Preface: My workplace just moved to a new office, and during the move my old computer stopped turning on. It was an ancient AMD machine anyway, slower than today’s low-voltage Celerons, and I’d wanted to replace it for a while — so this was a good excuse to put together something new. But at work my desk space is limited, and there’s no room under the desk for a tower either, so the “new computer” had some requirements: It has to take up very little space Within that footprint, as much performance as possible It has to run Win10 without issues As cheap as possible — under 1000 ideally After looking around, the Lenovo M73 that was popular a while back turned out to be a pretty good choice. After a bunch of research I decided to jump in.

A while back I saw someone on the HiPDA Discovery board recommending bootleg LEGO, saying this 78-yuan WALL-E was actually pretty good quality. So I went and bought it on impulse, thinking I’d never played with LEGO before, might as well start with a cheap knockoff and see how it feels. It arrived and I burst out laughing — theirs is LEGO, yours is Lepin. Though this “Lepin” is actually pretty famous in bootleg circles.

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.

The last time I put together a model kit was in elementary school. I remember it was a ship, and it looked hideously ugly. The rest of the time I was playing with Mini 4WD cars, and those are so modular I don’t think they really count as models — you can knock one together in a few simple steps. Guro is something a small toy merchant makes himself, and apparently there’s intellectual property involved and all that. I saw it was a limited sale at the time, so I put in a preorder. It arrived last November, and when I got my hands on it and took a look… Holy crap, over 200 tiny parts, detailed down to every joint. Then I looked at the assembly instructions and my whole body got drunk. So it got shelved. Today I finally finished The Witch’s Dinner Party and felt sick to my stomach, so the only thing left was to assemble a model. I saw someone on X bragging that they finished assembly in 15 minutes. I can tell you that guy is absolutely full of it. It took me almost 3 hours…