This post has been updated: Check out the new firmware guide and tinkering notes: /archives/9750/ I loved handhelds as a kid, and the habit stuck. I bought a PSV, I bought a Switch, and I still enjoy just holding a handheld and fiddling with it. Recently I was bored, stumbled onto this whole open-source handheld scene online, saw a bunch of crowdfunding projects, and ultimately—because I’m broke—went with the cheap Subor Retro Game (RS97).

Almost three years ago (damn, has it been that long?) I bought an ASUS Xonar U7 sound card to get audio output while my laptop was hooked up to a dock. And now, three years later, that sound card has started acting up. Roughly, the problem is it often doesn’t get enough power and won’t come up—plug it in and it isn’t recognized. After unplugging and replugging it a bunch of times it occasionally has a chance of working. Eventually I couldn’t stand spending ages plugging and unplugging every day when I brought the computer home, so I decided to replace it. I had three requirements: USB powered, I don’t want to plug in a power supply Has audio input The DAC chip can’t be too crappy Has a headphone output jack I looked through a whole pile of Chinese-made DACs and couldn’t find one I was happy with. The biggest pain is that they don’t have audio input, and they can’t be USB powered either—they all make you drag along a big power supply…

I’ve wanted to listen to a tube amp for ages. Everyone says tube amps are super classy, mostly because they supposedly have this amazing “flavor.” So I got together with a high school buddy to figure out how to put one together. He said the circuit and soldering should be fine—schematics are all over the internet—and the tubes are no problem either, you can just buy ready-made ones. Solder it up using the public mold designs online… So I placed the order. We’d agreed to do the soldering together, but last month his master’s thesis defense was such a pain and kept him so busy that I let him start on his own. When he finished, he said: after soldering it with someone else’s board, someone else’s case, someone else’s power supply, and someone else’s tubes, it ended up exactly the same as the finished units other people sell. So why not just buy a finished one? Yeah… for something this cheap, why not just buy a finished one?

The GH60 project is a tutorial and process for letting users assemble their own mechanical keyboard. There’s a decent intro here, and you can dig into foreign sites for the details. For us users, though, all you really need to know is that GH60 is the process of assembling a mechanical keyboard yourself. GH60 itself is just a keyboard PCB. Once you have the PCB, all that’s left is soldering switches, adding a case, and deciding whether to throw in LEDs. At first I stuck to the principle of “if you’re gonna do it, do it big” when picking parts, and by the end I found that an original Cherry switch + aluminum case + steel plate + custom purple-black-orange three-color keycap combo had already shot the price past 900. Damn it, at that price why wouldn’t I just buy a Filco?

The first NAS I used was an HP N40L, so I’ve got a soft spot for that little chassis. Then the motherboard died… So I built my own case, stuffed some drives in it and called it a NAS. Installed OMV, set up a garbage storage stack — a RAID 1 made of junk, then a RAID 0 on top of that, then another RAID 0. It ran fine for over a year, but that pathetic 3TB capacity ran out fast, so I started looking at a new NAS. I like small cases like the HP N40L, and I saw that a German site had the HP MicroServer Gen 8 on sale again, so I figured I’d do a German import. After ordering I assumed it’d arrive around the end of November, but it showed up surprisingly fast — 12 days to my door, and no customs fee.

We already had a NAS at home, but it was useless to the older folks in the family. Fine for me, too much hassle for my parents. For them a NAS is actually necessary — they need somewhere to keep the photos they take, whether on phones or cameras. Importing photos from a phone to a PC is way too much trouble for them, and I didn’t want to install some domestic Chinese management app and get burned. Dumping everything onto one computer also seemed unsafe — one dead hard drive and it’s all gone. So we decided to go with a Synology. Given data safety concerns, I picked the two-bay DS216se.

The Surface Pro 3 is Microsoft’s own hardware, and also the handheld gaming platform Microsoft was pushing, so upgrading it to Windows 10 really shouldn’t be a problem. I bought the regular version of the Surface Pro 3, then picked up a key on eBay to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 Pro, so the Windows 10 upgrade I got was naturally Pro too. The upgrade itself went smoothly. Just like everyone else: reserved the Windows 10 upgrade, downloaded it ahead of time, upgraded directly. The process was fast, and then I ran into a few problems: