I remember my first PC build, it was probably around 1995, my dad and brother put one together in the kitchen.

Back in those days a gig drive was a big deal. I remember after our build, I told my dad anout a friends dad who had just upgraded to a state of the art 1gb hard drive, a braggable and dare I say extravagant item at the time. My dad said “What is he going to do with all that space?!” Back then, if my research is correct, 1gb disk could run $400-600 in the 1990s. Today 1gb costs somewhere around 0.01¢.

Back then having a pentium was a big deal. These PCs had 1 core and were 100 to 400mhz. 8mb of ram was fairly standard. 32mb was something that could turn dad’s green with envy.

I built my last PC in 2017 and I used a pretty run of the mill Intel i5-7600K. 4 cores, 4 threads, 3.79ghz. Honesty it still feels fast enough. 32gb of ddr 4 and a 1070gpu. For surfing the web, watching movies, managing my libraries, this is plenty fast enough but it needs to be replaced simply because Windows 10 is going away.

Unless you’re doing high end video, rendering, ai stuff, there’s not a need for much more speed. I plan to replace it with a top end processor when I am forced to, hopefully I get another 7 years out of the next one.

Recently I decided to learn more about networking and by way of that, virtualization. Virtualization can use up a lot of ram depending on the use case, for me I’ll be running some light apps. I decided to run everything on a mini pc.

I spent about $500 and purchased a Minisforum um870 that comes with a Ryzen 7 laptop processor, 48gbs of 5600m/t ddr5 ram, which I think has 2x the bandwidth of ddr4.., and 2tbs of storage. The processor runs at 3.8ghz, has 8 cores and 16 threads. It’s insane performance for the price and should be able to handle light gaming, if I were to use it for that, which ai won’t. I’ll primarily use it for managing my own personal and private cloud.

A VM is a virtual machine, people run VMs on hypervisors for a lot of reasons including ethical hacking, messing around with network administration, and efficiently self hosting services without having to deal with some of the more annoying sides of using containers.

In a few years. I wonder if I’ll look back and think of my dad when he suggested nobody had need of an entire gigabyte of space when I am installing a 5000qbit processor into my quantum computer. Today it feels like computers can do whatever we need them to do, and maybe even, with AI and ML that they can do too much, but on the other side of the coin, we always seem to find more for them to do.

In the meantime I’m going to max out that ryzen chip and see what it can do. I’ve already started setting up the basics. While this does sound boring and it is, being an adult requires it. One of my first big projects is setting up Homebox, this is an app that does home inventory. This is for insurance purposes. Most people never put this together, but it is very handy in the event of a loss.

The next project I’ll be tackling is setting up a document management tool, so that I can keep track of tax documents, monthly statements, important emails, receipts, and legal documents.

Also on the list, setting up a bitcoin payment server so that I can start facilitating payments from my local network instead of trusting a 3rd party. I actually use bitcoin a lot, several times per month, and it’s just more fun to be your own bank.

So that’s where I’m at and what I’m doing. It’s been fun and challenging to say the least. Each app has little quirks I have to figure out, some require secure connections (https), others won’t work with it without some tweaking, some need third party services to facilitate email and job scheduling… and on and on it goes. if you’re a person who likes to tinker, home labbing is definitely the way to go.