I started repairing vintage film
cameras

Second hand buying and being friendly with the IT guys at work.

The last time I bought something new out of a store at full price was maybe 15 years ago. I can usually find anything I need by watching the local equivalent to Craigslist, people with lots of money are constantly updating their systems and selling almost new components at bargain prices. A bit of luck and quick action is required, naturally.

The IT-department at work is more than happy to get older gear off their shelves, only the hard drives/SSDs and USB-sticks are off-limits for obvious reasons.

I also like keeping older gear alive with LineageOS and Linux distros. My home laptop is ~10 years old and it runs Fedora smoothly without any problems. My tablet is a Samsung Galaxy something from 2015, the only thing it can’t handle with LineageOS is HD-streaming, which isn’t a problem for me.

I pivoted to peripherals. My mouse, for example, has exactly 4 original parts left, everything but the shell, PCB, and side button switches are aftermarket. My headset has aftermarket cushions, and EQ profiles for specific genres of games and music. I’ve started learning about CPU and RAM clocks. Basically, modify/tune what you have, don’t buy new stuff.

I always had a good machine. As I’m not a gamer or slopmaker, I don’t need crazy amounts of ram or fat GPUs. I just wait until the LLM shit crashes, and will buy a new machine after that.

I have just focused on enjoying what I have for now, mostly.

I built desktops for my wife and myself back in 2013 and 2014. Back then I fresh out of college and we were poor, but I had experience building PC’s in high school. So I was able to use those skills to find deals and be efficient so it was a great investment in dollars per hours of entertainment. And over the years I slowly upgraded them- mostly the storage, adding SSD’s as boot drives and bigger HDD’s for storage. I started using integrated graphics for my own, then bought a used 270X a couple of years later.

Something in mine broke in 2019. Either the CPU or motherboard, but at that point both were ancient and it wasn’t worth trying to buy parts to try to troubleshoot, so I built myself a new PC. In 2020, I started building my wife a similar one, accelerating my purchases when I started to see reports of factories shutting down from sone mysterious flu-like illness that was hitting China and Taiwan hard. I couldn’t afford high-end stuff, so we both had an RX580. I have a 2600x, and my wife has a 3600, so basically the same thing. We were really lucky to get such relatively decent hardware before the crypto boom and pandemic led to GPU prices skyrocketing. Those rx580’s were each less than $200, and for 1080p are still a WAY better FPS/$ than anything new on the market today.

I have been keeping an eye on the market and waiting, hoping for GPU’s to come back down to more reasonable levels. I probably would have bought a 9070XT, or maybe even a 9070, if I could have found one at MSRP. Despite AMD’s promises those MSRP’s were completely divorced fron reality: there was simply not enough supply to support those prices. So i’m still rocking those RX580’s.

When I built my wife’s PC in 2020, her old one still worked and I still had a bunch of good parts from mine which broke in 2019. I waa interested in learning about Linux so I cobbled those parts to make a machine with an AMD 8 Core Bulldozer CPU, my RX270X (my wife had an NVIDIA GTX660 which maybe had slightly better performance on paper, but NVIDIA drivers gave me issues with Linux so I switched), and 16GB of DDR3. I installed Cinnamon Mint and fell in love. It was so much more customizeable, so much more stable, so much better performance than Windows was on the same hardware. Felt like breathing new life into old hardware, and i was able to stream games from my new Windows desktop in my office to this Linux machine in my basement. Linux works a lot better with my Behringer audio interface, and this allowed me to have a workflow where I record in my basement where my musical equipment is, then do the rest of the production on my Windows machine because my DAW is not Linux a compatible and my office is more comfortable to be in.

Separate from that, I wanted to dabble with pi-hole so I picked up an OrangePi Zero 2 for $35. At this point Raspberry Pi’s were ridiculously overpriced (as they still are) for what they are, but at least knock offs like tbe OrangePi were still cheap at the time. I always intended to do more with it, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

So at that point I could game in my office and my basement. My living room was annoying. At times my wife had her PC there, and it was a pain. Wires were messy. She somehow broke a ton of wireless mice/keyboards. The noise from her fans was annoying. The scaling was bad. So I moved her desktop to our office (and built a custom megadesk for both of us out of wood) and bought an NVIDIA Shield Pro for our living room. It was way better than the built-in Roku for streaming video, and I was able to stream there from either of our desktops for gaming. Being always-on, low power, with a bit of storage from a USB drive meant it was kind of a rudimentary NAS too. With SyncThing I was able to use the Shield to do stuff like backup the memes from our phones and keep an organized collection of our desktop and mobile wallpapers. I also got into emulation, and basically turned the Shield into a personal Cloud Save solution for my emulators across devices.

Other than that, I got a Steam Deck. Best purchase of my life. $400 in February 2023, and very similar performance to my desktop. I upgraded the storage, put SyncThing on it to syncronize any saves that Steam won’t (including some Steam games that don’t support cloud saves, like Sonic Adventure 2: Battle). I installed Steam Link as a non-steam game so I can stream from my desktop, saving battery life, heat, and fan noise and getting around and games that don’t have Proton compatibility.

I also picked up a used 2019 10" Amazon Fire Tablet for $50. Used Amazon Fire Toolbox to open it ul and remove telemetry, added Steam Link for Streaming.

I invested in a 12TB HDD and a Blu-Ray drive that allowed me to rip all of my physical media. I slowly transcoded all the video and set up a Jellyfin server. I think that was 2022 or 2023.

This year I upgraded our router to a GL.iNet one. It can function as a VPN server. We formed a polycule with another couple, and my bf and I set up our own VPN’s to connect our networks. He dropped like $5k on building a new NAS, while I spent about $1k to buy a pair of 24TB HDD’s to drop into my Linux machine. I moved my Jellyfin instance off of my desktop and onto there (though I still use my desktop for transcoding because the RX580>RX270).

And that led to me finally making my Linux machine a proper server this year. Still running Cinnamon Mint because I’ve had no reason to change. I re-ripped our CD collection and set up a Navidrome server. I started backup up our Google Photos every month and set up an Immich server. I started collecting ePub files and set up a Calibre-Web-Automated server. I set up Dashy to easily link to all of these.

I have also dabbled with services like Journiv and Nutritrace, but haven’t really gotten them up and running. I really wish I was able to build a proper new server, with rack hardware. I wish I could build a new gaming PC too, or maybe have a dual-GPU server with VM’s for my wife and k to stream from. But prices are just too damn high.

I have been waiting “for prices to go back to normal” to get a new video card since 2018.

1. abstaining / thinner BCP
2. crying and buying overpriced second-hand
3. crying harder and buying new

I still have a few older sticks of DDR4 from various older projects, and AM4 boards and CPUs are still decently priced… at least relative to newer stuff. In any case, most games aren’t going to need DDR5 for a long time, and so long as you aren’t bothering with ray tracing to any significant degree older GPUs are still competitive. The only thing that’s required these days is an SSD, and it’s not as though those haven’t been around forever at this point.

It sucks yeah, not being able to even consider newer parts, but it is what it is.

I work in IT and have admittedly taken some systems we’ve set for recycling to fill gaps or help people out.

I built my gaming/media rig before covid. it’s still running strong. My 2 laptops were work laptops that were going to be tossed so I took them home, installed linux mint and they work perfectly fine. I’ve been in IT for over 20 years so I’m fine with older tech. I don’t need new and shiny.

Good time to check the backlog of older games in your library and just be ok with the reality that your main pc can’t run modern games anymore. Also I turned 2 of my older pc’s to linux machines. Ubuntu lts (12gb ram minipc) and mint cinnamon (4gb ram laptop). Those old machines just got a new life and can still run renpy, rpg maker, html games etc.

Buying second hand.
I don’t need the latest CPU generation or largest ram sticks for my minipc for self hosting.

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.

I mainly only buy old (like, over a decade old) laptops off eBay so I’m not affected. I’m not replacing any parts of my main PC till they break. I think the current culture of upgrading just to stay up to date rather than because something doesn’t work anymore is incredibly wasteful, especially given the emissions and human rights abuses in the manufacture of PC parts.

I upgraded a year ago so I’m fine on RAM. When I needed extra storage I just bought the disks. It’s more expensive but not something I can’t afford.