I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it’s just a much nicer experience.

The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC “just works,” and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).

My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.

Ah, good point!

Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon seems like it’s trying to compete with the Air.

man rot13 ;)

I’m not mad at the huge amount I pay in taxes. I’m mad about what I get in return.

And over twice the GDP.

“Wow you signed the document in blood, you must be really hardcore.”

“No I’m just cheap.”

That’s…pretty believable.

The amount of money you save (and invest) isn’t accurately depicted with this though. Living expenses don’t necessarily grow with take home, if you keep lifestyle creep to a minimum.

So what this means is that if you make $100k and save $10k/year, if you start making $200k you can save the same $10k/year, plus the entire additional $100k after taxes (let’s just say that’s $50k+). So you doubled your salary but your savings went up 6x+.

But “included” doesn’t mean free. You still paid for it.

If you don’t want to sail the high seas, and you don’t want to pay, the library is a great, free option.

What kind of cutlery are you dropping that requires refinishing your floor?

So what is an easy to use or no think thing I could use a pi 5 for?

It sounds like you really want something that works “out of the box,” in which case, I would look for projects that have disk images available.

This severely restricts what you can do with it, and as others have mentioned, is a bit antithetical to the Pi’s original purpose as a tinkering machine. But you may find something you like.

The most basic would be to just use it as a desktop replacement.

Does Minecraft server have a known memory leak or something?

As a hack you can always set up a cronjob to automatically reboot at a time when you won’t be using it, but not sure if that defeats the purpose of a Minecraft server…

My headcanon for The Matrix’s “humans are batteries” is that it’s the machines’ perverse interpretation of this — killing the humans is off the table, and for whatever reason letting them live with no purpose to serve the machines is also disallowed. But giving their lives “meaning” in the form of a shitty (and thermodynamically dubious) “battery” somehow satisfies the rules.

It’s a very big stretch, I’ll admit…

No, I don’t see any handcuffs…

…it’s a myocardial infraction.

If you have a TV, you likely already have the receiving device. Antenna can cost, or you can play around with wire length and orientation.

It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.

AI generated, so influenced from all of the above (with a sprinkling of Chrysler LeBaron perhaps?).

I picked up an old HP LaserJet (with the Ethernet option) for free during grad school. It was a great printer — good CUPS/Linux support, reliable, cheap 3rd party toner.

It’s sad how the mighty have fallen. Would never recommend one for someone today.