I bought a whole bunch of 32/64GB SD cards a week ago for all the new devices that my sister and I plan to use.
As they come to mind:
- Raspberry Pi (the OG B model that's been discontinued after I bought it in 2013)
- Two 3DSes
- My sister's new Switch (with no games lol)
- My Picopix Max projector
The poor Pi has been gathering dust for literal years throughout university, and then at home, and then at my apartment. I can thank shelter in place for the urge to finally give it a purpose in life.
I originally planned to use one of the larger SD cards for it, but then the 3DSes popped up and the card was allocated to the latter. The handhelds came with their own 4GB cards so I thought, what the heck, just make good use of it with the Pi, it's not like hardware that old is going to be high ROI with a higher capacity card.
After searching around for a practical project I'd use that doesn't require fancy components, I found Pi-Hole. The worst name for the one of the greatest applications I've ever tried. Highly recommend this if you're looking for something ambitious to do.
Loving the dashboard. I'm also appalled by exactly how much tracking my phone does, though I'm not surprised. Quantitative data on how much tracking is blocked really puts things in perspective. For reference, this is with my phone idle for 2 hours.
Even better, I don't ever have to do the poverty salvage and rip peripherals off my desktop to make changes to the Pi. Everything is accessible through SSH. Quality of life is very high.
This is the first (completed) project in a series of home improvement plans I want to finish while I'm stuck at home. ()s needed because I thought of other plans first but this was the first one I finally got off my butt to do.
The remaining projects:
- Get the Picopix properly set up with the card and start using it. Using it is going to be the hard part.
- Replace the earpads on my Audiotechnica M30s. I didn't really look into aftermarket earpads until a serendipitous comment from /r/buildapcsales for ATH headphones led me to Brainwavz. The stock earpads get somewhat uncomfortable after a while, especially with glasses, so both my sister and I stopped using them. She even gave me hers. Hopefully the earpads fit - the Amazon review had one person answer M30 fits perfectly - and I can get around to using headphones again. The other pair is in the office so I'll have to wait until SIP is over to replace them.
- While browsing Brainwavz to find items I could both use and add for free shipping, I stumbled upon some really like screwless wall mounts. Perfect for routers and other bricky components. If you've seen my living room, you know the disaster that is the cable mismanagement near the desktop. I bought two mounts, hopefully shuffling some of the cables upward will reduce the clutter on the floor.
- Break out the spare power strips and add them to the bedrooms. My bedroom's will be for supporting the Picopix. The other bedroom was originally meant to be the Pi battle area, but I'll have to figure something else now. Maybe the central handheld charging area.
- Rearrange the floor lamp in the living room to go behind the couch, connect a power strip to the outlet behind the couch for decadent internet usage while lazing.
- Get around to making the Backblaze extension work with Ghost. I know, it's been on the bucket list before corona happened and it's not even "home improvement" but if I put it here I might feel slightly more accountable.