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The government announced new covid restrictions for my country yesterday evening, in anticipation of the Omikron variant of the virus. Though many media articles I've seen say that this new variant is not as dangerous as other variants, the government still decided to go into a full lockdown. Everything is closed, except for essential stores such as supermarkets and drug stores. School is closed too, except for practical classes and exams. I just wish it would all be over soon, but it all just seems and endless cycle of lockdown, slowly opening things up, discovering a new variant, closing things down again, vaccines, boosters, whatever. It's tiring.


Since I only have practical courses, I still get to go to school. In the coming week, I want to finish one project, and make some progress on another. I guess I'll just have to work on the rest of them during winter break. I realized I only have 4 weeks left, including winter break, and it's making me nervous.


Spend a huge amount of money today on mostly computer things. Almost 200 euros, something I never really do. At least it was all second hand. I bought hard drives for my NAS, cpus, a computer case for my new build (that will probably not be built until mid 2022), and a Lip Service jacket.


And I rediscovered my old Nintendo DS Lite with Pokemon Platinum! God, I love this game. Never liked how grindy Pokemon always was, but the rest of the game is good. Torterra is my baby. Baby boi.

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I've wanted to build a file server for a long time, especially one I can reach from outside the local network. A central system where I can store photos, videos and important files, and retrieve them whenever I need them. I haven't started building it yet, I'm just figuring some things out right now.


I'll use my old desktop. Right now, dear Clutterbox is 6 years old, has 8 GB DDR3 RAM, an i5-4460 CPU, a GTX 760 GPU, a 64GB SSD boot drive and a 1TB HDD for storage. The specs were already a generation behind when I built it in 2015, and it doesn't meet the minimum system requirements for some games on my Steam wishlist anymore. The SSD is way too small, too.
The case, however, seems like a good start: it's a Fractal Design R3, with 8 internal and 2 external drive bays. I'll probably replace the motherboard too, since it's a uATX mobo with only 4 SATA ports. The new one should have at least 6, and maybe a few more PCIe slots for expansion cards. Maybe I'll get more RAM, and I'll reuse the CPU and SSD. For the OS, I'll use TrueNAS, it seems well-documented. It also has some nice plugins. I'll configure the drives in RAID 1. Just need to get some huge HDDs.


There's one problem I haven't tackled yet: How can I remotely access the NAS? Can't I just forward the FTP port? No, it's actually super unsafe. Most google search results suggest accessing it through SFTP, setting up a dynamic DNS, and do some other complicated computer things.

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Thought I was finally done when I ordered the sata cables last week. I figured the cable to the HDD shouldn't have to be too long, since the sata ports are right beneath the HDD tray. Guess what? The 10cm cable I bought is just a bit too short. Ordered a new cable.


Okay, but I could still turn the computer on with the HDD tray half displaced, right? Yes! I thought, when I remembered that the Fujitsu has a VGA port, and I have an old monitor with a VGA port. So there should also be a VGA cable somewhere, right? Nope. Still, I managed to get a VGA cable from university today, so I'm looking forward to finally firing this thing up. I just hope I got the whole "burning an ISO to a usb drive" process right. I thought I had a cd with an old Debian-installation laying around somewhere, but I cannot for the life of me remember where...

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Years ago, I pulled an old computer from a garbage bin outside a community college. It was a Fujitsu Esprimo E3510. I didn't know much about computers back then, I just disassembled it as far as I could, removed every wire I saw, took out all of the components. And of course, I neatly kept track of where I left everything, down to the last screw (I totally didn't).


A few months ago, I came across a ram stick, a whopping 2GB of DDR2 RAM, and an old cpu, an Intel Core 2 Duo of some sort. They seemed to go together, and I remembered the old Fujitsu I pulled from a garbage bin. I found the case and the motherboard too, and the power supply, and decided to put the whole thing back together as an experiment. Sadly, I had disassembled the psu so much that I decided it was too much of a risk to use it again, so I bought a new ("new") one, along with a cpu cooler, a 250 GB HDD, a few cables and an extra ram stick since the motherboard has two slots. I found a manual online, apparently some of them came with an Nvidia Quadro gpu, but I decided to leave it for a future upgrade.


I just need the last SATA cables now and then it'll be ready. Not sure what I will use it for. And it also needs a name, I like giving my devices names. My piratebox is called JackSparrow and my main gaming pc is called Clutterbox, but I'm not sure what I should call this one.

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