This poor neglected blog!
Last time was a catch-up post for almost a year of missed updates. I was That was july 2018!
Now it’s june 2025, It’s been seven years and… that new PC I was hyped for last time is packed up in the next room, waiting for me to be sure I won’t need it anymore before I sell it off.

While I haven’t been doing nothing, not exactly, I have fallen into a kind of complacency. The kind of tech-exploration that this blog was about have become quite rare as my life settled into a routine.
One interesting thing is that I bought a decommissioned rack-server from work and took it with me home. It’s been resting on a table ever since, becoming even more hoplessly out of date than it already was. The idea was to run VMs on it, but now I’m thinking I’ll just salvage the disks and get some mini-PC to run as a home server instead, less power, less space, less noise.
A lot has happened with RPGs though, mostly Pathfinder, a lot of it as a GM, and one way that relates to tech is that I moved away from Roll20 and I am now running FoundryVTT on a VPS. It is working marvelously! A lot of my free time goes into preparing and running adventures there. (The time spent of RPGs is probably the main reason I haven’t been doing so much tech, now that I think about it.)

Related to RPGs, I too have been exploring the Latent Space of Image Generation, I feel I have enough to say on that topic that it deserves a post of it’s own.

But now there has been a recent big tech development in my life for me to write about!
When I bought my last PC, the plan was that I would keep it for 4 years and then upgrade. After all, I think of myself as an enthusiast and I was high on having a salary! Why wouldn’t I upgrade more frequently? Well… summer 2021 came, and I didn’t feel a need to upgrade. Not really running the latest games anyway! 2022, still fine but I’m starting to say “I should upgrade”. 2023, starting to grumble that “I really should upgrade”. 2024 “I really should…”. 2025, I finally pull the trigger and start looking at parts. Part as an obligation, part as a gift to myself, and part because Microsoft is forcing my hand – but probably not in the way they were hoping.

One thing I notice is that everything is more expensive now, but also things are kinda the same. AMD still does Ryzen with a similar lineup to last time, and Nvidia lineup likewise.
I didn’t put weeks into planning the build this time, trying to just pull the trigger and sort it out from there. I did decide to go bigger this time. where last time I got a 60-series gfx, this time I get a 70-series equivalent… from AMD.
It’s a damn shame AMD won’t compete for the true high end, but 9070xt seems to be where it is at for upper mid-range to lower high-end now. Nvidia is acting like a monopoly, only way they’ll stop doing that is if people start buying more AMD.

So what’s the twist this time? There’s always a gimmick in my PC builds, something I’m trying out, the build before the previous one had two SSDs in a raid0, and last build had water cooling for the CPU. I considered water-cooling also for this new build, I remember saying last time that “I will always watercool my future builds”, due to how silent they are and the cool factor. But there has been a development since I said those words: Years passed, and while the water-cooling has worked without issue for me, I have started to worry. Worrying about how gunked up my loop might be on the inside, worrying about the water level, worrying about if it will start to leak, worrying about air-bubbles in the upper radiator. worrying about how I would empty the loop if I need to, and so on.
There is something to be said for peace-of-mind!
Besides, last time I found an all-in-one kit of pieces for a soft tube loop, this time I couldn’t find any equivalent, so water-cooling would take me a week of research looking at tube gauges, fittings, pumps, reservoirs, blocks… I’m not already plugged into that world so I don’t know what I should look for. It would take a lot of time and effort, it would cost another $1000 (or something), and ultimately it would just give me more to worry about. No thanks.
Also also, for my last build, I was looking to do overclocking. I had Prime95 running for hours to proof my overclock! This time around I wasn’t really feeling like rebooting a bunch of times while trying to find the limits on my parts, only to get a few percent that I will have to roll back in a couple of years.
I kinda went with “no gimmick”, at least physically, and at least for a start. When the build was almost done, I notice that I was just two parts shy from a Whiteout build… Hit it!
And something I had intended for my previous build, but that the store screwed up, was arms with vesa mounts for the display. Well, this time I won’t be denied. So my home setup now has more empty desk. Can never have enough empty desk.

Another consideration is OS. Windows has slowly been sliding downhill, that has been a long time coming and I started to feel it with Windows 7 and how Microsoft wants you to have an account, how they took out their signature games only to sell them back to you, edge nagging you that “it’s good now, honest”, and ads and articles in the Start menu. Microsoft, kinda like Nvidia, are acting more and more like a monopoly. They don’t need to worry about adding new features that are a screaming invasion of privacy, you’re gonna buy the new Windows 11 anyway! Drop support for 10 in October, let’s nag our userbase and remind them that their computer isn’t ready, nevermind that we nagged last week for the last five weeks! Hope you are ready to pay for extended support or to buy a new PC! You’re gonna buy Windows 11 for your next PC anyway…
Well, joke’s on you Microsoft. Linux is starting to look pretty good for daily use, even for your average gamer. And I have been doing a lot of stuff with Linux servers for the past eight years!
My new PC will be a Linux PC