Projects

Hobbies, or what I have been working on.

2022-2023: TV Setup

To be honest, I have been working on this for about a decade. As you can probably tell, I do like my retro games. I have been sailing towards a Utopia where anything and everything is set up and ready to play. The ultimate irony is that by the time I get close, I get so annoyed with the clutter that I dismantle everything and start over.

By the time I started the blog, I had a pretty decent setup. I had about a dozen consoles set up, all available auto-selectable either via HDMI or RGB SCART. SCART was routed to both a Retrotink scaler and a CRT TV. Everdrives and ODEs were ready to serve whatever game I desired.

I then started working on the clutter. The most visible cables are always the controllers, so I was looking at getting wireless controllers for all the consoles I had connected. I had pretty much succeeded except for with the PC Engine, which is why I was excited when I saw someone had made an inexpensive Wireless PC Engine controller adapter available on Github.

Seeing I had started this blog, I wanted a way to capture footage from games. I decided on a Retrotink 2x SCART for this purpose and even 3D printed a HTPC case for use with capture.

Along came the Ukraine war and energy prices sky-rocketed for a while. I was shocked to learn that the TV setup was using about 75W without doing anything! That's when I started dismantling the setup. I downsized to a pretty minimalist setup: A Beovision 11 TV, an Nvidia Shield, a Nintendo Switch and the aforementioned 3D Printed PC. Rather than insisting on playing on original hardware, I now instead wanted to give emulation a go.

I didn't take long before I wanted more, however. While the APU in the 3D Printed PC worked well, I decided to Radeon RX 6600 which required me to make a new case. This time in an Ikea storage box.

While I am pretty happy with the setup, I still have a couple of things I want to things I want to do:

• Try out Linux! While the HTPC does everything I want it to do, Windows from the couch is a chore, requiring a keyboard for half the things I want to do. Besides, the forced updates and nagging new features are annoying. Would a Linux distro be able to save the day?
• Speakers! I really, really miss surround sound. Bang & Olufsen are famous for their active speakers, so when I find the right deal, I will start re-added speakers to my setup.

2022-2023: Home server

It didn't take long before I started posting on self-hosting becuase its something I have fun playing around with. There is a five part series of my setting up a home server. While it's unfinished it should leave you with a set up system, ready to run the services you want:

Post 4: Self-hosting
Post 7: Self-hosting part 2: Picking a server
Post 11: Self-hosting part 3: Setting up Unraid
Post 12: Unraid: Recommended settings
Post 15: Unraid: Setting up Community Apps

I was making this server as a backup server to my main server at the time, a beastly 16 core Ryzen machine with a GTX 1080 on standby and 60 TB of hard drive space available. This machine was the first machine to get turned off when the energy prices started going up due to the Ukraine war.

Now I use a much simpler machine: a broken laptop with a smashed screen. While it's more stable than you'd think, I should probably consider making something a bit less… ghetto.

Misc.