A batch of HP docks showed up on eBay recently for 69 yuan with free shipping. Full name: Elite X3 Lapdock. It was originally made to pair with HP’s own Windows Phone handsets, but thanks to the well-known reasons, the Windows Phone market is completely dead, and this thing is now an awkward orphan nobody wants. Like most people, I had fantasies about it too. Could this be a cheap TNT Go? So I grabbed one to find out.

I’ve said before that ChromeOS tablets might be the future of “productivity”. But the Duet’s performance and RAM were just too weak, so I eventually sold it. Not long after, I saw this new product: HP Chromebook X2 11 A 3:2 screen, 8GB of RAM, a Snapdragon 7c processor, a detachable keyboard, a magnetic charging stylus… This was exactly what perfect “productivity” looked like. Doesn’t that seem cool… I forgot the rest.

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.