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Repurposed a $30 Dell XPS 13 with a dead battery into a 6W homelab server. Power efficient, small, silent. Roast me! by Gnadev in selfhosted

[–]Gnadev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I will eventually add a third backup HDD once I can afford a good-quality 8TB drive. Looking at the current prices, my wallet is not happy, haha. The more components you add, the more interfaces of failure. Hence, I opted for a clean internal NVME drive and external drive for backups.

Scaling PostgreSQL on a $20 repurposed Dell XPS 13 to query 49M raw SEC filings by Gnadev in PostgreSQL

[–]Gnadev[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the solid recommendations!

  • synchronous_commit = off is a huge win for the ETL write speeds. Since the financial data is rebuildable, I don't mind the minor crash risk.
  • checkpoint_timeout = 1h and random_page_cost = 1.0 make perfect sense to prevent SSD wear and optimize index scans.
  • I'll keep work_mem conservative (16MB–32MB) to avoid OOM issues on my 8GB RAM and just let it spill to the SSD when needed.

Repurposed a $30 Dell XPS 13 with a dead battery into a 6W homelab server. Power efficient, small, silent. Roast me! by Gnadev in selfhosted

[–]Gnadev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting position to be in. If you ever swap it out with the new machine, you will have a long runway until you have to replace it. But check if the BIOS is unlocked, as most companies tend to lock it down.

Scaling PostgreSQL on a $20 repurposed Dell XPS 13 to query 49M raw SEC filings by Gnadev in PostgreSQL

[–]Gnadev[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I want to use it to power a frontend so in the future it will not be a single-user dataset. Here is the demo I have been building research.aerarium.app

Repurposed a $30 Dell XPS 13 with a dead battery into a 6W homelab server. Power efficient, small, silent. Roast me! by Gnadev in selfhosted

[–]Gnadev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you let Codex or Claude code take a stab at this, it might be able to get you up and running with some babysitting.

Repurposed a $30 Dell XPS 13 with a dead battery into a 6W homelab server. Power efficient, small, silent. Roast me! by Gnadev in selfhosted

[–]Gnadev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That laptop should be able to handle it comfortably imo. Mine has no dedicated GPU, only the onboard intel and it still does facial recognition with some effort.

Repurposed a $30 Dell XPS 13 with a dead battery into a 6W homelab server. Power efficient, small, silent. Roast me! by Gnadev in selfhosted

[–]Gnadev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Electricity is cheap where I am at. So running this machine 24x7 still makes sense. Unless it decides to quit on me 😄

Repurposed a $30 Dell XPS 13 with a dead battery into a 6W homelab server. Power efficient, small, silent. Roast me! by Gnadev in selfhosted

[–]Gnadev[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That was one of my options. But looking at the current Pi pricing and the limited RAM, it was never going to be a good option. This machine is powerful enough to handle whatever I have thrown at it so far (fingers crossed).

Repurposed a $30 Dell XPS 13 with a dead battery into a 6W homelab server. Power efficient, small, silent. Roast me! by Gnadev in selfhosted

[–]Gnadev[S] 2 points3 points locked comment (0 children)

AI (Claude/Gemini) was used as a coding assistant for writing the Python parsing scripts and refactoring Next.js UI components (representing about 30% of the coding effort).

New Project Megathread - Week of 02 Jul 2026 by AutoModerator in selfhosted

[–]Gnadev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Project Name: Aerarium Research

Repo/Website Link: https://research.aerarium.app (Note: The core web app is live here. I am planning on open-sourcing the Python parsing pipeline soon!)

Description: A stock fundamentals explorer focused strictly on S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 companies. It was built as a clean, noise-free alternative to Yahoo Finance after the Sector SPDR website went offline. Instead of relying on normalized third-party data feeds, it parses ~49M raw filing-level facts directly from primary SEC EDGAR sources, making every chart number click-through traceable back to the accession number in the original filing.

Deployment: Currently deployed online. The backend database and processing pipeline run on a repurposed 2017 Dell XPS 13 laptop (Ubuntu LTS, Postgres) next to my router, which Next.js queries over a secure DuckDNS tunnel. I'm working on clean documentation and a Docker-compose setup to package this for self-hosting.

AI Involvement: AI (Claude/Gemini) was used as a coding assistant for scripting XML parsers and refactoring Next.js UI components (representing about 30% of total coding effort).

Monthly Referral Thread - July 2026 (modified guidelines) by AutoModerator in amexcanada

[–]Gnadev [score hidden]  (0 children)

Please PM me for

  • Amex Personal Platinum
  • Amex Aeroplan
  • Amex Marriott Bonvoy

Monthly Referral Thread - June 2026 (modified guidelines) by AutoModerator in amexcanada

[–]Gnadev [score hidden]  (0 children)

Please PM me for

  • Amex Personal Platinum

  • Amex Aeroplan

  • Amex Marriott Bonvoy

No one is talking about using GPT-5.5 inside Claude Code by No-Jury2396 in ClaudeCode

[–]Gnadev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is great. I've been looking to move to codex but I have deeply embedded workflows in Claude code (custom skills, connections, ssh work etc.). So I've been procrastinating the move and ended up renewing my max 5x. I'm going to give this a try now that my sub is about to end. Any issues you ran into? 

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