eBay Arrivals, February

Amazingly, February is drawing to a close and as I said last post, I am still waiting on a few items before I can continue with a couple of projects, so to fill in the time I thought I would highlight some of the eBay loot from the last week or so.

The first items are a couple of Intel NUC computers from the original source, I had bought one from him at the great price of C$148 shipped and he told me he had one more left, so even though I had no idea what I needed it for, I could not resist.

I have a use for one of them, it will become an emulation machine for my old game library, I will detail the progress in the blog when a couple of other components arrive.

If I rewind to a year ago, my passion was with Raspberry Pi computers, mostly model 3B although I had a couple of previous generation models during those education months, suffice to say I learned a lot from them, and then in the middle of 2019 my interests moved back towards full sized computers.

All the Raspberry Pi units have now been sold back into the eBay ecosystem, developing cash for the new crop of projects. This is the circle of life for my continuing learning process with technology.

The next few pieces of tech are more modest, but they will be used for various important projects in the coming months :

A used memory module for one of the NUC machines, they come with 2GB preinstalled and this is a matching unit for the second slot, it arrived by Canadapost lettermail, total price six bucks.

I'll put that in perspective, travelling back through time to the early 1990's when I bought my first 386 computer, RAM was something like C$90 a megabyte, so applying that rate the above quantity of memory back then would have been (grabs calculator) C$180000

Next arrivals were a couple of 2.5" hard drives, one 500GB conventional unit with moving platter and a 120GB solid state drive.

This used 500GB unit is destined for a desktop project as I want to make the NUC machines as quiet as possible. This was C$18.90 delivered, so if I rewind once again to my original 386 when an extra 100MB hard drive cost me two hundred bucks, this amount of storage back then would have cost me (grabs calculator again) a cool one million dollars....

I think I still have the receipt for that original computer, so at some point I will post it to the blog.

The last arrival came all the way from Denmark of all places.

Samsung 128GB Solid State Drive, no moving parts and (apparently) 6.0 Gbps speed. This unit will be used for some project, perhaps a boot drive for a desktop. The price, including shipping across the planet, was C$23.94 which was rather impressive.

So, that's it for current eBay arrivals, I am waiting for a few more things so that I can kickstart the new NUC builds, and I will keep the blog updated as they arrive.