What a Difference a Few Months Makes!

Back in January I made the difficult decision to step away from posting on this site. I won’t go into too much detail but a combination of issues in my personal life and a general decline in my own enthusiasm about NUCs and tech in general led me to think I was done writing.

But it seems what I needed was some time away to get the spark back. After almost 4 months of getting things back on track personally, tinkering with some tech, and generally recharging my creativity, I’ve decided to unretire and pick up writing again.

A lot has happened in the past few months technology-wise for me. Had I been in a better space I’d have written about much of it. For example, I bought a 3D printer (Ender 3 Pro) and have been learning all about 3D printing and having a great time. I even set up a fanless NUC as an Octoprint server, so I can run my 3D printer and monitor the prints from anywhere. Mistakes were made, filament wasted, but I made it through the learning curve. I’ve been able to print a ton of things, some useful, some entirely pointless, and am still having fun with it.

I set up a home Plex server/NAS for storing my movie collection for easy viewing. It is, dare I say it, flawless. I completely redid my workstation: new, more functional desk, giant 32″ 2K monitor, etc.

For a while I was enjoying working with the tech just for fun, not thinking about writing anything about it. But after a while I got the itch to tell people what I was up to, and so here I am again. I’ve got a few posts planned, and would love to hear from any of my three followers about what they’d like to see. Interested in a post about my new setup? My massive new monitor? The Plex server? If things work out the way I’m hoping, my first actual post should be pretty cool. Fingers crossed.

One of the things I did when I stepped away was I let the companies I’ve been working with know I wasn’t going to be reviewing products anymore. That may or may not have been a mistake. I like the freedom to chose what I write about, but getting new products to test was always like Christmas for me so hopefully I can rekindle some of those relationships.

There’s a whole new generation of NUCs out and some of them look pretty awesome. But the playing field has expanded to include offerings from many companies, so it’ll be interesting to see what Intel does, if anything, to retain the prominence of the NUC name.

So while I ramp back up on the posts, let me know what you’d like to see from me.

See you soon!