i3rd

At some point ago, something happened to the SD card for the Raspi3, which made the system freeze and it could not properly reboot... I'm guessing something ended up corrupting part of the card. I never remembered to reimage it nor did I really have the motivation to do it, and so it sat as such.

There's been some recent events that have made me kinda wish I had it up, and while I could use Triela (or Shizuma... more on Shizuma later), it's a bit annoying to use a laptop for an extended period of time sometimes... or maybe for me in my room.

I first thought of possibly buying a NUC-like thing from my best friend, but with it's low specs (Atom Z8350 or something and 4GB RAM), I decided it would be worth more to invest in a Chromebox, NUC, or another mini-STX system (I'll get to the first later).

With the lack of options, I decided on the latter and getting something more powerful than the Celery Box (the first mini-STX system). I also put the M.2 NVMe SSD in the PCPartPicker list that I used in the Celery Box, but my other friend pointed out that I wouldn't need it since there's two SATA ports - saves me 80 usd.

I first went with a Pentium G4600, since it seemed to have the best performance per value (at the cost of being able to handle some instruction sets), but toward the end, I changed it to the i3-7100 for those missing instruction sets - it was only 26 USD more (give or take).

Everything else is the same compared with the celery box otherwise - same RAM, heatsink, barebones kit. at least this time if the PSU happens to be missing, I do have a spare.

So with another VESA mount kit and a Logitech MX Ergo, I finalised my order (well orders because I bought the i3 from a different site).

Unlike the Celery Box, it'll run Manjaro, not be a headless system, and have the Wifi/Bluetooth card installed. The MX Ergo will replace the m570 (or whatever the bloody number is), so I'll have one trackball for Mei-chan and i3rd. The Wifi actually will be providing me an 802.11ac hotspot, which will be much faster when I'm trying to grab a song from the file server (or hell, from i3rd itself) than the crappy 802.11g.

Okay, so with the name, I was loosely brainstorming with that other friend, and I wanted to kinda do what I did with the Celery Box. it was a bit tougher, but she suggested doing something along the lines of "Armitage iii" (read as "Armitage the third"), and after a bit of mulling, I came up with "i3rd" (perhaps read as "I third"?) as this is literally the third Intel build for myself and it has an i3 cpu - I love it when she gives me those little sparks that light the flame.

It'll utilise a 64GB 2.5" SSD as the boot drive, and a 500GB hard drive for a more local copy of my files.

i3rd will probably spend most of its time refreshing a page (like the raspi3 was doing), but I'll be glad to have a low power, low heat (and stable) system when I need it.

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I ended up using an unused M.2 NVMe SSD from a laptop (more on it in another post) as the boot drive for i3rd and added another hard drive for extended capacity (if I needed it). Later on I ended up using i3rd for a semi-successful hackintosh (more on that in another post... probably).