With the recent sky high electricity prices (well, I thought they were high until I saw the heating oil prices, oh my) I decided it was irresponsible of me to continue running my Pentium D desktop - afterall that’s a 130W processor on a desktop with a 275W power supply. Ok, it’s probably not drawing full power all the time, but owing to the age of the machine I was having to keep it powered on all the time - the capacitors on the power board were on the way out and it would take a long time cycling on power up until it would finally start; Once running it was fine.
So I shut it down and started looking for something NetBSD suitable I could move the SSD too, ideally with VGA so I could re-use my monitor. I was first of thinking something super lower power like this (great website!) which I could probably do for under £50, but then realised I didn’t really want something slower than the Pentium D (plus graphics on that aren’t really supported under NetBSD, this would probably be better), so thought maybe just a more modern processor in a low powered desktop, or laptop (actually do-able for under £200 and would be nice to have a laptop again), but then reality hit and I put my monitor and keyboard away in a drawer and resigned myself to having no computer for the foreseeable future.
Maybe I luck out and I find something for around a tenner I can use. I can probably save up for that; I should have seen it coming, but of course dropping to two percent was not going to be enough - I’m down at one percent so around my youngest’s pocket money, but I have other outgoings to cover like running shoes and server rental (my choice I guess).
Frustratingly my Linode NetBSD instance (this one!) has chosen this exact moment in time to stop IPv6 from working for no discernible reason. I cannot figure it out. No amount of rebooting is helping. But also it’s bloody fiddly trying to investigate and fix from my phone. I think I’m close to just deleting all the IPv6 DNS entries.
For someone who works in software/technology it’s “interesting” that I’m the only one in the family without a computer (Ok, my work machine, which is very nice, but that is for work, no personal use allowed) and have the oldest/worst phone. Thank god I at least have my phone though, kind of back to these days.
Sigh.