We already have a Thread about new Hardware here:
But what about all the other nerdy things? 
Did you get any new cool gadgets? Post it here 
For our Team, we printed some teamugs, each one featuring logos of technology we want to use, but for some reason got forbidden by our company.
My mug got the Erlang logo on the front, and RabbitMQ on the back.
Another one has gRPC on the front, and Kubernetes on the back.
Looking forward to using it in the office after the pandemic is over 
That’s awesome Rainer I want one!! Funnily enough I am just getting into coffee now - I’ve always steered clear of coffee but Ben Greenfield talks about its benefits and so I feel like giving it ago. I fancy trying Espresso and the other variants… do we need a thread about coffee? 
Back on topic, I actually entered a group buy on a custom mechanical keyboard - it will be my first build so I am quite excited about it 
it won’t be dispatched until around July tho but I will definitely post pics here when I get it 
That’s awesome!
My favorite programming-mug (despite not having programmed in Erlang since a course at university) that I got from my dad somewhere around 1995-2000 is an Erlang mug as well. I’ve been using it every day for this years Advent of Code in Elixir.
I’ll skip the pictures for now but…
I have a Dell Optiplex 3060 Micro which I use as a NAS (for now; I also plan to use it as a main media center). It doesn’t have a lot of slots inside since it’s very small: a WiFi card slot, a SATA III slot and a NVMe M.2 slot (PCIe v3 x4, e.g. maximum 2000MB/s read/write).
I made it a challenge to stuff it with as much storage as I can. For now though it uses two external HDDs through dedicated USB 3.0 ports, one at 6TB and one at 3TB, “merged” together in a single “disk” of almost 9TB.
I removed the machine’s WiFi card and cable and antenna.
This freed up a specific M.2 slot – with an A+E key.
I bought a convertor from A+E key to M key (which is used in SATA III M.2 form SSDs, i.e. they cap at 580MB/s maximum). 7 EUR.
Bought a small Chinese M key SSD (250GB) and installed it on the former WiFi slot through the adapter, just for a test. This costed me 35 EUR.
Voila! Now I have an extra SSD in my server, even if that one in particular maxes out at 320 MB/s read and 210 MB/s write. Still quite good and still a little faster than most good HDDs. Thinking of replacing it with a 2TB one in the future.
Next steps:
Buy a convertor from a single SATA III slot to a dual mSATA box.
Put 2x 2TB mSATA SSDs there and use them with ZFS in a mirror setup. This will be the main place for me to backup photos, code, and anything non-huge. Speeds per device would never exceed 290 MB/s but the combined speed of 580 MB/s should be quite fine unless I move to 10GbE local network and actually want to saturate it – and even if I do that, this configuration will still saturate 50% of the bandwidth!
Eventually, buy a proper NVMe SSD that caps at about 2000 MB/s transfer and also put that in the dedicated slot. BIG PROBLEM: so far I can’t find a single NVMe 2280 bed that converts to dual 2230 or 2242 beds. I would like to put 2 independent SSDs there for redundancy because I am not sure I want to entrust data to a singular non-mirrored device in a NAS. Anybody has any links for that?
All in all, I found love for tinkering with physical machines in the last several months and even if my first steps were very hesitant, I had zero problems almost completely disassembling my mini server and putting it back together (it was a little challenging to put the 32GB of RAM in but I succeeded just fine).
And I plan to keep doing that. My gaming machine has an amazing case that allows for like 12x 3.5" HDDs and 4x 2.5" SSDs / HDDs so eventually, when I decide to replace the gaming machine, I’ll reuse the case for a proper bigger server.
Looks good Rainer! How much was it?
I was going to get the Keychron Q1 Knob Keyboard but couldn’t wait any longer and ended up getting a new Apple KB:
I got a Raspberry Pi just yesterday. Looking forward to what I can do with it.
~80$
Lighting of each key is configurable separately, i like it 
But still have to get used to it, I always had flat keyboards.
I can recommend https://www.nerves-project.org/, it was great fun building my loco remote with it.
I was really eager to buy this one.
But the position of the opt/command/alt keys are too funky for me. Idk why they put them in a so strange order…
That’s the standard layout isn’t it?
Looks neat!
That’s a decent price for a mechanical keyboard from a top brand too 
Agree with Rainer, gets some Nerves on it 
Thanks
