I spoke about my adventures in Uzbekistan briefly in my previous blog post. Apologies if you couldn’t read it because it was in German. I spend nearly two weeks with a German group and a German tour guide and couldn’t not use the opportunity to write my very first blog post in a language that I’ve spend countless hours learning.
Something that I didn’t mention in that blog post, mostly as I was trying to keep it brief due to the language, was an interesting encounter that I had in Samarkand towards the beginning of our journey.
In Samarkand, Uzbekistan, as we were heading out of a Quran School, I saw another south asian person walking in the opposite direction. Now, since I had landed in Uzbekistan, I had not seen many south asians despite of reading that there are many Indians who go to Tashkent to study medicine. So seeing this guy made me instinctively wave at him and ask if he was a “Desi”.
He said yes, he was from India, from Karnataka. Super! I thought. He told me that he’s on a road trip from Bengaluru in the south of India all the way to London, traveling some 25,000kms and visiting 40 countries along the way. I found it extremely fascinating.
We chatted for another minute or two and exchanged phone numbers. He was supposed to pass through Berlin so I invited him to reach out whenever he passes by so that we could meet. In all honesty, I didn’t expect him to do so, or for it to work out.
But couple of weeks ago, he reached out saying he’ll be passing through Berlin and would like to meet up for dinner. After some back and forth, he and his daughter finally made it to Berlin on a fine Saturday evening. I took them to Sarvana Bhavan and we had good south Indian dinner.
After that, we walked all the way to Alexanderplatz, and then headed to Warschauerstr, and then walking back to Ostbahnhof after seeing the East Side Gallery. In the end, we were out there walking until late in the night. In spite of me meeting these people for the first time, we connected very well and had a great time.
The next day, we met again for dinner at the very same restaurant. I told them that I was already feeling a bit sad that they were scheduled to leave the next morning, onward in their journey. I was genuinely sad after having felt a bit invested in their journeys for the past couple of weeks concluding with that dinner at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.
They’re still in touch, and I’ll probably see them again someday in India. I think the whole story was quite fascinating for me. A random wave at a stranger and that led to a meetup in Berlin and perhaps new friends in India. Life is chaotic and random. But sometimes, beautiful patterns come out of the chaos. The trip to Uzbekistan itself was pretty random, and then this extra layer of chance bringing few folks together was just cherry on top. A story that I’d keep telling people!
„Wo genau liegt Usbekistan?“ fragte ich mich, als ein Freund mir erzählte, er wolle mit seiner Mutter nach Usbekistan reisen. Ich schaute auf Google Maps nach und entdeckte, dass es nicht so weit von Indien entfernt war. „Du kannst auch mitkommen!“, sagt der Freund.
Ich dachte ein bisschen darüber nach und entschied, dass ich mitkommen wollte. Usbekistan kann das zweite Land in Asien sein, das ich besuche. Das erste ist natürlich Indien (ich weiß nicht, ob Indien dazu zählt).
Nachdem ich sechs Monate auf diese Reise gewartet hatte, war ich in der zweiten Septemberwoche auf dem Weg nach Frankfurt, um diese Reise zu unternehmen. Ich war mehr als aufgeregt.
Die Reise
Wir waren mit einer Gruppe in Usbekistan. Es war eine deutsche Reisegruppe mit 14 Personen, und wir hatten einen Reiseleiter, der Deutsch sprach. Alles war schon geplant, so dass es für uns sehr entspannt war.
Alle zwei Tage waren wir in einer neuen Stadt; zuerst Taschkent, dann Samarkand, Buchara, Kivva und schließlich zurück nach Taschkent für unseren Flug nach Frankfurt.
Wir machten ein paar Wanderungen durch den Wald in der Nähe von Taschkent und dann in eine Wüste in Kivva. Es war nicht zu anstrengend, aber es hat viel Spaß gemacht.
Das Essen war besonders lecker. Ich habe das Essen von Leuten geholt, die ihre Portionen nicht aufessen konnten. Mehr zu essen für mich 😎.
Ich konnte nicht alles verstehen, was die Leute gesagt haben, weil mein Deutsch nicht so fließend ist, aber unseren Reiseleiter konnte ich gut verstehen. Er sprach Hochdeutsch und benutzte einfachere Wörter, die ich schon kannte.
Zusammenfassung
Es war eine tolle Reise. Ich empfehle Usbekistan, wenn man noch nicht dort war. Unten sind ein paar Fotos von der Reise.
I came across the idea of slow living and slow things in life through some videos, and wanted to document some of my own after-thoughts on the matter for future reference.
Here’s a synopsis of the original idea: With technology, a lot of things are sped up. Communicating with a friend or family is an instantaneous act. Airplane travel have made traveling anywhere around the world an at most two day endeavor. Access to most of human knowledge is usually a click or two away. Generating a plausible-sounding article draft on a topic takes a minute (caution: ‘plausible-sounding’ is lifting a lot of weight there).
But should the end goal be to speed up everything in life? Intuitively, we’d all say no. But then, how do we know when we’re doing something that should be optimized versus something that we’d always like to do slowly, without the need to speed up or optimize? I suppose one way is to define some of the slow things in life, and be mindful of them.
This article is my attempt at bringing conscious thought to these activities and have a reference to look back to later. In the process, I hope you get some ideas too!
Reading a book
There was a time when I read regularly. It has since then turned into very occasional bursts of motivation when I try to read a book as much as possible, ideally to the end, in one sitting as I know I might not get back to it soon again. There’s always something else I should be doing rather than taking some time to read a good book. Perhaps I should try blinkist.
Not only is relying on bursts of motivation significantly more inefficient than just small but consistent steps towards a goal, it is also not very fun. Trying to read fast and get to the end of books has made me not want to read all. It sucked the joy out of immersing myself into a book and swimming in the sea of thoughts created by the author. The same is true of book summarizing services.
I don’t want to rush through a book, reach the end only to have not understood anything and lost any motivation to re-read it properly again. Worse, I don’t want to read/listen to a summary of a book, feel like I’ve gotten everything out of it having missed most of it. Then why ruin the fun by speed-running through the book barely letting anything stick on the wall of my mind.
I feel like this is a big miss, and I should see to it that I don’t ruin reading completely for the sake of reading faster.
Hanging out with a friend
I live in Berlin. One of the nice things about this city is that I’m surrounded by very friendly people who I love seeing often. Growing older, I’ve often found myself scheduling hangouts with friends that feel inadequate or too organized.
I don’t want to see a friend for an hour after which I have the next appointment scheduled. The hangout feels shallow, and like a task when it is scheduled so tight in terms of time or agenda. I know that my favorite hangouts are hangouts without a strict agenda that just flowed into its own unique shape.
I’ve also realized that most of the deeper conversations I’ve had with my friends were in private setting with no time bounds. It takes time for conversations to naturally flow into a deeper state, where people think before responding and have time to express complex feelings and emotions. I really value these conversations as they’ve done a good deal to shape my thoughts, and for that reason, I’d like to always find adequate time for my friends.
Time for myself
I often pack my schedule to the point where I’m constantly chasing behind the next task on my list, the next person I have committed to meeting or getting on a call with, and so on. Some weeks I hardly have a single evening to myself where it is just me, my home and nothing else.
I’ve found that empty evenings with no plans are a nice way to recharge, think, play guitar, paint or do anything unplanned. They’re meditative, and help zoom out and refocus. This time must not be rushed, or spent in worry. This leisure shouldn’t make me feel guilty. This downtime is important, just as sleep is.
Cooking and eating a good meal
With home office and heavy workload, sometimes I cut corners on my meal quality. I grab a quick snack in the afternoon or just eat something that barely qualifies as food, much less dinner, in the evening.
I’ve also noticed how much joy it brings me to take time to cook something nice for myself. I’m an okay cook, and given an hour of time, I can cook a good meal that I’m extremely satisfied eating. Whenever I skip on this and order something from outside, I am always reminded of how little time that saved and how significantly less satisfying it felt.
That’s why I try to take my time to cook. Even if it eats into my other task time, it is worth it. It must not be rushed, and it isn’t something worth cutting corners in.
Vacation time
I get a limited number of days off per year. This creates a compulsion to always have a lot of plans crammed into vacation time. If I take a day off, and I don’t completely jam pack it with todos, I feel guilty that I didn’t use my day off well.
It doesn’t have to feel this way. A day off is a day off, whether it is spent doing some adventures or just relaxed with a nice cup of masala tea and some snacks watching an anime. Sometimes it is okay to go to a new city, visit museums, walk around all day until the legs hurt. Other times, just staying home is golden! Perhaps an off day while in a new city doing nothing but eating and sleeping isn’t a bad idea either.
I am particularly bad at this, but I’ll try to remind myself that if I always try to follow a template during my off days as I do during my working days, it kinda defeats the point of the off day.
In conclusion
Working in tech, and trying to optimize everything we work on, sometimes we can go a bit too much in the other direction with things that should be left untouched. Capitalism hasn’t help this case either, having convinced us to keep automating and abstracting our life and moving to the next levels and creating more value (whatever that means) as fast as possible.
But some things, especially ones that really matter, shouldn’t be cursed with the infinite growth and optimization virus of tech world. They are better done slowly.
I can hardly believe it, but 6th June 2024 marked 10 years since I originally purchased nagekar.com, my beloved blog’s address. In terms of longevity, this is the longest running project of mine, and outside of a few friendships and family, it even predates most of the people I have in my life today. How interesting!
As I spoke about in my 5th Anniversary blog post, it felt very pretentious to get a domain with my name in it, only so that I can show off my firstname@lastname.com email address to plebs friends who were using gmail and yahoo mail.
The website itself was never very popular. Partly because of the inconsistency in terms of the topics I wrote about, the quality of my writing or the efforts (or lack thereof) I put into promoting any of my pieces. The SEO game is also lacking hugely, although I refuse to participate in bot pleasing.
But that is also what is liberating about this website. I’m literally writing this line as I’m waiting for RE8 local train on Berlin’s Zoologischer Garten train station. The activation energy to starting writing about a topic is minimal, around the same as writing a whatsapp message to a friend you’ve not spoken with in a couple of months. Perhaps lower than that, now that I think about it.
10 years ago, it would’ve been inconceivable that I might not even be in India when I’d be writing the 10th anniversary post. Or that there would be one for that matter. Or that I’d be working with my dream company. Conceivability, perhaps, is just a product of the size of your dreams and desires. More importantly, it is perhaps the size of what one considers is possible and feasible.
I was recently watching a video of Rahul Gandhi where he talks about this very thing; about how what one dreams about and thinks is possible depends on the environment they grow up in. Think about all the human potential that’s underutilized due to lack of being able to see a bird’s eye view of the world; to understand all the possibilities, whether it is through traveling, reading, or consuming diverse media from different parts of the world.
Anyway, I digress. This time, I want to dream big. I want to dream big enough that the dream scares me away; that I myself laugh at the impracticality and infeasibility of it all. And then still attempt to do it. As Rutger Bregman wrote in Utopia for Realists
One needs to be able to believe passionately and also be able to see the absurdity of one’s own beliefs and laugh at them
What will June 2034 look like? I don’t know. That’s slightly discomforting. But then, no one does. There are innumerable possibilities for how things might turn out in June 2034, but I could also say that about tomorrow. And yet, we don’t stop trying. I hope to be a kind person tomorrow, and also 10 years later. I hope my blog stays, along with the thing we refer to as the Web, and everything we love about it.
I’m playing a game of chess while listening to a remix album of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I finished work for the day, went to buy seeds to plant coriander and mint plants in my balcony, ate warm food and an Alphonso mango. In short, life is good.
This playlist always reminds me of the first half of 2020. Hearing about this new disease for the first time in the media and really not caring about it. Then all of a sudden, Berlin case #1 turns out to be a second degree contact.
It was a scary day. I remember fearing fear to the level that I had not experienced before. It was fair, to be honest. No one seemed to know what was happening, and all I was seeing was growing numbers on worldmeters.info‘s coronavirus stats.
Going through my Google Maps timeline shows an interesting stoppage in going to office or getting food outside in the middle of March, which was when I believe it hit us in Berlin, Germany. Within a week or two, most of the city went offline, so to speak.
Seeing the people we always met and hung out with on Google Meet calls was weird at first, and we wondered if things would ever change. It felt persistent and tiring. It felt like things would stay this way forever. It was overwhelming and I’d closely monitor any symptom I was showing and then trying to over fit it to Covid19 (with so many first hand experiences on the internet, almost any general sickness symptom could’ve been attributed to Covid19).
I still remember closing looking at the stats for age vs fatality graphs and convincing myself and my family that it isn’t that bad, although I didn’t believe it fully myself then either.
Masks were the norm. Shops had a N-people-only-inside ordinance, and sanitizing supermarket groceries was common. Entire days were spent just thinking about how life felt like before this new norm, and that was mixed with news of people dying, strangers and familiar names alike.
What a weird time. And I was one of the privileged ones who didn’t actually get affected nearly as much. A work from home job, residence in a country with state healthcare, parents who could afford staying indoors etc. I cannot imagine what it must’ve been for those who weren’t as privileged.
I regret not documenting more of my thoughts from that time. I tried to suppress it, trying to convince myself this is kinda normal. It has been more than four years since those scary first two weeks of lockdown. “Lockdown” feels like a strange word to type, but it had become such an integral part of our vocabularies back then.
It was a troubling time, and we’ve just come out of it, albeit not everyone and not completely. I feel grateful for being able to do the things that we couldn’t do during the covid19 time, things like hugging, eating out and traveling freely. Things that I took for granted before 2020. That year will serve as a good reminder of how quickly life can change, the fragility of it all and the importance to make the most of our now.
This past Christmas, I tasked myself to build my very own home server / lab. The goal was to do so at as little an upfront and running cost as possible. One of the components of a home server is a good customizable router. My requirements were modest but power efficient hardware, dual Ethernet ports (for WAN/LAN separation) and intel network adapter, fanless design for quiet operation, and ideally not more than 50 euros.
On the christmas eve, a Zotac Zbox CI327 on local classified ads caught my attention. It checked all the boxes except for an intel network card. After some reading, I decided to bite and went to pick it up. Since it was the evening of 24th December, it really felt like a Christmas present for myself!
Design
CI327 has a fanless design and it depends on its sturdy metallic body for cooling. Which means when I first picked it up, I was pleasantly surprised at how heavy and sturdy it felt, despite the plastic-y looking frame (not that that would’ve been a bad thing at 35 euros either).
Don’t you love it when you set your expectations based on what you’ll be paying for something and then it turns out to be something you’d have paid 3x for and still would’ve felt good?
The rubber foot double as screws to open the box, and can be opened without a screwdriver so that is cool.
Realtek NIC woes
If there’s one thing that’s not ideal about the CI327, it is that it comes with a Realtek NIC. I knew people recommended against buying anything with Realtek NICs, but I went with it given the price. Soon I found myself debugging very strange network issues involving the internet capping at 100mbps and sometimes the entire LAN interface refusing to route any traffic.
Upon analyzing the dmesg output, I realized it was a very common issue for this device. I tried to follow any advice that I found and it turns out it had to do with outdated drivers which upon updating resolved the issue.
Pfsense
My main motivation of buying the CI327 was to use it as a router for my home network. I was obsessed with setting up a real home server, and the first step towards it (at least how I envisioned everything) was to have a really powerful router that pulls internet from the ISP provided modem and connects everything.
Pfsense was very easy to set up, with the only challenge being finding a display and keyboard to run the setup script.
Performance
While I had really no idea what I exactly I wanted from Pfsense, all I could really do was run some speedtests off the LAN port and make sure nothing’s getting bottlenecked with a quick internet speed test.
And it seemed to work. I was getting the full throughput of the bandwidth provided to me by my ISP. All that I had to do now was to hook up a switch and a Wireless AP to this LAN network and connect all of my local devices to this network.
TP-SG608E Network Switch + Huawei AX2 Pro Wifi 6 Access Point
I went with the TP-Link TP-SG608E as my managed network switch. The LAN port of the CI327 is now connected to the WAN of the TP link switch, and from here the Synology NAS, Dell Optiplex homeserver, Huawei AX2 Pro Wifi 6 access point and a Raspberry Pi are connected.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the setup is working good enough that I sometimes forget that I have all of these moving parts powering my home network. There’s some interesting software running on both the Dell Optiplex and the Raspberry Pi which I might write a post about in the future. As far as the Zotac Zbox CI327 goes, it is probably one of the most value for money tech purchase I’ve made and I’ve very pleased with it in spite of the little Realtek woes.
In my quest to find the perfect laptop, I’ve made yet another stride (or slide, we’ll see about that). A week ago (actually a month and a half ago, as I’m publishing this), I bought myself a Chuwi Minibook X, Intel N100 edition. Chu-what?! You might ask. I’m glad you asked.
Motivation for a new laptop
I have a sling bag that I really like. It is tiny but fits everything that I’d generally carry when stepping out for a few hours; headphones, portable power bank, some cables etc. A couple of months ago I got myself a 7in screen that latches to a Raspberry Pi and looks like a cool “cyberdeck”. I thought it would be very cool to be able to carry it everywhere; to have a device with a full desktop operating system running with me that isn’t as bulky as a regular laptop.
I have a Thinkpad X230 as my personal laptop. It is small compared to most laptops, and features a 12.5in screen. Overall it is probably a bit bulkier than a modern 13in laptop like the Dell XPS 13 and cannot be carried in my tiny sling bag. Upon looking for a portable device with a 7-10in screen on the internet that’d fit in my sling bag (around 25cms in length), all I found were tablets and few laptops running Android, iPadOS or ChromeOS.
But I really wanted a device to run my favorite Linux distros on.
Requirements
A device to run a desktop operating system on (ideally a Linux distro) that’s no bigger than 25cms across and 16cms wide. For reference, the generally accepted small footprint laptops like the Dell XPS 13 or the Lenovo X13 Yoga are 30x20cms and 31x22cms respectively, which feels noticeably bigger than a 10in tablet device with a keyboard, the size I’m going for.
The internal specs weren’t as important, but anything that’s relatively power efficient so that I don’t have to then use it with a charger at all times.
Contenders
Given the size constraints, there aren’t very many devices to choose from. In the traditional brands, there is the Microsoft Surface Go 3 and the Surface Laptop Go 3. Outside of traditional brands, there’s GPD Pocket 3 and a whole bunch of 7-8in laptops that all look suspiciously similar to one another. One of the brands I stumbled upon during this search was Chuwi. They had a laptop that checked all of the requirement checkboxes I had, and unlike the other options, wasn’t nearly as expensive.
Upon some reading on Reddit, I realized it was a real company (the experience with their support seems to be mixed; I’ve not had any complaints so far) and the product was reviewed by youtubers and redditors alike. Good signs. I decided to bite and placed an order during their spring sale to effectively get the laptop for EUR 317 (down from the regular >360). It had it in my hands 2-3 days later.
Initial build quality impressions
The build quality is a solid 6/10 in my book. Of course, it isn’t as good as my XPS 17 or M1 Pro Macbook Pro, but it isn’t as cheap as an off the shelf HP or Dell laptop worth a couple of hundred Euros. The hinge feels solid, and the display part of the laptop is solid metal, but the keyboard half is plastic-y. It is hard to tell, thanks to the good color blend.
The packaging is okay. The laptop comes with a 36W USB-C charger out of the box, and it is of okay quality.
The keys on the keyboard are a bit oddly placed and requires some getting used to. The power button doesn’t always register a click, and also takes some getting used to. The indicator LEDs for charging and power feel cheap and are hard to see at steeper angles. The USB-C ports aren’t the highest quality either, and there’s a slight amount of misalignment in the ports, at least on my particular unit’s case. This doesn’t affect its functionality, but is definitely indicative of sub-par QA.
Pictures
Note that the Windows 11 license issue resolved itself automatically. I had already created a support ticket with Chuwi who provided me with another license key which I didn’t need after the issue went away by itself.
Rome trip
A huge motivation for buying this laptop was to be able to use it in tight places, like on an economy seat of my flight from Frankfurt to Mumbai where the person in front has their seat fully reclined (oddly specific, but honest).
I got to use it in an airplane for the first time (for the intended use case, that is) during my Rome trip in the last week of March, and on my way to India in the first week of April. It works well, like 7/10 well. The size of the device and thus the keyboard does become a productivity bottleneck and it strained my wrists typing on it for more than a couple of minutes without breaks. For its intended use case of surfing the web and light documentation, it works well nevertheless.
Linux support is sparse and makes the device unreliable
Of course, the first thing I did after unboxing the laptop and making sure it isn’t completely dead is try and flash Linux on it. I started with Fedora, and upon seeing a lot of hiccups, installed Ubuntu.
A major hassle is the default orientation of the screen, which is portrait. So the splash screen and many of the startup options show up in portrait, and only upon logging in successfully does the custom orientation (landscape) kicks in.
There are ways to make it work better, but I wasn’t very patient. Then there was the problem with resuming from a sleep where the screen would be all messed up (think half of the display is black, the other half has strange colored lines across it) and required a reboot. It almost feels like a hardware problem, but it most likely is a driver issue.
The list of issues with Ubuntu installed went on and on, and while a younger me would’ve taken it up as a challenge, I decided to stick to Windows for the moment as my life is pretty busy lately due to work. If I do come back to Linux on this device, I’ll try to make a guide for making the device usable with Linux.
Charging seems slow
The laptop comes with a charger out of the box that charges at 12V 3A (36W). I usually don’t use that charger and stick to my Macbook Pro’s charger. I also use my Anker PowerCore power bank. In either of those cases, the charging speed is fairly low, and the laptop takes a while to fully charge. Chuwi’s website claims 45W PD 2.0 fast charging, but the most I’ve managed out of this device is around 22W (even when charging from a depleted state).
Laptop body prone to decoloration
Sometime during the Rome trip, I carelessly threw around the laptop. For example, I just dumped the device in the carry-on luggage space during takeoff without a sleeve. I noticed a part of the bottom half got bruised and the silver color wore off, exposing white plastic underneath. Now I knew that the bottom half was made from plastic, but I somehow didn’t expect it to decolor after a little throwing around.
I tried to take a picture of the defect, but it is too faint and the light isn’t good enough in my room to actually help you see it. Just trust me it shows in real life.
To be clear, it isn’t a deal breaker. Given the price it is made available at, I probably cannot complain. It is just something to be aware if you decide to get one.
Accessories I bought
I couldn’t find a screen guard or sleeve officially presented so I ended up spending a lot of time measuring the device (and the screen) and finding accessories that fit.
For the screen protector, I went with Samsung Galaxy Tab A8’s screen protector. It doesn’t fit perfectly, but gets the job done for most part.
For the sleeve, I ended up with two sleeves; one is too large and the other too small. Of course these are tablet sleeves, so you have to measure and guess and hope something fits. I for one was too impatient before my trip to India and ended up with two sleeves that don’t fit.
Screen can be overclocked
By default, the laptop’s display is set to 50hz. But some folks on the Chuwi forums posted that they’re running the panel at 90hz and it works just fine. I tried using the Custom Resolution Utility to set the display to be 90hz and it worked well.
Wishlist
If I could make a list of wishes I’d like to see in this laptop (practically, in a future version of this device), it would be as follows
5G SIM slot to have internet on the go, just like a tablet
SD Card reader
Fully metallic body, and not just the screen-half.
Better Linux support
Many of my wishes would likely raise the device’s price. Spending any more than a couple of hundred euros on a lesser-known brand is risky in my book and I don’t know if I’d have bought a laptop that fitted all of those wishes but then retailed at 500+ euros or more myself so there’s that.
Conclusion
It isn’t all sunshine and rainbows with the Chuwi Minibook X, but it is a good device. I intend to make it my daily driver and see how life feels like carrying a small device running a full operating system around. I also intend on not taking too much care of it and using it like a rugged device. I’m allowing myself this luxury after carrying around my Macbook Pro for a long time and having to take extreme care of it (I’ve already managed to break an older Macbook Pro’s screen, and given the price of this current one, I’d rather not risk much).
So that’s it for this laptop review. I really hope a 10.5in laptop works out for me. I’ll post updates if there’s anything interesting to share. Thank you for reading.
This will sound extremely silly but I absolutely adore the about:credits page. This page lists the folks who have spent time of their life to make Firefox and Mozilla products better in some way. Many of them are volunteers and have contributed to Firefox’s success in their free time. There are perhaps as many motivations as there are contributors; some do it for fun, while others because they align with the Mozilla’s mission.
It won’t be an exaggeration to say I wanted to be on that page for a while. To be fair, desire doesn’t necessarily translate to regular contributions, which is why I didn’t make it to that page for the longest time. But getting employed by Mozilla helps, and after working on the Add-ons team for a little over a year, I applied to be on the page. And I was accepted!
If you’re using Firefox, type about:credits in your URL page and you will find me there, forever. For the non-Firefox users, you can directly navigate to https://www.mozilla.org/credits/
That’s really it. It was a bit showoff-y but I thought this achievement deserved a blog post. Thank you for reading!
After years of contemplating on making or buying myself a NAS, I finally decided to bite and got a Synology DS223j two-bay NAS as a present for myself for Christmas along with two refurbished 16TB Seagate Exos hard drives.
Rewinding a bit
For most of my life, the only “backup” I had was a 500gb hard disk that came preinstalled in the Fujitsu A514, my first laptop. I had also bought a 120gb solid-state disk at the time and immediately replaced the hard disk with it. The hard disk went into an enclosure and I used it to back up any important data as my laptop went through frequent cycles of OS reinstalls during my distro-hopping era.
Any time I’d want to back up my photos, it would become a folder on the hard disk and then cleared from phone storage as phones came with much smaller storage back then. I remember having 16gb internal storage on my Galaxy Note and thinking I’d never fill it up no matter how many pictures I take.
I used Gmail and the 15gb storage the free account comes with was enough for email and the occasional document sharing via Google Drive. Life was good.
In 2018, I had some INR 300 of Google Play credits that I used to get some of the apps that I wanted to support and use pro versions of, like Nova launcher, Tasker etc. Along with those, I got the 100gb Google storage plan (at INR 130 a month) and started backing up photos to Google Drive. It was an okay cost as I was already working by then and had some money to spare for subscriptions.
Since then, I had kept that subscription and even upgraded it to 200gb after moving to Berlin.
Problem statement
The problem I set out to solve was to get rid of some of the cloud storage subscription fees I’m paying each month. I was paying duplicate fees for cloud between two Google accounts (and an iCloud account), so the plan would help get rid of two of the three subscriptions resulting in some 50 euros saved each year while providing me to actually follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy for some important data that I wouldn’t want to lose.
Requirements
Late last December I got a bit obsessed with watching computer build videos. It was fun to learn something new, and to be honest it also was entertaining. From the videos, I learned some important considerations that I’ll have to think for myself before spending my first Euro on this new project.
Number of drive bays: While a NAS can just be a single drive attached to the network, generally they also offer redundancy (using RAID configurations) for NAS with two or more drive bays. I knew I’d want a RAID 1 so I’d need at least two drives.
Idle power consumption: Power is expensive in Germany and I’d want to stay away from any old hardware that’s cheap to buy but very expensive to run. The last thing I’d want to do is invest in a NAS that I’m going to not keep running all the time.
NAS application / operating system: Ideally, I’d like some bells and whistles like automatic backups to make my life a little easier and not having to do that manually. The popular NAS applications come with add-ons that allow more specific usecases. TrueNAS, Synology and others have public pages where one can see if the application they’d need is available on the platform they’re choosing for the NAS.
Gigabit access speeds: I wanted to NAS to be accessible at the same speeds as the rest of my home network, which is currently at a Gigabit. Fortunately, that seems like the minimum one gets in 2023.
Non-requirements
I also learned about what other people prioritize in their NAS, but it didn’t resonate with me. More specifically, I couldn’t justify the price overhead that acquiring those features needed. Namely,
SSD Cache: While there are many strategies to use an SSD for read and write caching, it primarily makes read/write operations feel faster for some use cases. I thought this was over-optimizing for my modest use case.
CPU / RAM to run containers / VMs: I also found that folks like to run Docker containers / VMs on their NAS and need more powerful CPU and added RAM. This hadn’t even crossed my mind, and as such, I stayed true to the “if I didn’t know it exists, I probably don’t need it yet” principle.
Multi-gigabit or multiple LAN ports: Folks opt for 2.5 or even 10gig LAN ports on their NAS for faster transfer speeds. Now while I’d looove to have transfer rates more than 120 MB/s, I’d need to upgrade my entire home network to multi-gigabit LAN and WLAN, and that’s expensive. That also would mean having a beefier CPU to handle the transfers which would increase the cost of NAS hardware itself.
Four or more drive bays: This was the one I was most unsure about; Most if not everyone one reddit suggested to get at least a 4 bay NAS and then just using a couple of the bays until the requirement arises. It sounds reasonable, but I have a feeling that the requirement for 4 bays would never arise and 16TB in RAID-1 is going to be enough for a very long time.
Building vs buying
The nerd in me wanted to really go down the route of buying all the parts and assembling everything myself. The videos I had watched made me confident enough that I could pull it off. Building a PC is fun, and truth be told, I’ve never actually built one for myself.
Having said that, I also recognized that I’m mixing two things together; my requirement for a secure and reliable NAS for my critical data and my desire to build a PC that I can experiment on. I’ve lost important data in the past and I didn’t want to risk it. Especially not after having just watched a bunch of videos and never actually having built a decent PC myself.
I decided to pick up a Synology 2 bay NAS DS223j with 1gb RAM and a relatively weak but does-the-job quad-core Realtek CPU. The cost of the NAS was 180 euros. To do with it, I got a couple of refurbished 16TB Seagate Exos drives, each of which was 180 euros, for a total cost of 540 euros.
My rationale behind going down this path was as follows:
I don’t trust my PC building and setting up skills enough to offload all of my data to the built-NAS and then cancel a couple of cloud subscriptions.
At 4-5 watts of idle (hibernation) and 16 watts of under-load power consumption, it is comparable to a relatively efficient Mini PC.
Hardware isn’t cheap in Germany, and actually saving money on hardware would require sourcing parts off Aliexpress which takes time and is often less than reliable.
Building a PC and setting up the necessary software takes time. I could use this time on another project (home server blog post coming soon :D).
Synology’s DSM (their proprietary operating system) comes out of the box with remote access via QuickConnect.
Tradeoffs I’ve ((sub)consciously) made
I feel like I’ve given up on some of my preferences when going down the Synology NAS route. And while some of these are conscious, there are some that will only show up once enough time has passed. In any case, I’m still documenting some of them here.
Open source and free software: Synology DSM only runs on Synology hardware, at least officially. It means I’m stuck to using Synology software for as long as I’m using this hardware.
Synology tax: Like I mentioned, using these off the shelf NAS’s requires paying the software and marketing budget of the companies in addition to the cost of the actual hardware. That’s fair, of course. Just something to be aware of.
NAS hardware: I’m sure my “16TB ought to be enough for me” might not age very well. I also faced some situations where the NAS really slowed down and made me realize that it is running a very under-powered CPU after all. Again, tradeoffs.
Noise: Seagate Exos drives aren’t the most silent hard drives. My wooden floor made it much worse and I ended up putting the NAS on a softer raised surface to absorb some of the vibrations. I believe this problem would’ve not completely vanished had I chose to get non-enterprise drives like the Seagate IronWolf, but it would’ve been better.
Electricity costs: While my Synology NAS is efficient, and consumes single digit Watt power most of the times idling, it will still add 30-40 euros of additional power consumption to my yearly electricity bills (at 10w average power consumption 24x7x365 and 40 cents per kWh).
Breakeven cost: From a purely utility perspective, it will take some years of not using Google Drive and iCloud before the cost of investing in a personal NAS is broken even. This is especially true if I do not fill up the 16TB that I have and then have regular need to access those files. This isn’t factoring in the added electricity cost, nor can I effectively compare the reliability of Google Drive to a NAS set up at home. Overall, for most people without the need to store TBs of data, Cloud is a very logical option.
In closing
I hope that was informative in some way. I am looking forward to seeing how my investment turns out and if the list of tradeoffs grows further. I’ll leave you with some pictures of the NAS.
Fresh out of the box with its accessoriesInitial setup in my “Lack rack”. It has since been replaced but wait for an update on that.
Some 1,826 days ago I arrived at Berlin Tegel Airport. Missing my connecting flight, losing my luggage due to that and landing in a completely dark, freezing and rainy Berlin wasn’t pleasant, but it also wasn’t that tough. I was just happy that I finally stepped foot in another country, and given how long I prepared for this journey, I was glad it had finally started. The kind HR person from the company I was about to join was at the airport to pick me up which I’m extremely grateful for to this day.
The first super market trip was nerve wrecking, and not just because I only had 100 Euro bills with me and was worried I’ll get yelled at by the cashier. But I managed to have dinner that night (as depicted in my picture above), and sleep well. And then to my surprise I also managed to survive the rest of the week. And the rest of the month, and the year, and then some.
I did more than just survive, as one ought to aspire for. I made friends, traveled to pretty places and ate good food. I learned a new language and experienced a culture that was totally foreign just five years ago. I learned to play a musical instrument, play chess and cook tasty food. I did a lot of what I had only dreamed of, including landing my dream job at Mozilla.
Reminiscing on the time from my first day in Berlin till today, I have a lot to be grateful for, lot to smile about and a lot of notes on how to do better in the future.
I’m writing this eating delicious glutinous rice ball dessert, to celebrate the little milestone. The past few years brought us all a lot of changes, and it feels like the world is caught in turbulence. I wonder if I am only thinking so because I’m getting older and tend to pay more attention to what’s happening around me, or if everything is actually happening faster.
It was undoubtedly an interesting journey living through these last five years here in Berlin, and I’m looking forward to the next.
