• 2 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I’ve had my fw 13 since early Feb 2022. So far, I’ve replaced the hinges and upgraded to a new mainboard. (11th gen i5 to 12 gen i7 when it became my main PC).

    I’ve redone the thermal paste on the 12th gen 2 times already to clean the fan out and have not had any problems opening things up. I open it up so often to tinker that the pull loop on the keyboard cable finally broke on me a few weeks ago.

    My old mainboard is currently running my entire homlab. Opnsense, pihole, Plex, Kavita, audiobookshelf, foundry vtt, *arrs, unifi controller. I threw it into a 3d printed case and its been running fine without any issues.

    I thought about upgrading to the fw16, but it’s too expensive for me to justify it. If I want to game I just plug into my eGPU. I don’t need my gaming system to be ultra portable.

    I’ll probably upgrade again when they release a new ryzen mainboard that has USB 4 2.0 support so I can take advantage of the additional pcie bandwidth for my GPU.

    I would reccomend the fw13 to anyone who is into customizing PCs or is passionate about repairability in the electronics they own.







  • +1 for openscad. I switched over from Fusion 360 back when autodesk changed the personal use license in 2020.

    It takes a bit to get used to it, but once you’ve made a few parts you begin to see how powerful it can really be.

    Its also super lightweight, so you can run it on most systems without any issues. I’ve ran in on a chromebook before.

    The only thing I miss about fusion 360 is an easy way to add fillets to parts, that can be tricky in openscad. I use chamfers for the most part though, so I don’t miss it much.








  • A custom router + managed switch is a great way to learn. Studying the fundamentals is also good, but in my opinion it’s not as fun as setting up your own network and learning hands-on.

    If you decide to go this route I highly reccomend taking regular backups of your config (and backup again before you change stuff). Part of learning involves breaking things - trust me you will break your network - and in networking that’s one of the best ways to learn. Backups will give you an easy way to restore to a known working configuration.