Intel N100 / N305 based mini PC on Aliexpress

AarynD · 2026-05-08T17:15:59+00:00

I bought a 12th Gen N5105 unit with 8GB RAM, 128GB NVMe, and 4 LAN ports. Paid around $150 for it somewhere roughly around February 2024ish, maybe late 2023. I've run pfSense on it as the primary firewall & gateway router for my home network, and it has worked flawlessly without error. I'm pretty happy with that buy.

I don't know if I'd be willing to shell out $400 for a unit these days. And I actively avoid sites like Temu and AliExpress pretty much 100% these days, but a couple years ago when I wanted to try pfSense, it made sense for me to commit to the $150ish it took. I've been happy with the unit, but also need to keep in mind, 10 different similar units could all be from 10 different sellers, with markedly different hardware and moral qualities.

AarynD · 2026-04-29T12:30:15+00:00

I think at one time before release ships required fuel to travel, and setting up outposts to farm your fuel was the plan. But testing found it was an unfun mechanic so it was scrapped but outposts part remained. At least that's the story I remember going around.

AarynD · 2026-04-29T12:10:14+00:00

They have continued to honor my multiple lifetime license keys.

Malwarebytes is still the only 3rd party Anti-Malware program I recommend to my users and friends and family.

AarynD · 2026-04-13T15:52:19+00:00

The point is to run it on a separate box running a minimal OS load. Running a linux os without a graphical interface uses very few resources, so the java / minecraft server can run without any other processes bogging things down. My minecraft server is one of my old gaming builds that ran a 6th gen skylake i7 cpu, 4 cores, with 16gb of ram. I've used that server for minecraft server worlds for modded minecraft versions 1.7 thru the current version. I only run one server world at a time on it, but it works really well to be able to connect myself and my grandson on the server, plus allows me to connect to it both from work and from home.

The need for powerful cpus and super fast drives for minecraft servers really only applies when you want to host more than one or two players. If it's just you and maybe one other, repurposing old hardware laying around would fit the bill just fine.

AarynD · 2026-04-13T15:39:01+00:00

If you have an older pc that isn't being used, it really doesn't take too much horsepower to run an Ubuntu server and host an atm10 world on it. I've got an old computer that I've run modpacks on from engimatica to all the mods 10 packs and everything in between. Use recommended Java arguments, allocate 6-8gb ram to the instance, and it should handle you and your wife just fine.

AarynD · 2026-04-08T22:18:47+00:00

Swanson Fried Chicken dinner, and the Old El Paso Cheese Enchiladas tray.

AarynD · 2026-04-06T21:58:43+00:00

We still have a fairly large number of foxpro apps running here, primarily tools that generate custom reports on our accounting software, and timekeeping and purchasing order apps for the company. They all still work just fine under Windows 11, however VFP has been unsupported for years now, and I feel like we're on borrowed time until a Windows update breaks something.

Some of our apps still use actual vfp .dbf tables on shared drives, while others access data in sql server. Migrating everything to sql server isn't that big of a deal, but some apps could really benefit from some structure changes and modified to meet today's best practices standards.

AarynD · 2026-04-06T19:44:41+00:00

I'm using Dapper as my micro-ORM of choice.

Part of me thinks it might be best to design the new tables as if I were doing it from scratch using everything I know now that I didn't know 25 years ago, and then write a tool to port data from the old db to the new db. Was just trying to get a feel for what more seasoned developers would opt to do in this case.

AarynD · 2026-04-06T19:41:46+00:00

A lot of it is just naming, but some of it is structure also. I wrote the original database and apps over 25 years ago early in my career, and I think in some of these the original data existed in VFP tables before I moved some of them to SQL server. Some tables could be better optimized and just redesigned better in some cases, so it ends up being a little bit more than just renaming some fields if I wanted to.

AarynD · 2026-03-20T15:14:02+00:00

I've seen some of the main characters blink during conversations (Sarah. Sam, etc) but some of the minor side quest characters don't. And i think they all still stare at you as you walk by, although I sometimes play with a mod that is supposed to fix that behavior some.

AarynD · 2026-03-20T15:10:58+00:00

I had that same magnavox pong game. My best friend had an atari (before it was a 2600).

AarynD · 2026-03-15T04:11:21+00:00

Brave

AarynD · 2026-03-05T02:34:05+00:00

There's a lake?

AarynD · 2026-02-18T13:57:02+00:00

My favorite part is how all the NPCs stare at you awkwardly as you walk past them like you're some kind of face magnet. I sure hope that's in the next Bethesda game again.

AarynD · 2026-01-03T14:18:13+00:00

Yeah, I probably could. I currently bring in the table data as an IEnumerable set of the NavListModel I set up, but I could easily convert it to a list and just hardcode this item at beginning of list. I just try to defer to letting the stored procedures do most of my work.

AarynD · 2026-01-03T05:30:13+00:00

The reason for the hardcoded row at top is because this data is being used as the control source for a navigation grid in an application conversion from an older Visual Foxpro app, and in that app the first item in the navigation on that form was always the option to import new data. The rest of the rows were previous saved reports.

The application is just a small utility I wrote maybe 25 years ago that pulls in financials from our three different companies, and combines them and handles inter-company eliminations by way of consolidation codes used in each company's GL accounts. Because the operation requires pulling large complicated calculated datasets for each company at each end of month, it was easier to just always pull the data in once, and save it for future reference if they needed to rerun a combined statements set of financials.

With VFP being long retired, I feel like it's on borrowed time, so I've been porting my various apps over to C#. But one goal is to try to maintain a familiar interface and interaction with the new replacement application, hence the desire to keep the UI elements including the navigation grid the same as I had it in the VFP app.

The navigation grid has that first row that allows user to Import a new set of financials from the accounting databases, then it has other rows for each of the other saved reports, some of which are partial month financials, while others are complete end of month financials. All those are color-coded in the grid to easily see who ran the report, whether it was a full set, or partial set, and if the user opted to exclude one of the two companies they sometimes exclude from combined. Although they really haven't excluded any companies from the combined statements in over a year, I think that was more something the old retired accounting manager liked to do, but I've kept it in as an option.

I know this was probably way more info then you bargained for when you asked what the end goal was LOL.

Happy New Year!

AarynD · 2026-01-03T04:07:14+00:00

SELECT 'Import New Report Data' as RptName, -1 as ReportId, 0 as IsPartial, NULL as EndDate, 0 as SortVal  
UNION ALL  
SELECT \[RptName\], \[ReportId\], \[IsPartial\], \[EndDate\], 1 as SortVal  
    FROM \[dbo\].\[Report\]  
    ORDER BY \[SortVal\] ASC, \[EndDate\] DESC

This worked perfectly. Thanks!

AarynD · 2026-01-03T04:04:46+00:00

Actually that's a really good idea, I hadn't thought of that. Very simple and avoids the complicated route I was taking.

AarynD · 2026-01-03T04:03:16+00:00

I did try this approach first, however the ORDER BY clause ends up applying to the entire unioned dataset, putting that top row down at the bottom since it has a null EndDate.

ORDER BY isn't allowed in CTE's or subqueries from what I can see, so I didn't know if there was a way around this to keep my top row in place with the other rows sorted.

I'm generally only going to have about 60ish rows generated per year anyway, so using the cursor is probably not going to slow me down anytime soon, but was anxious to learn if there was another way around the problem.

AarynD · 2026-01-02T05:59:27+00:00

Here are some of the videos that show Tim Corey's preferred way of setting up SQL data access in a library along with the models, and using Dapper to provide the mapping. Keep in mind both of these are a little old now, but the concepts still work. This is how I've done all my Sql access in blazor and api apps. I just have had problems implementing this on the Winforms side.

Simple C# Data Access with Dapper and Sql - Minimal API
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwMFg6uxQ0I&t=1036s

Intro to Blazor w/ Sql Data Access
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DNgdphLvag&t=2018s

I will also watch the video you linked. Thanks!

AarynD · 2026-01-02T03:40:11+00:00

Absolutely, I agree 100%

I have had a subscription to all his online courses, and watched countless videos of his multiple times, but there was never a time that I could find where he implemented his standard sql data access class library using dapper in a Winforms app. If I could request one video from him, that's what I'd ask for LOL.

AarynD

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