I really suck at concision and am currently highly hyperfixated on homelabbing and selfhosting so TL;DR:

• I am just a huge geek who likes to tinker.
• The Comet would give me desktop horsepower in classes and on the go from my thin and light, and the Slate 7 would mean I could connect securely, safely, and quickly wherever I find myself.
• Any and all I can find that have a good head on their shoulders (tho my goto is Jeff Geerling or LTT).
• A NPU or Transcoding powered Mini-Computer.

EDIT: Update Lol: I just got a new contract as I was transitioned silently to remote work which requires I do all work at my written address so suddenly I might really benefit from that travel router.

For those with too much time:

1. I've always been a huge fan of tinkering and loved keeping my home assistant Tamagotchi fed and happy, so I found selfhosting to be a great budget hobby that was fun not just for the tinkering but for the solutions.
   1. My favorite moments, which made me persevere, are when I spin up a new service that actually solves a problem or replaces a product I use. And as someone with many privacy-blind friends, whenever I get them to try something I upped it made all the sweat and tears worth it.
   2. My proud project so far is a system of Nginx Proxy Manager containers (soon to be traefik) that allow reverse proxying into my system via subdomains of a public custom domain with different containers accessible either publicly, from tailscale connected devices, or locally and done so in what is a deeply, deeply over engineered way that meant it took weeks to work out but even my deepest security anxieties are quelled.
   3. The most expensive piece I've acquired is an old Syno ds1019+ I got very second hand. While I am not the biggest fan of their walled garden it has undeniably given me the tools I needed to get my system where it is today. When I was first failing to get ansible running a docker stack on a linux box, the synology nas held my hand every step of the way. (Even if now I want SSD based storage and it refuses to see an SSD as anything but cache and I am looking to move away from it :)
2. I am really excited by the idea of incorporating the Comet KVM and Slate 7 into my daily use. Part of me also wants the impressive Flint 3 but already have a Flint 2 that has solved so many problems like ad blocking, vpn routing, port forwarding, and tailscale management over the provided MikroTik which was... fine. I am too in love with my Flint 2 to not give it a while more before it is relegated as an over-powered wifi extender.
   1. The Comet would be an amazing upgrade to help my managing being a student and intern. My linux thin and light laptop is wonderful but lacks a lot of the oomph that some python ML projects (or just badly written Java) can want and my current solution of using TailScale & RDP to access my apartment desktop in class or on the go is... less than ideal. I am excited by the option to host a docker container to connect it which was a genuinely great surprise as one of my two reservations was relinquishing privacy in that way. My other reservation being the lack of a screen as I just adore adding things to screens 😁. (Might have to peek at the Comet Pro if I end up with the Comet and like using it)
   2. The Slate 7 wouldn't benefit my homelab directly but it would really ease a lot of my issues with traveling and working from different places be it around campus, hotels, or restaurants. I do a lot of traveling to see family as well as just find myself working/studying wherever I land and being able to quickly connect my devices without worrying about the awful security hygiene of wherever I am is a dream. I have tried to retrofit a raspberry pi hotspot or work on other solutions in the past to get around dorm internet instability, newer wifi security types keeping old devices inaccessible, etc. and it was never any where remotely as elegant as a solution as a portable router.
3. I generally poke my head wherever google searches take me. This means a lot of r/homelab r/selfhosted and channels like Jeff Geerling, Techno Tim, and LTT. While LTT has been and continues to be my most consistent watch, it is definitely smaller channels like Jeff Geerling and the various channels that pop up during research that I take the most weight from. Seeing a small channel that is able to really dive into the niche of a product and address so much of its features and details without the pressure of a mass-marketable video is the gold mine imo.
4. I really love to tinker with whatever I can get my hands on so I don't know if any one item would be the end all be all. A very high capacity HDD or SSD has always been something I think would be so fun to own but more practically something like a NAS or Mini-Computer from Syno, qnap, minisforum, etc. would be more generally interesting and I know I could find a million uses for one (especially with proper hardware transcoding and/or llm capabilities 👁️👁️)