21–30 of 160 posts
A bunch of crap strewn across an old IKEA desk. Why is this interesting.
I'll answer it literally: seeing what equipment other engineers use can give ideas for one's own serup. stapelberg is an effective engineer, so I'm glad he shared it.
“ For redundancy, I am backing up my computers to 2 separate network storage devices.” Hopefully he understands that this is not a true backup....he’s basically created a more complex RAID 1 running two NAS... For example a flood, a House fire, theft, or a power surge is probably going to lose/fry both then everything is gone. This is a perfect example of thinking you have something backed up but if you store it in t…
The redundancy is just for home, because I don’t want to wait for replacement hardware for my setup to work.
The hardware section makes it sound like he's rebuilding his computer multiple times a year. Do people really find upgrading that often is worth the cost and the bother? What sorts of workloads do people deal with that having top of the line hardware even matters?
I rebuild once a year on average, but not every year (planning to skip this year, for example). In general, yes, I find it worthwhile to invest money and effort into a faster experience, but I’m very sensitive to latency, so YMMV :)
I recently re-built my i7-3770 w/ SATA3 SSD into an Ryzen 3700x with NVMe and build times are just remarkably faster. I waited far too long.
“ For redundancy, I am backing up my computers to 2 separate network storage devices.” Hopefully he understands that this is not a true backup....he’s basically created a more complex RAID 1 running two NAS... For example a flood, a House fire, theft, or a power surge is probably going to lose/fry both then everything is gone. This is a perfect example of thinking you have something backed up but if you store it in t…
A backup to one computer is better than none.
A backup to two computers is better than one.
A backup to four computers in two geographic regions is better than two local.
There's no end to how good a person's backup can be. Everyone has their limit.
"I found that using only one monitor allows me to focus more on what I’m doing, and I don’t miss anything about a multi-monitor setup." This. I had the same realization maybe 7 or 8 years ago and it is true for me. With multiple monitors it's like moving your hands away from the keyboard all the time and looking for the mouse. Same happens for me while looking for anything across the 2 or 3 monitor setup. It just wea…
Except you have huge monitor and you lay stuff in multiple side by side windows which makes the whole argument very moot. And when you use laptop you are kind of forced to use single screen because multiple screens is inconvenient at best. When I started development 15" monitors were standard and 17" were a luxury. Setting multiple monitors was a must or you would have to constantly switch between editor, terminal an…
It doesn't matter if I use 2 27" 1440 monitors or a 32" inch 4K monitor.
Personally, a single 27" 1440 monitor is the bare minimum I am comfortable with in a desktop.
The hardware section makes it sound like he's rebuilding his computer multiple times a year. Do people really find upgrading that often is worth the cost and the bother? What sorts of workloads do people deal with that having top of the line hardware even matters?
If one’s been building machines in the past year or so, we’ve just had the biggest performance gains in CPUs in literally 10 years with the latest AMD CPUs. I went a long time with an E3-1230 but got really bored honestly after 5 years and built an i7-4790k ITX machine which wasn’t as big of a change as going from 8GB of RAM to 16 GB or to my first SSD. I got a 3900X this past year and the substantial performance gains are not a big enough reason for me to upgrade yet again compared to something like the new Ampere GPUs for even hobby machine learning purposes like mine. In the future a bigger reason for me to build again would be based around space efficiency reasons where a small case could fit on top of my desk and drive 4K AAA games, encode HEVC video day and night, and all with a 600w SFX PSU.
Scrolling through the size I see the recommendation of the Noctua NF-A12x25. Probably 3x what I paid for the fan that is being replaced, but it could be the only component in the case that stays during the next rebuild!
I like your idea with the USB hub to switch between computers — I will probably adopt that.