Ramblings: 2026

I host a large number of services I use myself, there are a few however just bring me no joy, or would be a considerable amount of hassle to host myself if it came to completely bootstrapping things. Notable things I don’t self-host:

The television did not go gently into that good night. It died with a bang.

Whilst rebuilding my PC case, a friend commented: "Why bother? You could just buy something". This got me thinking, the same question applies to self-hosting my own infrastructure, writing my own CV in LaTeX, or even maintaining this website when I could simply exist on social media platforms. It isn't about the result, it's about what the process gives back.

I've been using mITX for years, and up until a couple of years ago, I stuck with some fairly small cases. However, the recent shift in GPU sizes, from being merely large to being behemoths, meant I thought I'd need to go with a larger case. I settled on my new hardware specs and found a single case on the market that the GPU would fit in: the ASUS ROG Z11. I wasn't a fan of the glass, but it seemed acceptable on paper (and in pictures), there were no reviews at the time, so I just went for it.