well Gilfoyle certainly made this crap sound way cooler than it is

got fed up with the local marketplace options so Imma scrap together a market. haven't touched django in like a decade, not up-to-date on tooling, don't wanna pay for 3rd party services... what can possibly go wrong?

and all those are on top of the covert peer-to-peer network that every apple device is a part of, constantly phoning home - including when your device is supposedly off. you can't disable it or opt out of it, and its security, full functionality, and breadth is unknown.

90% of everything is shit. journos are falling head over heels to prove that maxim.

can't stand those things, along with movie X made Y money, couldn't give less of a fuck if I wanted to.

got a busted Lenovo Ideapad 520ISK out of a dumpster, missing screen but otherwise perfectly functional. the thing has i5-7200u, 8 GB, two SATA ports inside and this prompted me to look up converting the thing into a server, specifically figuring out how to run 3.5" drives off it; I'm very anti-friendly towards using USB solutions for such a task.

searching was arduous, both web and yotube, and except one lonely forum post (remember those?) didn't find anyone attempting let alone succeeding in running it thus. the 2.5" and 3.5" connectors are identical (there are micro SATA to SATA adapters for the DVD port) but the drives will need 12 V that the 2.5" ports ain't got.

what I've concluded is that all that's needed is a M/F SATA extension cable which I have trouble sourcing locally; the power will come from a separate ATX PSU for the time being, although I'm sure I can pull 12 V from somewhere on the board.

don't got no 3d printing nor fabricating options, so it'll likely look super-janky, but that's not a huge concern for me now. I'll do a write-up if I succeed.

lol fine - 3x 2 GB 1333 modules out of a busted 1366 motherboard I found and one 4 GB 1866 module I couldn't pair with anything, worked fine for years. the i7 got upgraded to workstation and a C2D i found by the dumpster took the server role. same drives, same debian, same docker-compose files - all good so far.

I've downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don't ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this "missed value".

not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there's sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

like, I couldn't bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.

way more modern CPU and chipset resulting in better power management; also faster and better graphics, but that's not important for the use case. an undervolted i5 5250u can run with wifi and lit screen in the sub-5W range, netting you 10ish hours of continuous light use out of a decent battery and days of standby (that you can turn into weeks if you implement suspend-then-hibernate). you could make an earilier model work but the price difference should be in the $20 range, so why bother?

edit: microSD, yeah, I guess you can boot off them but why would you want the flaky and slow mess when you got a perfectly fine PCI-E SSD?

anyone drone-savvy up in here, can recommend cheap drones that are okayish wrt range, carry capacity, ease of hacking, zero clown shit, etc? ideally some white-label that's globally available...

macbook air 11 2015 8gb version. just this one and no other, no 13, no 2013, no 4 gb versions, etc.

very linux friendly (once you sort out broadcom wifi drivers), sips power, tolerates undervolt. it's useless to the apple crowd as it don't got support for latest OS so it can be had for cheap, even more so if you wanna buy busted units and frankenstein together a new one. also, wide cross-gen parts compatibility. aliexpress got $5 USB-C to Magsafe2 adapter so you don't gotta haul the charger around.

don't get the 12" ones, unless they're close to free. spectacular screen, but the keyboard is atrocious and prone to die, with no option of replacing it, SSD is integrated so can't get the data off it if something dies, fragile display connection, it's a shit-show.

thanks, good stuff! sadly, got none of these locally available.

the, uh, alternatively acquired FC ND version doesn't work on wine due to some creative ways a bypass was implemented; doesn't look like this fixed it