A pair of 20TB HDDs. My NAS is a janky RAID0 setup of a Raspberry Pi and 2x 12TB external WD HDDs that are about 3 years old at this point. I want a backup at this point but there's no way I'm paying for something that ridiculously expensive at the moment.

I also should've gone for at least 32GBs of RAM for my PCs but my cheap ass thought prices would never explode.

Don't worry kids. It will require you to be a slave only for a 30 years.

I mean, that is how a mortgage works. You don't have to accept the inheritance after all, or you could sell the house to pay the reminder of the mortgage. Still sucks.

A couple days vacation to go hiking. I haven't had a vacation in years, and I desperately need a break from my life. I'd be thrilled if I could just get on a plane, go across the country and see some mountains for 2-3 days and then come home, but I just can't afford it. Maybe next year, she says, for the 3rd year in a row...

May I interest you in LoRa stuff? Meshcore seems to be the big thing now. No license, and 95% of the traffic is "can you hear me? I can hear you". So basically the same as ham radio.

I have been wanting to..but theres no one to really talk to around here and my friends would think I'm a nutter for trying to get them on it 😅

The point is people used to be able to pay off the house in a reasonable number of years.

Oh, I fully agree here, the economy is fucked, money only moves one way (up), and housing is not really affordable unless you either settle for dogshit in bumfuck nowhere, or make a lot of money.

https://meshcore.io/map
https://meshmap.net/

If you can make it to a repeater that is in a good spot, there are decent chances you would reach someone. Now, of course, repeaters require someone to set them up and maintain them. If you live in the middle of nowhere or in a country with super strict radio laws (like Belarus or India), you are mostly out of luck. But if you live in a place where it is illegal, chances are that ham radio will not be trouble-free either, to put it mildly.

Upgrade my server/storage. I only have 1.5tb of storage total for everything including my music, shows, etc.

But I am able to manage it, so I can't really justify buying more storage for it when I technically don't need it.

It isn't portable enough and usually you need a reason to be at the hospital, not just hanging out.

Amazing, that’s literally serfdom 😭

housing is not really affordable unless you either settle for dogshit in bumfuck nowhere

And then it’s still not affordable, because there’s no work out there.

In 2017 I built a new computer. But graphics cards were very overpriced right then because of bitcoin mining. So I bought a used graphics card from my roommate and figured I’d update it later when the prices of graphics cards “went back down.” It never happened, I’m still using that same graphics card from 2015.

Aw, man. We all need a break sometime. Maybe you can find something closer to home that can help you decompress?

A new bicycle. But I can fix the one I've got for now.

Several books (like the annotated Lord of the Rings).

I've been browsing thriftbooks.com for cheaper books to buy. It's a clunky site with slow shipping but you can get good deals on lots of books.

Talkbox.

I'm decent with a synth (and bass guitar) but never really leaned into vocals. I would surely never use it once the novelty wore off.

but they're just so. damn. neat.

Nobody did it better than the late, great Roger Troutman (of Zapp and/or Roger):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq62sqYZEK8&t=5m26s

I thought about the Steam Frame, and can definitely afford it, but I just can’t see enough VR software I’m interested in. I’ve played through HL:A, and most everything else is very short experiences. Or beat saber, which is too fast for me.

I wish there was a good monthly subscription service for manga, but I also don’t know if it would pay fairly enough to creators.

Retiring

A virtual tabletop setup for D&D. A tv cut into a large table with space for players to have some food, drink, their sheets, and dice while putting their minis on an animated map in the center

Oh for sure. Thriftbooks and abebooks are my go-tos. It's just $125 for a set of books is hard to justify when I've already got copies of other versions

I'm lucky enough that I can afford some nicer things for myself, like a new ebike. Metallica is one of my favorite bands and I'm looking to go visit the Sphere in Las Vegas one day.

But with all of that said, I can't justify paying a minimum of $500 a ticket to go see Metallica at the sphere. I get the spectacle and Vegas setting brings the price up, but most live music seating to me is not worth more than $200-300 tops per ticket.

They'll find some next-of-kin to pin it on, I'm sure

Well, I’d rather own the manga and light novels physically, and I prefer to pay the creators directly. I’m not fond of subscription services, and if that were the case, there are other ways to read without spending money. Subscription services also have the problem with licenses and getting more expensive by the year.

I usually read the content in a certain way... And then purchase when I find it really good (which is what I wanted to do with the ones I have listed previously). Main issue is the pricing; No Game No Life volumes would cost me €144 (if not more since there are new volumes now), Witch Hat Atelier about ~€210 and at that point, I stopped researching about the prices. So don't know the price of ''Hey Boy! Let's take a break?''.

Getting my dryer fixed.

Holy shit, are you me?

Can't really justify the Frame, but will do anyway, when buying mail comes around.

Also got into 40k lore recently, but that is easier to withold, as I have no time and patience whatsoever to paint minis rn (especially not if the Frame comes around 😅). Books do it now, I suppose.

I kinda want a true cargo bike. Not anything branded, I'd want to be able to replace electronics, but just having a huge box on an e-bike would be nice I imagine.

I rarely need to move more stuff than fits in a backpack, I have 2 big bike bags as well, and if it won't fit in any of these, chances are it's furniture that won't fit in a cargo bike either. I simply do not need it.

I feel you. We hit the limit of our 2 TB in RAID1 like a year ago. Those were old, like some 10 years. I hold off, I thought we could make it until prices come down again. Could not, because one started failing. So I had to bite the bullet, bought two 8TB for 800 € 🙈. Was some 350€ one year ago, where I thought "Nah, those will get cheaper, we still can get by, by deleting some unused Linux ISOs every now and then" 🙃.

Being debt free.

It is so annying, this is the first NAS I have ever built myself, and the first proper redundant storage solution I will ever have had at home.

(I don't consider the old Intel NAS with four used 2TB drives in a raid 10 to be reliable anymore)....

Now all my media is on teo drives, one 2TB for photos, and one 4TB for other media.

I want a modern NAS that can deal with a loss of two drives without any loss of data.

I am also annoyed at TrueNAS, I have been planning on using TrueNAS since the start of the project, one key feature was that they were open source, now that they have closed the source, I don't believe I can trust them anymore. Currently considering Proxmox, or Open Media Vault.

I don't know how stable OMV is with ZFS, so I am feeling a but stuck....

My initial plan was actually to use OMV, set up LMV and have a 32bit LV across the six 8tb PVs and migrate as needed, but that just felt like a way too annoying nonstandard setup....

So I decided on TrueNAS tor their ZFS support, and now here we are...

This is my hang up on it too. There's just not been any interesting VR titles lately, and I havent seen any announcements either. Seems like a waste of money for a blade and sorcery machine.

I would highly suggest looking for a wrecked parts bike for the expensive replacements. Even if its something weird, theres usually lightly used wrecked bikes out there.

This is what everyone should be striving for. At least in America, a large percent of the population doesn’t have more than two paychecks saved.

This looks sick, what is it?!

More professional Bosch tools (Blue ones) for personal use. Maaaaybe I can justify a new drill, drillbits and a multicutter. Bosch professional tools are a true pleasure to use. I cant go back to cheaper consumer grade tools.

RTX 3090 for local LLM. I just pay for european hosted inference instead.

They'll take the building and sell it to some other shmuck for a massive loan

Its a gpd win 4, a gaming pc in psp form ❤️

Edit: you can even dualboot win/linux.

Omggg I love it. Now I want one tooo