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based.quest – Personal projects and plans going forward

Posted on 17/08/2022 12:10:24

Preface

This blogpost will be mainly about the DIY projects I am about to do going forward from remainder of 2022 to 2023. It will only faintly touch topic of based.quest and cernodile.com, although some projects are tailored for it.

Project ReuseNAS

As they say - reuse is more important recycle. I will take that principle to heart when building my very first personal NAS. For those who haven’t known me for a long time, I have an older SFF PC from Fujitsu. It has been collecting dust for at least 4 years now as I built my very first proper PC with my own funds.

The idea with this project is that I will reuse my old PC components, minus the processor and case (as it’s not really fit for NAS) and repurpose it as a NAS. If my memory serves me correctly, it already has 8GB DDR3 RAM installed and originally is equipped with a Intel Celeron G530. I intend to upgrade that with an i5-2400 that I got second hand. As for the case, I will try to scourge my local second hand market for a case fit to house 4 HDDs.

The only component I won’t be using second-hand here are the actual drives. I will be purchasing 4x4TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro 7200RPM drives running in either RAID 10 or 5/6, if you think this is a poor choice, please let me know in Matrix!

There will be 2 uses for this NAS. The first use is the obvious - backup my own files that are hard to come across off my PC and laptop. The second use is for creating an incremental backup system for my cernodile.com+based.quest infra. I will be doing a writeup on the latter on how I achieve it and the journey to have it working.

The rough build date for this project would be either end of 2022 or Q1 2023.

Project SteamBoxReborn

Ever since I got my Steam Deck earlier this year, I’ve really started to appreciate the hard work that Valve has put into making Linux experience near flawless for almost any end-user. I want to bring this experience to a stationary PC machine. This is going to be a staple of my living room where it gets attached to a TV.

There is the elephant in the room that prior to this point, building it with integrated graphics would have caused very poor experience to the end-user. However, thanks to AMD’s recent developments on Ryzen platform to enable integrated graphics on every single CPU starting from Ryzen 7000 generation - this is no longer a concern. The RDNA architecture has proven itself with Steam Deck to be very powerful.

There are no concrete specifications on this build yet other than the CPU generation and preferred form factor (mATX or lower) and that it has to run SteamOS 3.

I will be making a video (and blog) about this build when time is near. For now it’s just a rough idea that I plan to execute either early 2023 or mid-2023.

Experiment DeckPC

DeckPC is exactly what it sounds like. Using the Steam Deck as a PC. Okay, maybe it is a bit more nuanced on what I am trying to do here than just plugging in a dock and calling it a day.

I intend to purchase a KVM switch alongside a dock, so I can switch between my actual desktop PC and docked Steam Deck on the same set of peripherals.

While this is really basic, I still want to document my experience for this over a longer period of time - for example a month.

I will try to use SteamOS as a regular desktop PC for a month. Sometimes game on it if there is no great controller support for a given game. Try do usual productivity workloads like browsing the web, using Matrix and such.

This has no timeframe, it’s either really soon or really late when I do get around to it - but it’s something I’m entertaining in my mind still and wanted to get the idea out at least.

Further considerations

Framework please come to Estonia, I want to purchase one and make a review for it. My current laptop has caused enough troubles already.

Going forward and the present

I realize I haven’t posted anything in nearly 4 months and as it so happens, the last 4 months have been the most hectic in my career development. I have devoted a lot of my time to work and getting further in ranks. This has been mainly at cost of my spare time and energy. I haven’t forgotten about the site and care a lot about it still.

I do intend to keep the place alive and do regular housekeeping around it. I am still reachable over social platforms and still ready to discuss on many topics.

I can’t promise increased activity, but rest assured I am still here for the site and journey of based.quest. Special thanks goes to a few of you who have decided to chip in generously for hosting costs, I appreciate every last cent of it.

Thank you for reading,



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