Thinking about a desktop PC

The iMac I have at home I inherited from Rachael. It's not the fastest, especially since it still has a spinning rust hard drive. If I'm going to experiment with [[Filecoin]] mining to any degree (and assuming that it is at all feasible from home), I'm going to need something more powerful.

I priced out a [[System76]]. I priced out the smallest of their Thelio desktops:

• AMD Ryzen w/ PCIe 4.0 +$199
• 4.5GHz AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen 5 3600XT (3.8 up to 4.5 GHz - 6 Cores - 12 Threads) + $299
• 64GB Dual Channel DDR4 @ 3200 MHz +$389
• 500 GB PCIe Gen4 +$124
• 1 TB PCIe Gen4 +$289 (this could also be an external?)
• 8GB GeForce RTX 2060 Super with 2176 CUDA Cores +$489

Total $2697USD, plus ~$200 in shipping to Canada. So about $3900CAD. This is really a "work expense", and I suspect that I would actually put it at the [[Fission]] office, not actually here at home.

I know nothing about figuring out how to select a desktop PC today. [[Wirecutter]] only has a guide to Mini Desktop PCs:

A mini PC combines the performance of a good laptop with the upgradability of a full-size desktop computer together in a package the size of a paperback book. Mini PCs are fast enough for anything other than high-end gaming, and unlike some laptops, they include all the ports you need to connect multiple monitors and your favorite keyboard and mouse. You can find lots of good mini PCs, but HP’s ProDesk 600 G5 offers the best combination of performance, ports, and price.

This iMac needs to get replaced, but I'm not ready to leave the Mac. Maybe a [[Mac Mini]]?

Going to Apple Canada, the Mac Mini 2020 configured with 3.2GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz) with 512GB SSD is $1659CAD with 8GB of memory. +$750CAD for 32GB of memory from Apple??!! Looks like $180CAD from OWC for the same amount.

Mac Mini also means I could get setup at home with a KVM (keyboard / video / mouse) switch between different machines, and focus more on external add-ons, including an [[eGPU]]. This 9to5 Mac video covers an eGPU and Windows Bootcamp -- which mainly focuses on FPS performance in games on the Windows side. This Apple Insider article on using an eGPU has some benchmarks on the MacOS.

I think I just convinced myself to get a Mac Mini as the next step :)

Daily Journals and jekyll-feed

I moved public notes to be in daily files and made a [[Journal]]. Like a [[Worklog]], but less day-job work related :)

This jekyll-rss-feeds and jekyll-json-feeds are good starting points. Made custom [[Feeds]] for recently updated notes as well as [[Links]]. Those are articles I'm quoting and taking notes on, or bookmarks to stuff that I want to keep track of.

Redid the home page and got rid of the Start page.

Quotebacks, Annotations, etc.

[[Quotebacks]] https://quotebacks.net/ are interesting because they are another new-old thing in blogging. Annotations are a web standard (that's from the blog of [[Hypothes.is]], which is big on annotation) -- so I kind of want to use a standard. But annotations aren't really quotes? Have to dig into this more.