I’ll never forget taking delivery of a new HTC Vario back in 2007. I was super hyped from the moment I ordered it until approximately 10 minutes after I set it up, at which point I realised that I wanted a cool little computer / phone, but had no actual use for it. And ultimately that was a shitty device in all directions.

This is horrifying, and enlightening.

Yes.

This can’t be real. None of those Teslas are on fire.

Yeah, that scene soured me on the franchise too. The first few were kinda stupid, but you could make an argument that the things they were doing was just regular car shit, albeit pushed the very, very extreme.

Then they yoinked a safe out a reinforced concrete wall with a car, and didn’t just tear the fucking towing hitch off? Nah mate.

Quite right too. In this life, a man must have standards.

No, that was a different guy.

WHAT IS THE CHARGE? BEING NAKED? DELICIOUSLY NAKED?

One nice thing about my rented house is that a previous owner (possibly my landlord) ran an ethernet from the lounge at the front right to the small bedroom at the back, upstairs. So, router > Deco node > ethernet > Deco node > 1gbps switch. Then I have three PCs upstairs wired to that switch, and they all get the full glory of our 1gbps fibre.

But, like, the rent is almost £1400 a month, so…

Hey, don’t shit on the font size. Mine is getting alarmingly large, and I’m only 46.

Is it a PC for playing 15 year old games? Because that’s still a gaming PC.

I got a bunch laying about for one reason or another. Sadly, it’s all laptop RAM.

I mean, not sadly for me, as I have a fetish for micro PCs, and guess what…

Did they stutter?

Keep an eye out for any thin clients that can’t support Win11 that businesses are getting rid of. You might have some luck with them.

I’ve hit a goldmine with my work upgrading all of the PCs.

I now have two Dell Optiplex 7050 and a 3020 micro pcs, all with 8gb of replaceable RAM. Two of them came with 130gb M.2 SSDs, one with a 130gb SATA SSD. All told they cost me nothing, because the company can’t use them (they don’t support Win11), and there’s another 50 machines that can be sold if the boss can be arsed.

None of them will set the world alight, but they’re perfect for little things I want to do at home.

I spent yesterday setting up one of the 7050s with an M.2 NIC, then slapped Proxmox and OpenWRT on it and am now free of the shitty Linksys my ISP gave me.

Next up, I need to whip the two drives out of my 2014 Mac mini Debian server so I can replace it with something that can accept more RAM than the soldered 8gb I’m currently stuck with.

It’s fun!

I have to use Windows at work. It’s genuinely horrifying.

Every time I open Word - and I mean EVERY. TIME. - I have to dismiss a box inviting me to ask Copilot to do my work for me.

I KNOW that I could bung Debian on that PC and wring SO MUCH MORE performance out of it, but noooooo, I’ve got to use SlopOS, because our IT guys don’t know the first damn thing about Linux.