OMG the tower even has a lock and a turbo button! My first (self-built) media PC was in a Silverstone case with a VFD display. They make some good stuff.

Bit of a catch-22 for me there. I want to run a local LLM for Home Assistant voice stuff and most of them are heavily optimised for Nvidia. At least the ones that don’t take a ton of effort to setup.

Yeah I’ve recently got back into buying and ripping physical CDs so an internal optical drive would’ve been great, but it seems the fronts of modern PCs are dedicated to massive RGB fans. Gonna have to make do with something external.

Good to know. Last time I tried to share a partition between Windows and Linux it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing but that was a number of years ago now.

Yeah agreed, and that’s what I always used to do when it was just for myself. I did actually have a grand plan of buying parts and trying to get the kids involved in building it, but I’m in my 40s and out of the loop, and really I need something that kinda “just works” and that the rest of the family can use without me incessantly tinkering with it.

That’s why I talked myself into a pre-built, with the mindset that a project PC that takes time and effort to spec out and build just right can come later. But the fact that that pre-built isn’t exactly how I would spec it is likely causing some of this angst!

I do already plan to shrink Windows down to a bare minimum (or possibly just clone it to an external SSD) and use something Linuxy as my daily driver. I’m mostly a Mint guy but I’m interested to give ZorinOS a go since they’ve just released v18. Might even try Bazzite for shits and gigs.

Thanks. I always manage to do this to myself with any expensive purchase. Yesterday I watched a ton of video reviews of it and came away pleased with my decision, and then this morning I started second guessing the whole thing. Been telling myself all day that the CPU thing isn’t a big deal, it’s leaps and bounds more performant than any console, and could still get fixed if Dell releases Intel’s patch, but there’s always that little nagging demon on my shoulder!

It’s more like £150/year, but it’s charged every 3 years. Still very expensive compared to .com for sure!

This looks really good and I’m enthused with how responsive you’re being, will definitely give it a try.

It is a bit of a shame you didn’t call it Jott as jo.tt is available as a domain, but then the tt TLD is pretty expensive so maybe not!

Just a shame the sublime platforming had to be continuously interrupted by repetitive fights! Still, I want to play it again now.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. A game of pure charm.

I used to habitually replay it every Christmas until one year it just felt too janky. They were supposed to be remaking it but the expected release date came and went without a word and now it’s just vaporware.

It’s niche but I like to point it out whenever I get the opportunity: if your workplace uses Bitwarden Enterprise, every licensed user gets a free family plan that can be linked to any account. I haven’t personally paid for BW for years.

This right here. In the UK we have a little box (ONT) where the fibre comes into the home that essentially acts as a modem and converts the fibre to ethernet and back again and then they provide a separate wireless router that plugs into it. Other than for my current ISP where I had to specifically request that they enable bridge mode (which they did for free), I’ve never had any issues plugging my own router into the ethernet side of this box.

If your ISP’s wireless router plugs directly into the fibre then you should be able to request that it’s set to bridge mode so that it becomes just a dumb ONT box like we have here. Albeit a large and clunky one.

Contacting the registrar is worth a shot and could be your best bet. I recently did a similar thing except the expiring domain was on a pretty obscure country-TLD with only one registrar. They told me how long the grace period was and then I setup a script to check the availability every minute and alert me when it came up.

Probably not feasible with a .com or similar but they might be able to help in some regard. Edit: though having read about drop catching, that’s definitely your best bet if it’s likely to be sniped!

This is very impressive and I’m highly likely to give it a whirl. My question is, though: would it be something that my very non-tech savvy wife could use?

Eg. I’m thinking setup the app on her phone with a default location and when she asks me for a file I can just tell her that I’ve “put it in the app”, and she’ll be able to easily retrieve it. Also same thing but vice versa, though the video seems to cover that via the Android share menu…

Again, super impressive. Good job!

I used to work at a games studio that would get these delivered fairly regularly, usually paired with a particular motherboard and presumably a custom BIOS.

I think we were technically supposed to return them but the manufacturers never enforced it, so once the chip was actually released to the public - and assuming the sample was stable enough for general use - the PC would rotate into normal stock and eventually get sold for cheap to staff or end up in the spare parts bin.

While it was cool at first to get pre-production chips before anyone else, it became pretty mundane and I’m not at all surprised to see them out in the wild decades later. Interesting piece of history though!

My workplace ran off DL360s (the 1U variant of this) of various generations for 20 or 30 years. I remember getting the first G5 in and being really impressed by the way the components all slotted in so easily and pretty much everything was hot-swappable. And the no-nut rail system was a revalation.

They were great systems for their time but that power consumption is crazy by today’s standards!

As for feedback, you have a very confusing sentence about 2.5" and 3.5" drives being the same size. Took me far too long to realise you meant capacity and not physical dimensions!

Just a PSA for anybody reading the thread, though it doesn’t really help with the question at hand… On the very slim chance that your workplace uses Bitwarden Enterprise it’s worth knowing that every licensed user gets a free family plan that can be tied to an existing personal account, provided it’s hosted in the same region.

We do use it but very few of our own users are even aware of the perk so I like to spread it around when I get the chance!

It’s an 8 bay unit with six drives that are a mix of WD Red and Seagate Ironwolf, all NAS grade drives, basically. The other two slots have SSDs for hosting the aforementioned containers and VMs.

The largest drives I have are 4TB though, so maybe the larger capacity ones are louder? I also ran the fan profile in whatever the quietest setting is.

I am a tech oriented person, I work in IT, and a Syno ticks the boxes in many respects.

• Low power draw. Power efficiency is very important to me, especially for something that runs 24/7. I don’t know how efficient self-build options are these days, but 10 years ago I couldn’t get close to the efficiency of a good NAS.

• Set and forget. I maintain enough systems at work so I don’t really want to spend all of my free time maintaining my own. A Syno “just works”, it can run for months or years without a reboot (and when it does need one, it does it by itself overnight), and I can easily upgrade or swap a dead drive in a couple of minutes. When the entire NAS dies I can stick the drives in a new one and be up and running almost instantly.

• Size and noise. I don’t have a massive house, so I need something that can sit on a shelf and be unobtrusive. In our last house it was literally sat in the living room, spinning drives constantly, and nobody was bothered by it.

The Syno I have is plenty good enough to run a bunch of Docker containers and a few VMs for all of my self hosted stuff, and it just does the job efficiently, quietly, and without complaining or needing constant maintenance.

I don’t like this creep towards requiring branded drives and memory, though I’m pretty sure it’s not legal in the EU. Regardless there are ways around it.