Happy Holidays

A quick post for Christmas Day 2022, here we are in the house, the turkey and sausage meat are in the oven and that smell is permeating the air as I type. This is our thirty-fifth Christmas since being married back in 1987 and we have our own little ritual today, food of course, drink yes a bit, relaxing away from the crowds and all the daft stuff on the planet.

There is a present winging it's way to me from an eBay seller in Vancouver, a third generation CPU for one of the fanless boxes, an i5-3230M that was just twenty-one dollars, I will blog an entry when it arrives and I install it, along with some other things, it will be reported here. I also spent a whopping $2.45 on a vintage game on Steam yesterday, to run on my Linux Mint box, it is "Total Annihilation" from twenty years ago, a fantastic RTS, Real Time Strategy and I have already played a couple of games and beaten it once.

The year has been quite special for this Old Tech Geezer and I hope next year will be the same, or perhaps better, but here are the trends I am seeing from my bunker.

Graphics cards, GPUs, have finally become affordable again, ok let me rephrase that, some perfectly adequate GPUs have become affordable again, there will always be the leading edge hardware that most people will never consider throwing their money at, because we are wise, we are special, we know that we should not spend extra on redundant horsepower, because those extra dollars can be used to buy beer.

Seventh generation motherboards and CPUs from the ex-leasing environment have become very cheap, although it is a pity that most of the big guns, Dell, HP and Lenovo, insist on being proprietary on everything from peculiar motherboard form factors to not standard power supplies and connectors. In that respect though, the culled socketed processors are bargain priced while the motherboards, cases and those odd shaped power supplies, end up as e-waste. Sad.

Here, in my world, things can be exciting even down to third and fourth generation hardware, there is a certain wonder about "kicking the trend" of buying everything new and shiny, and old is good, not too old of course, but nevertheless, tech that is over half a decade old is still highly functional.

That's it then for now, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, when the nice postman delivers my "new" CPU I shall show how it is fitted into one of those industrial units from last month.

Cheers!