what are some of the best purchases you've made ?

I bought cast iron pan which I think is the best ever purchase I made.

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My synology NAS. It’s great being able to have a central place for all my files that’s platform agnostic.
- If you got one with a decent CPU it’s also quite the little workhorse of a home server via its apps and Docker.
  
  Mine is quite old now but has always been slow a molasses. Maybe I should upgrade.
  
  I went from 212j to 920+ and it’s night and day in terms of what it can do. It was also $400 more so there is that.
  It has been a fun hobby to nerd out learning Docker, networking magic, VPNs, and such. It may tun into full-blown Linux on a PC at some point.
  
  If you go the full Linux desktop route, I recommend installing a hypervisor like proxmox to make it easy to spin up and manage VM's and containers off the bare metal.
  A lot more work to setup than a NAS like Synology, but having some more control over the setup and tailoring it to your needs makes it worth it imo.
  
  Thanks for the tip, i didn’t actually 100% understand what proxmox was until you said that it is a hypervisor.
  I have a NUC that I accidentally stole from my last job that may become my hobby PC. I will probably try a distro on bare metal to get my feet wet but then take it to there. Or maybe a USB distro to start? I haven’t put much thought into it yet.
  
  Yeah, just try some stuff, then wipe it and try something else. Do that until you have an idea of what you want to try more of.
- I have a Synology NAS too but YSK they’re an absolute shit company who only does well because they’re the only game in town. They used to be great but they’ve started doing some questionable things in recent years with “official” drives and their customer service is SO bad.
  Also, they’re closed source.
  
  They aren't the only game, there is also QNAP, I've had several of them.
  
  Spec-wise QNAP has always at least had parity but where they sucked was customer service. That’s why I didn’t even mention them.
  
  Never needed aupport, I just spin them up, create the disk groups and shares, setup the offsite backup and they do their thing.

361 comments