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With the addition of the DELL PowerEdge R230, the 42u rack now has 11 units occupied (yay?). Now all I’m waiting for is the 32gb DDR4 2133mHz ram and then we’re complete! (All that’s left after the ram, is of course, installing an operating system :3).

I’ll probably go with debian for this one because I’m lazy and uh yeah… just that.

Honestly, I only need a few more parts to get this wonderful device up and running again! These parts are:

• DDR4 ECC RAM
• Outer Dell A4 Friction Rails. I already have some Inner Rails however its not as easy as you’d think to find Outer Rails – yet there are loads of Inner Rails on the market, so I’ll probably end up buying new rails, not much more in price either way.

I’m expecting this to cost me around £80~ish in total since I’ll most likely be getting new rails instead of used since it’s hard to find just Outer Rails by themselves.

Recently I have acquired 18TB in 2.5″ (SAS) HDDs, and have (well, even more recently haha – within the hour), got my hands on 10 4TB (SAS) HDDs for around £103. That’s £2.57 per terrabyte, which in all honesty is a sweet, sweet deal.

I am letting one of my friends use some of my 42 Unit Rack’s “rack space” for one of their servers, and they mentioned that they would like to purchase a few from me so that a bonus I guess?

Either way, my Dell Poweredge R230 will have around 16TB worth of space for a media server, etc etc. Either way, the amount of storage I now have available to me has skyrocketed. Yippee!!

Aren’t I cool? Jokes aside, I have recently decided to add to my lovely collection of what my mum calls “junk”. Such a joker huh?

Above is a computer I have just purchased. I already have some XP machines, for example the Dell Optiplex 745, and a lovely old Toshiba laptop which my mum gave to me a few years back. I did have a Samsung A10 years ago, but I have no clue where that went either.

I have some pretty stupid (as some put it) ideas for this lovely relic:

• Use it at college and really annoy my teachers!
• Get Discord working using a somewhat functional web browser (e.g. Supermium)
• Install stupid software and play around with Windows XP even more.
• Try and get Minecraft working on this stone-age device

Not just this laptop, I have also found a lovely (huge) expansion for my collection. This includes:

• 3 Desktop
• 3 Laptops

All Windows XP compatible – and here’s the fun thing: I don’t have any IDE HDDs, so I’m a bit stuck until I find some decent IDE HDDs.

Once you get used to it, you can – if needed – only use the basic commands within vim and still be faster than your average IDE, or text editor whichever you prefer really.

Above is my installation of vim on my ThinkPad T470p, which is ironically named “thiccpad“. Makes me crack a laugh every time. Now, vim is a wonderful piece of software since it has the option to be expanded more than Windows Notepad (duh), or even just about any version of iOS, MacOS, or Windows – probably.

Either way, using the pretty simple .vimrc file, you can control every single aspect of your vim installation, but for now let’s focus on the basics shall we?

Installation

On an Arch-based distro:

• pacman -Sy vim

On a Debian-based distro:

• apt-get install vim -y

Then simply run the command vim in your terminal and boom, you’re in. That’s the easy part done.

Basic Use (CMD/s)

Congratulations, most people give up and turn off the computer just to leave vim at this point because they can’t figure out that they need to type :q to leave vim, or to quit and save while in a file :wq, or even to quit but not save changes while in a file :q!

Remember! To execute a command, or to enter NORMAL mode, press the ESC or escape key. To enter insert mode, press the i key.

To open a file, you’d simply run :o <path_to_file> , alternatively if you have the plugin called NERDTree, you’d run :NERDTree to open the navigation menu (simples!).

To save to a specific file, use the :sav <path_to_file> command. Fun right?

Plugins, etc blah blah nerdy mumbo jumbo

If you want to use plugins with vim, you’ll need to use a plugin manager, or VIM 8+’s built-in package management feature.

Remember, you’ll need to configure a .vimrc file for any plugins to work, however its really not that hard to configure.

• Pathogen
• Vundle
• Vim-Plug

These are some popular VIM package managers. Personally I use Vundle, but have a look through and pick whichever one sparks your fancy. I’m not going to go into plugin installation within this post (sorry lol)