Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

I reviewed both the original NESPi and the new NESPi 4. Word of warning: despite that YouTube video claiming an "awesome heatsink," it's *terrible*. Your Pi *will* overheat, guaranteed. There's absolutely zero ventilation in that thing, it's like an oven. It just about passed my thermal throttling test, but idles at 45°C and makes no effort to cool the PMIC.

You'll also need to disable UAS or you'll get throughput to the SSD measured in kilobits per second - and once disabled you'll see heavier CPU load and lower throughput than if they'd used a SATA bridge that worked properly on the Pi.

 

That'd certainly help, I reckon: the HSF itself is perfectly serviceable, it's just the fact it's sat in a mostly-sealed plastic box that does for it!

 

Might be counting my chickens, but I've transferred an unfeasibly large sum of money to my solicitor so I'm hoping that the house purchase is definitely happening...



4G+ router. There's no 5G in the area, so I didn't need anything bigger. £20 a month on a rolling contract with Smarty for unlimited data, and that'll (hopefully) tide us over until Brsk fits 500/500 fibre in September - and without giving Virgin Media £35 and £45 one-off and £50 a month for their own rolling contract offering.

Fingers crossed it'll do the job!

Also:





I was going to go for the Ring camera stuff, but Blink delivers pretty much the same thing minus a few top-end features for a lot less - and has the option of running without a cloud sub, recording to a USB stick shoved into its sync box. Figured I'd get it now, and it can be keeping an eye on the place while we're in the process of moving in. Will probably get a second camera for the garden office.

Also this:



A surprisingly expensive lump of plastic and short USB cable, so that the Blink's sync module doesn't take up a load of room. You'd think it'd come as standard, but... nope!

Fingers crossed I get the keys on Friday, so I'll be spending Saturday getting all this up and running.

 

Hah! I've never seen this lot in-person, but my wife has - she's been taking documentation in, so it doesn't get lost in the post.

I had to do the transfer over the phone, though, 'cos it was higher than my bank's limit for internet banking - and they did a lot of "are you really, really sure this ain't a scam?"

 

Weirdly, their voice-and-data SIMs are cheaper than their data-only SIMs at every level bar unlimited - and there's no restriction on using the voice-and-data SIM for tethering.

I'll let you know how I get on! There are a few annoyances I'm already aware of - like there's no privacy shutter or other way to disable an individual camera when you don't need it, and to my understanding they don't talk to your Wi-Fi network but to the Sync Module directly meaning you might need multiple modules at £30 a chuck if you're covering a large area - but it's a decent saving over Ring. And even the cloud sub's not too spenny, at £8 a month for unlimited devices.

EDIT: My mistake, they do use Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only) - you only need multiple Sync Modules if you've got multiple disconnected networks.

 

Not a great start: just got an email saying "your first month with SMARTY is nearly over." I ordered the SIM yesterday. It hasn't even been delivered yet.