Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

Flexispot 100x60 Standing Desk for my wife as an early B-day present. She is really into her Novel planning / writing and wanted a desk space downstairs. Moved the entire room around to fit it in but was a net positive as we had a good clear out when doing it.





Technically the keyboard is also a very recent purchase, Royal Kludge S98. Very "thocky".

Also ordered her some surprise presents from one of her favorite independent authors. No pics as none of it has arrived yet...

Also treated myself to a new laptop to try and re-kindle my desire to game. I barely used my desktop due to it being the spare bedroom / office and I didn't enjoy having it downstairs hooked up to the TV either. My idea for the laptop is I can use it anywhere in the house where it can sit (mainly on the above desk if I am honest). Had a quick tinker last night and the Ultra 255HX and RTX 5070Ti (M) make for quite the paring for the overall price. Not amazing in isolation at £1699 (all laptops appear to have gone a bit whacky in pricing terms) but compared to other options with the same specs its decent value.

Worlds worst pictures incoming....





(Windows took so long to update itself that I ran out of time to get decent pics).

Quick and dirty performance netted ~33.5k In CBR23 and a smidge over 80FPS in CP2077 with Ultra settings but custom FoV (I need to reset to default to compare with other benchmarks, initial testing suggests its a little ahead of a 4080M running with a WC/d i9 14900HX).

 

Whats better than one screen, two!

 

It has been a growing realisation that my slippers and dressing gown predate the purchase of my house, meaning they're at least a decade old. The slippers have worn down well into the sole (which leaves a square grid pattern on my heels) and the dressing gown has holes in both elbows, and is thin enough on the bum area that anyone passing when I briefly pop outside to put the bin out probably gets a view that will mentally scar them for life. So, I decided to treat myself:



and...



Gave them a full wash and I'm now known as what is "snug as a bug in a rug".

 

A walking treadmill. I'm aiming to get up to 3 miles each day, so about an hour. Just dawned on me quite how unfit I am, so hopefully this will help.

 

I've been thinking about doing the same when I've finished building / renovating my office (an extension added to the top of the house). This "renovation" has been going on for 3 years now...

 

Zotac RTX 5070 Solid to replace my wonky 2080S

 

32GB of Crucial Pro DDR5-6000C36 for my old PC (harvesting the 64GB for the new one) to either keep it as a backup or sell it on as a working PC

2 of Amazon Basic's finest wire racking units to tidy up the boxroom

 

Is it wrong I think them slippers and robe look comfy

 

No, I don't own a dressing gown but that one looks cosy AF.

 

No, that's what they're there for after all.

I don't own a dressing gown either, but have taken to slippers in middle age.
Some kind person here recommended Homeys slippers, which are a cut avovevthe usual stuff, but should be at £40 a pair...
A friend also is a Homeys fan and she has a new pair every year.

 

Moccasins Cheesecake

 

Can confirm comfy/cosy AF.

 

If cold feet are a problem for you, I can recommend Nordic Socks: https://www.nordicsocks.uk/collections/wool-socks-1 I bought some last autumn and have been wearing them every day since. They feel lovely on my feet and, my feet are never cold.

BTW, despite the name, Nordic Socks is a German company and, the socks are made in Turkiye…
Still good socks though.

Now must email them, to ask for some free socks…

 

How do you find the desk ?, im looking at one for our new house, always wanted one and one of those walking treadmills

 

Having used it for a few days now it is really good. Sturdy with only a little wobble if you properly shove it and overall nice material quality. Motor is quiet and the front panel gives you 4 memory settings an granular control (in small increments) over the height. The desktop is one piece (vs the split pieces on cheaper options on Amazon) and it comes with a little foldable under tray for tidying cables. We got it on lightning deal for £105 which was down from £150.

Overall very happy with it and now looking at a larger model for when we sort out our second bedroom / office (for WFH / Retro station).

 

Funny you should mention that. I’ve been trying to get “Tinker WriterDeck” up and running on an older MacBook I have spare. It’s a customised Debian 12 distro that boots straight into the Tilde command-line text editor; the idea is that you turn an old laptop into a device solely intended for writing - no browser, no network, no other applications, just a text editor. Kinda like a Freewrite, but using cheap commodity hardware. A hat tip to @Gareth Halfacree for his Hackster.io article that put me on to the idea…

The “distribution” is just a pre-customised barebones version of Debian 12. You could set it up manually using the shell script on the project’s GitHub (so long as you do the usual of reviewing it so you know what it’s doing, instead of blindly trusting a shell script you download from the internet). Main challenge I’m having is getting Debian to play nicely on this MacBook, ‘cos this model has some wacky hardware like a keyboard & trackpad that use SPI to communicate with the mainboard… I’ve got all proprietary drivers working, but I can’t get the screen resolution set correctly; the terminal effectively “disappears” off the bottom of the screen. It’s one of those silly “retina” affairs where the native panel resolution isn’t actually the resolution it should run at; it’s actually a 2560*1600 panel, but OS’s - including Linux distros with a GUI - run it at 2x scaling so it gives an effective resolution of 1280*800. But the only available mode the panel reports is 2560*1600… I think the “nomodeset” kernel option and whacking the font size way the hell up are the key parts I’m missing, I just haven’t had chance to get back to it…

Ideally I’d like a GUI that boots into a stripped down version of VSCode, because I do write stuff in Markdown or LaTeX, and the project author has mentioned some early experiments with a GUI-based version. But I’ll settle for a command line editor for now. I don’t write novels, but there are a ton of blog posts I’ve been meaning to write up for a while. It’d be nice to have a device to do just one task, one that doesn’t have a browser, Steam, and all the myriad distractions that so easily lead my ADHD goblin brain astray.

 

I mean… I say that… but I do it all the time…

To be fair it’s usually “official” install scripts for software where I got the link directly from the “official” docs page.

We do it at work too; one of our container build pipelines literally has the command “curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh” in a dockerfile. But that’s at least a known, tested, and relatively trusted source, not some rando’s GitHub page, or mega filesharing link… Not impossible for it to be compromised in some way, but we sure as hell wouldn’t be the only ones to be hit if that ever happened.

Honestly I did consider devices like that. The more modern versions, such as the aforementioned Freewrite, were immediately ruled out on cost grounds.

But I have the spare hardware here already, so if I can make use of that then all the better. There are four “unused” laptops sat in my office right now: my ThinkPad T490, which is running Pop!_OS but rarely gets any actual use any more; a 2015 12” Core-M MacBook; and two 2009/2010 MacBook Pros with “pre Core i-whatever” Intel chips, one 14” and one hefty-boi 17”. If I can’t get the 2012 MacBook to play nicely then I’ll try the older MBPs; if they’re too uncooperative, too old, or too goddamn hefty, then I’m 99.99% positive the ThinkPad will do just fine.

Though I’d really like to get this working with the 12” MacBook, since it’s so teenytiny and lightweight. Keyboard takes a bit of getting used to since the keys are quite low profile, but it’s basically the same layout and tactile response/feedback that I use day in and day out on a modern M2 Pro MacBook. (The latter having been issued by work, because, as powerful and lovely to use as it might be, there’s no way in hell I’d pay nearly £3K of my own money for a laptop…)

Speaking of work, I better go do some - I’ve hardly done a thing today…

 

Giggles like an idiot



RIP 2080 Super June 2020 - April 2025, you did well