# Holiday 2015 "Special" Purchase Regret Confession Thread



## drmike (Nov 27, 2015)

What has anyone here bought so far via holiday specials?  Regretting or loving any of your purchases so far?


I've bought stuff, but nothing from a special yet.


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## MikeA (Nov 27, 2015)

I bought a discounted pizza, if that counts. I don't have any plans to purchase any physical items right now, maybe a phone if mine cracks more than it is, but surely it'll last another few months. Some of the deals on high capacity SSDs are pretty tempting...


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## Munzy (Nov 28, 2015)

I actually bought nothing!


I was looking at a delimiter blade server though, decided an nearly empty 32 gig and 48 gig server  needed to be filled first <.<


Sincerely,


Munzy


p.s. https://git.enjen.net/Munzy/DST-Caves-Windows


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## KuJoe (Nov 28, 2015)

I bought too much stuff and I can't remember half of it. 


I just finished buying another 2TB drive to replace my failing 1TB drive in my old NAS. I bought 2 RamNode VPSs for some reason. Got a pair of Amazon Fire 7" and cases for both. Shoelaces, elliptical machine, entertainment center, and all of my daughter's Christmas presents for this year.


I have 3 things in my Newegg cart, 2 things in my AliExpress cart, and 2 things in my AmeriDroid cart still but I'm not 100% on those choices yet. Was looking for a good deal on a dedicated server to give away free VPSs on but nothing worth paying annually for.


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## HalfEatenPie (Nov 28, 2015)

KuJoe said:


> I bought too much stuff and I can't remember half of it.
> 
> 
> I just finished buying another 2TB drive to replace my failing 1TB drive in my old NAS. I bought 2 RamNode VPSs for some reason. Got a pair of Amazon Fire 7" and cases for both. Shoelaces, elliptical machine, entertainment center, and all of my daughter's Christmas presents for this year.
> ...



I bought a VPS and then a dedi 


The Quickpacket 40/month Dual L5520 looked so good.  I kinda just had to pull the trigger for LA.


There's also Turnkey's 10/month (when paid yearly) server goign on right now.


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## willie (Nov 28, 2015)

KuJoe said:


> IWas looking for a good deal on a dedicated server to give away free VPSs on but nothing worth paying annually for.



Delimiter has a pretty attractive special for that.  Dual E5420, 16GB ram, 1TB HDD or 120GB SSD, 10TB BW, 1x ipv4 and /64 ipv6, at $200 a year ($16.66/month).  I don't know what additional ipv4's would cost, but if a VPS is free, then a LES-like NAT setup might be good enough.  Order link.


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## KuJoe (Nov 30, 2015)

willie said:


> Delimiter has a pretty attractive special for that.  Dual E5420, 16GB ram, 1TB HDD or 120GB SSD, 10TB BW, 1x ipv4 and /64 ipv6, at $200 a year ($16.66/month).  I don't know what additional ipv4's would cost, but if a VPS is free, then a LES-like NAT setup might be good enough.  Order link.



I did consider that. It really sucks when payday falls on Cyber Monday.


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## TheLinuxBug (Nov 30, 2015)

I bought some house slippers, a new wall mount for my 27" screen so I can get it off my desk and got a cheap 120GB SSD and 35$ wireless video cam from Newegg.


Also pre-orded one of these http://getchip.com as they are now available for pre-order 


Comes to $14.00 USD shipped for US Buyers.  Ships in June.


Cheers!


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## KuJoe (Nov 30, 2015)

TheLinuxBug said:


> I bought some house slippers, a new wall mount for my 27" screen so I can get it off my desk and got a cheap 120GB SSD and 35$ wireless video cam from Newegg.
> 
> 
> Also pre-orded one of these http://getchip.com as they are now available for pre-order
> ...



OMG, almost bought one but the HDMI adapter is more expensive the the device and shipping combined.


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## TheLinuxBug (Nov 30, 2015)

KuJoe said:


> OMG, almost bought one but the HDMI adapter is more expensive the the device and shipping combined.



Yeah, I don't know, to be honest I have no real need for it, I just thought it would be cool to play with for a bit and then give to my Nephew. 


Considering I also bought a pcDuino3 Nano Lite for $15.00 on Amazon and its twice as powerful (though lacks the WiFi adapter) I really didn't need a C.H.I.P. But I do figure it will be a fun toy.


I don't like that the HDMI/VGA adapter is separate, I believe they should just give you one or the other or have put HDMI directly on the board... but that's me, I am sure they have their reasons.


Cheers!


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## drmike (Nov 30, 2015)

I said no to CHIP since it's entirely unclear when I'd ever see such delivered.


Feeling I missed out, I went and unplugged a half dozen ARM devices idling and having a build party soon


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## KuJoe (Nov 30, 2015)

Damn, just placed another order with Newegg and Amazon. Time to go to sleep before I get more junk I need but shouldn't be buying.


Just going to leave this here for those of you who need a few more USB sticks... http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.2592754


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## TheLinuxBug (Nov 30, 2015)

I will warn you about ordering on Newegg today, I keep a pretty close eye on prices for various things, while there may be a few good deals, if you pay close attention prices have actually gone up from the past few days and they have actually removed several of their best deals (like the 16GB microsd 3x bundle for ~$13).  A lot of the SSD drives have actually gone up in price by $5+ compared to the sales over the last week.


Don't get me wrong, I like Newegg, but some of their pricing habits are quite abhorrent.  I saw a 120GB SSD drive over a 1 month period go from $60 all the way down to $37.99 and if you watch some of the items you will see they change prices as often as every 6 hours in some cases or in general at the start of each day.  This has resulted many times in me not purchasing hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise as I would shop during a day for most of the stuff I needed knowing I needed a few more things in the morning only to wake up and have the item completely disappear or all the sudden it is now $20 more expensive for no reason.  After the first few times and getting frustrated I just went to ordering things from Amazon more often as their prices are not quite as volatile and tend to be the same for more than a few hours at a time.


 I love Newegg I just can't stand the whole bait and switch method they use.  They know a lot of people will want to look and wait and think about their purchase and by the time they do, they can now rip you for it at a higher price because you decided not to immediately purchase. What is worse is by now in your mind you know you want it, so you buy anyways.  To me this is a bit scammy and occurs on any item with a  promotion on it.  Then 3 days later the price will drop back down, why it had to be $10 more for those 3 days... well to scam people out of their money who waited...


/rant


anyways, enjoy your cyber monday shopping!


Cheers!


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## KuJoe (Nov 30, 2015)

I think the reason for Newegg's pricing is to match Amazon as closely as possible. Before we buy SSDs we check both Newegg and Amazon and if Amazon is cheaper than Newegg for the same drive then they will change their price to match it (or within a few dollars of it) fairly quickly. Wouldn't be surprised if they did this with other hardware also.


EDIT: Also, Newegg lets me pay with Paypal and doesn't charge sales tax so I try to buy from them whenever I can unless I need the item today in which case I'll order from Amazon for free same day shipping (I get free 2 day shipping for both already).


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## willie (Dec 1, 2015)

I don't see the need for HDMI on most of those little ARM boards.  I'd want to run them headless.  I guess it's a worthwhile feature on some of them (like the RPI 2) if someone wants a mini desktop, but on something like the Pi Zero of CHIP, they may as well leave it off.


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## KuJoe (Dec 1, 2015)

willie said:


> I don't see the need for HDMI on most of those little ARM boards.  I'd want to run them headless.  I guess it's a worthwhile feature on some of them (like the RPI 2) if someone wants a mini desktop, but on something like the Pi Zero of CHIP, they may as well leave it off.



The little guys are perfect thin clients and that's what I use them for mostly. They are like 8 core, 72GB RAM, 6x SSD RAID10, 1Gbps uplink little monsters. The only device I run headless is my RPi2 which basically just runs Observium and some other random monitoring apps.


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## willie (Dec 1, 2015)

I think if you want to run a browser on a thin client, you want an rpi2 or similar, since browsers and web sites have become so slow and bloated.  The rpi2 has 3x-4x the cpu speed of the zero and the extra cost isn't that noticable once you add the monitor, keyboard, mouse, desk/chair space, etc.  I'd even look at a NUC style computer which is much more powerful than those arm boards.


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## KuJoe (Dec 1, 2015)

@willie why would you run a browser on a thin client though? That defeats the purpose of using a thin client. And of course there's always something better out there, that doesn't change how fun it is to do more with less.


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## drmike (Dec 1, 2015)

I use the ARM stuff still for servers.  All CLI.


Due to general distro issues with one board I have here I have an Ubuntu desktop running.  It works actually pretty good... Good enough that I've considered using it a second terminal for random things like browsing.  That's on a 2GB of RAM quad core board mind you...


I picked up a Pi Zero at higher price just cause.  Waiting for it to arrive.  I am keen on different form factors.  I like this Pi Zero form factor and want to experiment with stacking them and some concepts.  For now, it's going to USB tether to another ARM device.  That idea of USB-everything is my new kick, we'll see if the power envelope can handle it.


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## RosenHost (Dec 17, 2015)

I bought a managed VPS from Hudson Valley Host, a reseller account from InnoHosting, an OCZ SSD from Amazon. Still no use of any of them. SSD has not yet arrived (International Shipping)


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## GIANT_CRAB (Dec 17, 2015)

drmike said:


> I use the ARM stuff still for servers.  All CLI.
> 
> 
> Due to general distro issues with one board I have here I have an Ubuntu desktop running.  It works actually pretty good... Good enough that I've considered using it a second terminal for random things like browsing.  That's on a 2GB of RAM quad core board mind you...
> ...



I avoid using Ubuntu due to the privacy issues they had. You might wanna take a look at running Fedora on ARM. There's also a Fedora Remix named Pidora which runs pretty well on Raspberry Pi.


There are plenty of things to explore with ARMs. Proves that things can run without LEGs; as long as they got ARMs.


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## ChrisM (Dec 17, 2015)

Buying the higher level apple watch but getting it with the sports band. 


I thought it felt better then the other bands but after a while it just irritates my arm.


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## drmike (Dec 17, 2015)

I ordered one of these:




Banana Pi R1 (BPi-R1)


This is to free up my Odroid - reclaim it as thin client perhaps. More likely it will just be a slim distro with desktop to offset the crazy power hungry workstation I have on 24/7 in other office. 


The BPi-R1 will be running my gateway.  Rules, blocked stuff, filtering, DNS, VPS, etc...


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## KuJoe (Dec 17, 2015)

Arrived yesterday, haven't had a change to play with them yet or do any tests. 



Spoiler



Raspberry Pi 2, Banana Pi Pro
ODroid C1, ODroid C1+, ODroid U2


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## drmike (Dec 17, 2015)

Teehee! @KuJoe and what was the tab on that?  Way under $500 right?


The U2 I have here - always mess up the model number.  Great unit there.


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## drmike (Jan 7, 2016)

GIANT_CRAB said:


> I avoid using Ubuntu due to the privacy issues they had. You might wanna take a look at running Fedora on ARM. There's also a Fedora Remix named Pidora which runs pretty well on Raspberry Pi.
> 
> 
> There are plenty of things to explore with ARMs. Proves that things can run without LEGs; as long as they got ARMs.



The privacy issue = baking Amazon into the desktop  ?  They're doing a current 180 degree turn on that bad choice.


I'll give Pidora a look.   Still partial to the Debian family since there is so much how-to out there that just works.


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## GIANT_CRAB (Jan 7, 2016)

drmike said:


> The privacy issue = baking Amazon into the desktop  ?  They're doing a current 180 degree turn on that bad choice.
> 
> 
> I'll give Pidora a look.   Still partial to the Debian family since there is so much how-to out there that just works.



Privacy issues aside, Ubuntu founder is also not very directly - keep giving very long answers to questions regarding features, which in the end doesn't really answer the question well. (Answers are typically like "maybe" instead of just direct yes/no) I find this quite annoying.


Not through a direct experience but was told this by someone who had long years working at Red Hat. Of course, there might be some bias-ness.


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## wlanboy (Jan 10, 2016)

A STM32 F1 series microcontroller. 
Still have too less 3.3V sensors, BT boards, Wlan boards, ...


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