Just wondering as computers are sorta my hobby and i like messing around with different ones. I havent in a while due to prices going up such as with ram usually. I dont mess with new tech, but i want to know what you guys do with the crazy prices out there? or are you already set before prices went up? Or are you just lucky in some form?
Just curious.
I’ve been lucky with my upgrade/build timings. Built my first PC right before the crypto madness, and did my last major upgrade right before the AI madness.
I’m going to run my current system until it crumbles to dust. With any luck, the market will have settled a bit by then.
As for projects, I have lots of old “useless” tech that I can work with. Like old laptops, phones, Raspberry Pis, even mobos and other spare PC parts. Building small is more interesting to me than building big.
Recycling stores
I’m just not buying anything new. I need more drive space, but with current prices I’m deleting stuff rather than expanding my storage.
Other than that I’ve just taken up new hobbies like woodworking and homebrewing. I’ve toyed with the idea of tiny arduino type projects but haven’t made the plunge yet.
I’ve been messing around in the esp32 space. I cheated and bought a bunch of pieces off m5stack. It’s been fun!
I realized I don’t need new tech, I find more joy in repairing and using what I can find second hand.
I tried to do all of my tech purchasing for the foreseeable future shortly after Trump was reelected, based on the assumption that he was going to fuck the economy. Gotta admit I thought the high prices would come from idiotic tariffs instead of idiotic AI, but whatever…
Thats exactly how I came to rebuild my PC. I hate the piece of shit, but I have to thank him for scaring me into building when I did because of the threat of tarrifs. My 64GB of ram was like $200 not the absolutely fucking disgustingly insane $1k or whatever it is now…
I upgraded my desktop in a more-or-less “value” way (modulo going for SFF parts to make it more portable in case I needed to flee from the fascists or something like that – and yes, that actually was my thought process), and got new cheap but sufficient minipcs for my kids and my parents.
However, if I had known it was gonna get this bad for tech specifically, I would’ve gone for a new motherboard with a 9800X3D and DDR5 in my desktop, instead of keeping my existing one and upgrading to a 5700X3D and 64GB of DDR4. Also, I might have gotten a 7900XTX instead of a 9070XT (they were roughly the same price at the time, but the 7900XTX is double the price now).
I would have pulled the trigger on the minipc NAS I was thinking about, as I literally had it and a bunch of SSDs in my Amazon cart but was waffling about it when the prices started skyrocketing.
I might have even bought one of those “strix halo” PCs with the 128GB of unified memory back when they were $2000 instead of $4000+.
I started repairing vintage film
camerasAny half rate cook can make top tier ingredients taste good.
A true master chef can create culinary delights from scraps.
Everybody laughed at me when I took a 10-port USB hub, installed a flash drive in every one, and set it up as a RAID array.
Today? With storage prices where they’re at? Think they’re still laughing?
Yes. They’re still laughing at me.
😂
can your next project be to get one of those old multi-disc CD changers, install a rw drive in it and see if you can make a raid array work with it?
This rules lmao
Make a stew with RAM sticks, got it.
Stew? Are you mad? That’s ridiculous.
RAM sticks are for nachos.
I work in IT and have admittedly taken some systems we’ve set for recycling to fill gaps or help people out.
Been in IT for 25 years. This is the greatest perk.
I worked for a hospitality company, fortune 500, who had acquired us and had never had an IT department before.
I still have boxes of Cat5e from the wifi installations, who said to pitch the cable into the trash.
I also harvested a switch with just one bad port (48 port cisco catalyst) and when they decided to upgrade the call center with new PCs and were throwing away the old pizza boxes, we were all stuff our cars. I built a cluster, just because, but then started reinstalling Winders XP on them and giving them to friends, family, or selling them dirt cheap to acquaintances.
Yeah from a business perspective replacing hardware makes Load of sense but it’s not always because it’s problematic. We try to donate most of the systems we replace except for the hard drives. I’ve just shifted where the donations occurs a few times when needed.
Used tech is your friend like others have said, but yea I’m also not buying anything new right now. Once the prices stabilize again, I may buy some stuff but for right now, old used stuff or getting stuff from friends for me.
I’ve been getting into retro gaming. I’ve been buying and playing GameCube and GBA games and I started making my own GBA game as well.
started making my own GBA game
wow nice! How does that work with cartridges? Are there empty cartridges you can write to, or do you hook up the GBA to the PC directly?
I believe those are usually done by modifying an existing ROM, but there are tools to make games from scratch too I think, at least for GBA. It’s pretty neat! The cartridges do have size limits, so if your game / ROM hack is particularly large it might not be ideal, but it’s cool that you can play modern-ish games on an OG GBA (most people emulate nowadays, but lots of people still have original hardware!)
So cool! Let the GBA hunting commence! :D
Retro games are awesome! Relatively affordable and you don’t need expensive hardware to play them (whether you’re playing natively or emulated!), and arguably more fun than modern titles since there aren’t any forced online shenanigans
i haven’t bought new hardwares for a long time. it’s mostly all older used items, sometimes even straight out of garbage bin.
the newest machine i have is from 2021.
Same, this race for performance it annoying. My $150 computer is a billion times faster than the one I had in the 90s, I can use it to program, work, and even play most Steam games.
I’m doing stupid bullshit with $4 microcontrollers instead of doing stupid bullshit with bigger machines.
I took up blacksmithing.
I etch my own silicon wafers. I’ve perfected the 4mm chip.
I’ve been rediscovering “old” tech. Not necessarily because DDR prices are through the roof, but because some things were genuinely well built in the not-too-distant past.
And sure, I did enjoy servicing a 1980s VT320 serial terminal that I got for free, but I’ve also been examining what an original Raspberry Pi 1 is capable of doing. Did you know the RPi has hardware H.264 encoding capabilities? And mpeg2 hardware decode? With these things being fairly available – just ask some tech friends if they have some to spare – it’s not inconceivably to make a TV frontend to access Jellyfin, in lieu of a Google TV stick or whatever.
Likewise, some pursuits avoid new hardware outright: a FreeBSD-based router runs really well on older hardware, because the drivers will have been tested and rock solid by now. And Asterisk as a PBX software is great if you want to get into telephony. If modern packet switching is more your thing, dn42 is one such environment that you can plug into and pass traffic with other networks.
And if you don’t have PC hardware laying around, maybe try smaller: microcontrollers and embedded/IoT hardware is still fairly affordable, and has a breadth of applications, from home automation to just building things for the lolz. MeshCore and Meshtastic are comms networks built from low cost radios.
Just because some hardware became expensive does not mean the entire hardware space is out of reach, and in any case, the software domain is wide open. In that regard, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is timeless. This is akin to trying your hand at Software Defined Radio (SDR) before taking the plunge by buying an expensive ham radio.
The tech field is not limited to just Apple and Samsung. There’s also Dell, and Tektronix, and Linux, and Texas Instruments, and Arduino, and soldering, and KiCAD, and FlipperZero, and HomeAutomation, and IPv6, and more. Find your thing in this great big field!
I keep rp2040 microcontrollers around for keyboards, but I just used one to make a PicoMite VGA, a functional boot-to-BASIC computer.
I scavenge old hardware from work. My rack is now complete (hardware wise, at least), as I powered up the JBOD cabinet today, consisting of a bunch of harddrives left over from disk upgrades at work. It’s a bunch of 10TB and 3TB SAS drive. That server used to be an automation controller, now it’s my storage server. I had 160G of DDR3 RAM laying around from a machine I retired a while back, which is nice to have with ZFS.
My VPN concentrator was a datalogger for two industry robots.
My web crawler was supposed to be a test-server for the software department, but they needed to upgrade.
The only new hardware is my game server, and RAM was over half the price. It’s a fairly standard AMD build, except I gave it a rackmount case.
My networking hardware is also from work, as I detest consumer grade networking hardware. I replaced my shitbox ISP router with a Fortigate 101E, for example.
EDIT: Oh, and the UPS was bought dirt cheap at a bankruptcy auction (coincidentally, the bankrupt entity was a competitor of my employer).
The rack itself was given away at a regional airport who was getting rid of some old and unused stuff. It’s soundproofed and costs a fortune new. By far my luckiest score.
It’s not worth the downsides, but a major upside of working for a large tech outlet is getting to pick over the massive amount of tech refuse they cycle through. Being able to snag 2-3 year old pro equipment for free is an undeniably tempting perk.
