Computers
Work Stations
Active
| Name | Years | OS | CPU / GPU | RAM | HD | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nephrite | 2023 - |  Debian |
Intel Core i7-12700K 3600Mhz (12 Core) / Geforce 3060 12 GB | 64 GB | 2 TB NVME + 2 TB NVME | Custom Rig |
| onyx | 2021 - |  Ubuntu |
Intel Core i7-1185G7 3 Ghz (Quad core) | 16 GB | 1 TB NVME | MSi Prestige 14” Evo laptop |
| amethyst | 2020 - |  Windows10 |
Intel Core i5-9400F 2.9 Ghz (Hexa core) / Geforce 1650 4 GB | 16 GB | 512 GB SSD + 2 TB | Acer Nitro gaming desktop |
| pearl | 2022 - |  MacOS |
Apple Mac Mini M1 (Arm64) | 8 GB | 256 GB | Mac Mini M1 |
| emerald | 2023 - | Debian |
Arm64 1.500GHz Quad Core | 8 GB | 32 GB | Raspberry Pi 4 B |
Retired
| Name | Years | OS | CPU / GPU | RAM | HD | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| quartz | 2018 - 2021 | Ubuntu |
Intel Core i7-8550U 1.8 Ghz (Quad core) / Intel UHD 620 | 16 GB | 512 GB SSD | Asus 14” Zenbook UX430UAR |
| rarity | 2016 - 2020 | Windows10 |
Intel Core i7 2.7 Ghz (Quad Core) / Geforce 950M 1GB | 16 GB | 1 TB | MSi 15” Gaming Laptop |
| minerva | 2013 - 2018 |  QubesOS |
Intel Core i7 2.40GHz (Quad Core) | 16 GB | 240 GB SSD + 750 GB HD | System76 Gazelle 15” Laptop |
| ember | 2013 - 2018 | QubesOS |
Intel Core i3 1.3 GHz (Dual Core) | 8 GB | 256 GB | Acer TravelMate 11” Netbook |
| enki | 2010 - 2013 | Ubuntu |
Intel Atom 1.66 GHz | 1 GB | 250 GB | Gateway LT21 10” Netbook |
| umbriel | 2007 - 2013 | Ubuntu |
Intel Core2 Due 1.6 GHz (Dual core) | 2 GB | 250 GB | Acer Extensa 15” Laptop |
| inferno | 2002 - 2010 |  Gentoo |
Athlon 1800+ (1500 MHz) | 1 GB | 425 GB (LVM2) | Desktop |
| nika | 2005 - 2007 | Ubuntu |
Celeron-M 1500 MHz | 768 MB | 40 GB | Toshiba Satellite M40x 15” Laptop |
| crash | 1999 - 2010 | Gentoo |
Pentium-3 450 MHz | 384 MB | 15 GB | Desktop |
| bast | 2006 - 2010 | Gentoo |
PPC G3 350MHz | 256 MB | 20 GB | Mac G3 Desktop |
| snow | 2005 - 2007 | Ubuntu |
Pentium-3 600 MHz | 256 MB | 15 GB | Desktop |
| maxine | 2002 - 2005 |  OpenBSD |
Pentium 150 MHz | 80 MB | 4 GB | HP Omnibook |
Servers
Active
| Name | Years | OS | CPU | RAM | HD | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| jade | 2018 - | Ubuntu |
1 CPU VPS | 2 GB | 20 GB | Hetzner CX11 VPS |
Retired
| Name | Years | OS | CPU | RAM | HD | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ruby | 2018 - 2023 |  Raspbian |
Quadcore Arm v7 900MHz | 1 GB | 128 GB Sdcard | Raspberry Pi 2 |
| ukko | 2017 - 2019 | Ubuntu |
Single core KVM VPS | 2 GB | 30 GB SSD | Linode 2048 |
| anzu | 2017 - 2018 | Ubuntu |
Single core KVM VPS | 1 GB | 30 GB SSD | Linode 1024 |
| taru | 2015 - 2017 | Ubuntu |
Dual core Xen VPS | 2 GB | 48 GB | Linode $20 |
| loki | 2010 - 2016 | Gentoo |
Quad core Xen VPS | 1.5 GB | 30 GB | Linode $30 |
| kvasir | 2004 - 2010 | Gentoo |
Pentium-4 2.8 GHz | 512 MB | 120 GB (Raid 1) | SuperMicro 1U RackMount |
| frost | 2002 - 2004 | OpenBSD |
Pentium 133 MHz | 128 MB | 4 GB | desktop |
| janus | 2004 - 2011 | OpenBSD |
Pentium 166 MHz | 128 MB | 8.5 GB | desktop |
| holly | 2001 - 2004 |  FreeBSD |
Cyrix 486 133 MHz | 128 MB | 2 GB | desktop |
Phones
Active
| Model | Years | RAM | HD | OS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Pixel 6 | 2022 - | 8 GB | 128 GB | Android 13 |
Retired
| Model | Years | RAM | HD | OS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Pixel 4a | 2020 - 2021 | 6 GB | 128 GB | Android 11 |
| Pine Phone | 2020 | 3 GB | 32 GB | postmarketOS Linux |
| Google Pixel | 2017 - 2020 | 4 GB | 128 GB | Android 10 |
| LG Nexus 5X | 2016 - 2017 | 2 GB | 32 GB | Android 7 |
| Blu Advance 5.0 | 2017 | 750 MB | 4 GB | Android 5 |
| Sony Xperia Z3 | 2015 - 2016 | 3 GB | 32 GB | Android 6 |
| Samsung Galaxy S4 | 2014 - 2015 | 2 GB | 16 GB | Android 5 |
| HTC Desire HD | 2011 - 2014 | 1.5 GB | 8 GB | Android 4 |
| LG Eve | 2010 - 2011 | 150 MB | 150 MB | Android 1.4 & Cyanogen 2.3 |
| Sony Ericsson k510a | 2007 | 28 MB | Symbian S60 |
Media / NAS / TV devices
Active
| Name | Years | OS | CPU | RAM | HD | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| grimoire | 2023 - |  Linux |
Arm8 64bit Quad Core | 1 GB | 20 TB Raid1 Seagate Ironwolfs | Synology 2-Bay NAS |
| Rarity | … 2021 - | Ubuntu |
Intel Core i5 | 8 GB | 256GB | ?? |
Retired
| Name | Years | OS | CPU | RAM | HD | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| atlas | 2015 - 2023 | Linux |
ARMv7 Marvell Armada 370 | 512 MB | 5 TB Raid1 | Seagate 2-Bay NAS |
| sylvanas | … 2018 - 2021 | Ubuntu |
Intel Core i5 | 8 GB | 256GB | Asus Zenbook |
| hermes | 2013 - 2018 | Ubuntu |
Intel Celeron 1.5 GHz (Dual Core) | 4 GB | 300 GB | Nettop media center |
| bion | 2011 - 2015 | Ubuntu |
Intel Atom 1.6 GHz | 1 GB | 250 GB | Nettop media center |
Devices
| Name | Years | OS | CPU | RAM | HD | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IPaq | 2007 - 2009 | Familiar Linux + Debian chroot |
624 MHz Xscale (ARM) | 64 MB | 1 GB SD Card + 512 MB CF Card | IPaq hx4700 |
| GP2X | 2005 - 2007 | Debian chroot |
ARM 920T 200 MHz | 64 MB | 1 GB Flash SD card | GP2X First Edition |
History
Early
First there was a black and yellow 286 with DOS. Then a CGA or EGA 286. I remember a computer that had to be upgraded from 2 megs of ram to 8 for a birthday so I could play Warcraft. I remember dos, windows 3.1, then windows 95.
1999
In 1999 my family bought Crash which was the new family computer. They kept the windows 95 box around too for a while but it was old and rickety.
2001
By the summer of 2001 it was dead but I was also given a friend’s dead computer and between the two of them I made Holly, the first computer that was ever wholly mine, and my first Linux/BSD box. I tried Mandrake Linux 8.0 on the poor machine and it ran it, but painfully slowly. I soon moved on to console only FreeBSD. It soon became the first host of mindstab.net.
2002
In the spring of 2002 a friend gave me Frost made from spare parts from his computer class at his school where he was an admin. It became my first real Linux desktop, using Debian Linux and the blackbox window manager. In the summer of 2002 I bought Inferno to become my main desktop computer. Frost was then retired to the position of mindstab.net server which lasted from fall 2002 – winter 2004. Holly then became a testbed of sorts. In the fall of 2002 I bought Maxine, a laptop, for school. The only thing that would reliably install and run on her was OpenBSD. It also had better PCMCIA WiFi network card support than some Linux distros at the time.
2003
2003 only saw some upgrades to Inferno. A new graphics card, new ram, a second harddrive, a DVD drive, a CDRW drive, and by the end of the year a new power supply because the original one burnt out.
2004
In January 2004 I bought Janus from a friend at a networking company to be used as an OS testbed. Holly was harvested for spare parts and what was left was retired. I was able to cram Windows 2000, BeOS PE5, RedHat Linux, Debian Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD onto Janus‘s cramped 10GB of space. In the summer of 2004 I bought a rackmount server, Kvasir. During the winter of 2004 my ISP started port blocking, killing mindstab.net temporarily as it was hosted from home. Frost became a firewall.
2005
In the spring Kvasir took over the job of mindstab.net host at a colocation facility. In the spring of 2005 Janus was turned into my primary firewall and mindstab.net secondary DNS, and was relegated to a spare backup. The rational for this was that qemu and other emulation software was advanced enough I could move all my OS testing onto Inferno. In the late spring of 2005 Crash was given to me by my family when they upgraded to Snow, a slightly superior windows XP box that was given to them. I put Ubuntu Linux on Crash and started using it as Folding@home fodder. On July 30, 2005, I bought a new laptop, Nika, and retired the failing Maxine. In the fall I jumped on the early adopter bandwagon and pre-ordered a GP2X and recieved it in December. Also in December 2005 my family finally bought a new computer so I then inherited Snow onto which I also put Ubuntu Linux and used occasionally as Folding@home fodder.
2006
In the spring, I put Gentoo Linux on Crash and ran a short lived Quake3 server. Also, Inferno got a third hard drive and was converted to using LVM2 to combine the hard drives into one massive drive. In August, my financing took a turn for the worse, and I downgraded Kvasir from a costly collocation facility to a business line at home. In October Inferno got another ram upgrade. On November 14, 2006, I bought Bast, a second hand Mac G3 to be my alternate arch test box (big endian!). In December, I finally renewed my interest in my GP2X and installed a chrootable Debian environment on it.
2007
In the spring I finally found Ubuntu to have mostly everything I needed and be stable and useful so I replace my Gentoo install with it on Nika. This was the first time I started using Ubuntu on a main computer of mine. In June I donated Snow with a fresh XUbuntu install to a friend who did not have a computer. Over the summer, Frost finally got tossed, in part due to space requirements and in part do to incredible old age and not so usefulness. In August I picked up an IPaq hx4700 (PDA) and installed Familiar Linux on it. It became my ultra portable programming tool with it’s foldable keyboard and a Debian chroot with all the programming languages and text editors I need.
In September Nika died, apparently from an electrical system failure. However in December I bought a boxing day replacement, Umbriel on deep discount.
2009
In the summer mindstab.net’s modem died and it’s ISP decided it didn’t want to replace it for a couple of weeks, so ISPs were switched. Then in the winter it was show that the new ISP’s cable at mindstab.net’s location stopped working at night when the tempurate dropped below about -3c.
2010
On January 7th Kvasir‘s fan died and the server screamed to death. That coupled with the recent massive ISP problems of 2009, it was decided that hosting at home was a dead solution and so mindstab.net moved into the cloud at linode.com and Loki was provisioned as the new mindstab.net server.
In the spring I purchased a netbook, Enki, to be my new ultra portable and take with me traveling to China and Korea. It served me very well and took up little space. When I got back I paired it with a 22″ LCD to get “real work” done.
Over the spring Bast and Crash were retired in a bout of spring cleaning. And in the end of summer Inferno was considered dead and replaced by Umbriel strapped to my desk with a USB mouse and keyboard and a 19″ LCD.
2011
In September I moved and decommissioned Janus and purchased a small nettop Bion to run my new 42″ TV and assume some of the functionality of Janus (secondary DNS, internet facing front to my network).
2013
In January I ordered and got a new main development/gaming laptop Minerva from the Linux laptop vender System76. It’s a beast. Nice to not pay the windows tax. And increassingly more viable since more games are moving to Linux with Steam and all in the wake of Windows 8. This retired the long serving Umbriel who had long since stopped being a laptop and was desktop bound to stretch out her life. 5 years is a good run for a bargin bin laptop.
My netbook Enki was getting long in the tooth, it’s battery was down to a 30min charge and 1GB of ram was ok but not too much fun. But there wasn’t that big a market of new netbooks. Most of that market had been canabalized by tablets. But In June I found a 11.6″ cheap (< $400) machine with 4GB of ram and a dual core CPU and grabbed it up and this became Ember, my new netbook.
In the fall it came time to replace Bion as the media centre box. It couldn’t really handle high def video files or fullscreen flash video (youtube). Thankfully to moore’s law and 2 years having passed, I was able to pick up Hermes at a reasonable price and it handled high def video and flahs video flawlessly. We were very happy to be getting more out of our high def tv screen :).
2015
As Loki was getting old and it’s Gentoo install increasingly rotten I bought Taru, a newer linode VPS and started migrating services from Loki to Taru. In the fall I purchased a Seagate 2-Bay NAS, atlas, and put 2 5 TB drives in it to give me 5 TB of Raid1 mirrored storage.
2016
Loki was retired in spring. I purchased my partner’s gaming laptop Rarity from her so she could get an ultra portable for school/travel. This windows gaming rig allowed me to convert Minerva to Qubes OS.
2017
A series of both linode and Ubuntu updates rendered Taru unbootable so I quickly spun up a new server, Ukko, and migrated the files and services I needed over and then retired Taru. I also started running a Tor relay on another Linode, Anzu
2018
Both my laptops for work were aging and having 2 was becoming a suboptimal solution for my future plans so I bought a new slim 14” laptop, Quartz, to deprecate both Minerva and Ember in February.
My partner replaced her laptop, Sylvanas, with a new one in part because Sylvanas’ screen and hinge were dying. Since Hermes was well overdue to be retired and was limping along, we replaced it with Sylvanas, which was a good use for a laptop with screen problems, hooked into a TV.
Late in the year I dusted off my old Raspberry Pi 2 that I hadn’t been using and turned it into Ruby, my new mini home server.
I wanted look at both moving some infrastructure out of the US and find more bandwitdh for running a Tor relay and to see if I could consolidate and cheapen by server budget so settle on Hetzner. I migrated my Tor relay from Anzu to Jade.
2019
I moved the rest of my hosting from Ukko to Jade and shut Ukko down.
2020
Rarity was getting very old as a gaming computer, especially with an Nvidia 950M, so I bought a replacement, Amethyst, which was a prebuilt acer mid tier gaming machine and added some extra ram and large platter drive for storagte as upgrades.
In the summer my Pixel 1 phone over heated in the sun and the battery died. I ordered the budget Pixel 4a as an upgrade and replacement. I also saw some cool reviews of the Pine Phone and it was “cheap” and ended up with one as well…
2021
In the spring our media computer Sylvanas finally gave up the ghost and succumbed further to her injuries and age and we replaced her with my partner’s next retired laptop Rarity.
Over the spring and summer Quartz developed a swelling bulge that eventually pushed the trackpad up and made left clicking harder. One fateful Ubuntu update in the winter gave it a new bug where it would lockup on its screen going blank on both Ubuntu and Windows, so it was time to be replaced after nearly 4 years good service. I got Onxy as a replacement work machine.
2022
In the fall of 2022 Work (Tor) supplied me with a M1 Mac Mini (pearl) for build and testing with. Also in the fall google end of liefd the Pixel 4 line so I upgraded to a Pixel 6.
2023
In the spring of 2023 I invested in a hefty new dev desktop in the form of Nephrite for work and everything else. Having a stable desktop at home meant I could also retire Ruby who was well past expiration. Also thanks to steam + proton it meant I could start moving some of my gaming from Amethyst to Nephrite as well. Also of note is this is my first time using Garuda Linux, which is based on Arch, which is a distro I have def seen a number of other ex-Gentoo Linux users move to. So that may be interesting. Mostly for me it was just being very uninto what Ubuntu mainline was doing, going heavy into Snaps. To a lesser extent I’m no giant fan of Gnome Shell, but it’s mostly been stable and ok for me. And finally I’ve just noticed Ubuntu getting a little less stable and had some other concerns with it’s proposed increased used of snaps. Wanted something new. Garuda boasted the most pre tuned up interface, and is Arch based, so figured to give it a try. After a month I switched to Debian. Mid year I picked up a Raspberry Pi 4B so I could look at some Linux/arm64 portability work.
Over the last few years my 5 TB Nas, atlas, had been filled, and I’d also filled a 2 TB drive in amethyst and the Downloads directories on onyx and Rarity were starting to pile up. With seasonal savings I picked up 2 20 TB Seagate Ironwolf drives to upgrade atlas but sadly it was too old to take them (it had stopped getting software updates, complained they were too big, and wouldn’t work with them). So I picked up a new Synology 2 Bay NAS, grimoire, and put the drives in it, and migrated my data over.