Sheldon-specific zone—and, through the magic of phase-change refrigeration and a compressor, dumps it outside. It is a bouncer for British thermal units. I need to recalibrate before the universe ends
Without this invention, civilization as we know it collapses. No skyscrapers in Dubai. No server farms running the internet. No Sheldon calmly explaining why your theory of electromagnetism is wrong. We would all revert to the Dark Ages: napping in the afternoon, sweating into our lemonade, and thinking slowly .
The Thermodynamic Imperative of Climate Control
My own unit is not merely an appliance; it is a mathematical constant. It is calibrated to 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Not 71, because that activates a draft that raises the hair on my left forearm, creating a distracting somatosensory input. Not 73, because that allows my brow to perspire, which is both unhygienic and reminds me of my father’s barbecue apron. 72 is the Nash equilibrium of thermal satisfaction.
This article is a work in progress and will continue to receive ongoing updates and improvements. It’s essentially a collection of notes being assembled. I hope it’s useful to those interested in getting the most out of pfSense.
pfSense has been pure joy learning and configuring for the for past 2 months. It’s protecting all my Linux stuff, and FreeBSD is a close neighbor to Linux.
I plan on comparing OPNsense next. Stay tuned!
Update: June 13th 2025
Diagnostics > Packet Capture
I kept running into a problem where the NordVPN app on my phone refused to connect whenever I was on VLAN 1, the main Wi-Fi SSID/network. Auto-connect spun forever, and a manual tap on Connect did the same.
Rather than guess which rule was guilty or missing, I turned to Diagnostics > Packet Capture in pfSense.
1 — Set up a focused capture
Set the following:
192.168.1.105(my iPhone’s IP address)2 — Stop after 5-10 seconds
That short window is enough to grab the initial handshake. Hit Stop and view or download the capture.
3 — Spot the blocked flow
Opening the file in Wireshark or in this case just scrolling through the plain-text dump showed repeats like:
UDP 51820 is NordLynx/WireGuard’s default port. Every packet was leaving, none were returning. A clear sign the firewall was dropping them.
4 — Create an allow rule
On VLAN 1 I added one outbound pass rule:
The moment the rule went live, NordVPN connected instantly.
Packet Capture is often treated as a heavy-weight troubleshooting tool, but it’s perfect for quick wins like this: isolate one device, capture a short burst, and let the traffic itself tell you which port or host is being blocked.
Update: June 15th 2025
Keeping Suricata lean on a lightly-used secondary WAN
When you bind Suricata to a WAN that only has one or two forwarded ports, loading the full rule corpus is overkill. All unsolicited traffic is already dropped by pfSense’s default WAN policy (and pfBlockerNG also does a sweep at the IP layer), so Suricata’s job is simply to watch the flows you intentionally allow.
That means you enable only the categories that can realistically match those ports, and nothing else.
Here’s what that looks like on my backup interface (
WAN2):The ticked boxes in the screenshot boil down to two small groups:
app-layer-events,decoder-events,http-events,http2-events, andstream-events. These Suricata needs to parse HTTP/S traffic cleanly.emerging-botcc.portgrouped,emerging-botcc,emerging-current_events,emerging-exploit,emerging-exploit_kit,emerging-info,emerging-ja3,emerging-malware,emerging-misc,emerging-threatview_CS_c2,emerging-web_server, andemerging-web_specific_apps.Everything else—mail, VoIP, SCADA, games, shell-code heuristics, and the heavier protocol families, stays unchecked.
The result is a ruleset that compiles in seconds, uses a fraction of the RAM, and only fires when something interesting reaches the ports I’ve purposefully exposed (but restricted by alias list of IPs).
That’s this keeps the fail-over WAN monitoring useful without drowning in alerts or wasting CPU by overlapping with pfSense default blocks.
Update: June 18th 2025
I added a new pfSense package called Status Traffic Totals:
Update: October 7th 2025
Upgraded to pfSense 2.8.1:
Fantastic article @hydn !
Over the years, the RFC 1918 (private addressing) egress configuration had me confused. I think part of the problem is that my ISP likes to send me a modem one year and a combo modem/router the next year…making this setting interesting.
I see that Netgate has finally published a good explanation and guidance for RFC 1918 egress filtering:
I did not notice that addition, thanks for sharing!