Tech Setup

This page on my tech setup inspired by Henrik Nyh’s page. Last updated: 2024/02/01

Laptops

I have three laptops that I use regularly:

• My work laptop is a company-provided HP EliteBook 830 G7 with Intel i5-10310U processor, 16GB RAM & 256GB storage. It’s loaded with Windows 10 and a bunch of company-managed programs.
  • Since a recent Windows Update it has been noticably slower - Word takes 5 minutes to get past the splash screen, Excel sometimes doesn’t load, and Outlook freezes and hangs when you look at it wrong. It’s now a source of frustration for me at work.
• For leisure I go backwards and forwards between:
  • Dell Latitude 7290 - this is a second-hand laptop from eBay with Intel i5-7300U processor, 8GB RAM & 256GB storage. When I first got it I had it set up as a Hackintosh laptop which mostly worked alright - I couldn’t for the life of me get the trackpad physical buttons to work though, and that was the only thing on the laptop that wouldn’t work in macOS. For a while it had Linux Mint installed instead, but recently I’ve put Windows 11 on it and I’m setting it up to be my travel laptop.
  • Dell XPS 13 (9305) - Intel i7-1165G7 processor & 16GB RAM. I have it set up to dual boot with Windows 10 & Linux Mint, whilst managing to keep Secure Boot intact and functioning. What this means is whilst the Linux bootloader can see Windows, booting Windows this way wouldn’t work unless I key in the BitLocker decryption key every time - so I go with spamming F12 on bootup and use Dell’s startup menu instead.

Desktop

My desktop tower PC consists of the following key parts:

• ASUS PRIME B660M-A WIFI D4 - very budget-orientated motherboard here with DDR4 RAM support - DDR5 was new and expensive back then.
• Intel i5-12400F processor
• 32GB DDR4 RAM
• Gigabyte RTX 3060 with 12GB DRAM.
• A random front-header USB3 to back-bracket USB-C adapter - I forgot to check if the motherboard has a USB-C plug at the IO side (it didn’t) and otherwise I couldn’t plug my dock in.

To go with the desktop I have a set of Thrustmaster TCA Sidestick & Quadrant Airbus Edition for fulfilling my occasional flight simming needs.

Desk Setup

I work from home (my bedroom) two days a week and going into the office for the remaining three. So the desk setup is both for work and spare time stuff, and depending on what I’m doing either my laptop or my desktop PC would plug into it.

The centre to the setup is the Dell WD15 dock. It has a single USB-C input for connecting to my laptops (for both display, USB and audio) or my desktop (for USB and audio). I’ve brought this off eBay in 2020 but I’m considering replacing it. I’ll explain why in a bit.

Connecting to the dock are my two displays:

• My main display is Ilyama G-Master G2740QSU 27” 1440p monitor.
• My secondary (formerly main) display is HP 22es 21.5” 1080p monitor.

Unfortunately I wasn’t aware of this beforehand, but this setup isn’t fully supported by the WD15 dock. Whilst the dock can support a single 1440p monitor, it can’t drive both a 1440p monitor and a 1080p monitor both at their native resolution. Because of that plugging in my laptops would result in the following:

• Plugging in a HP work laptop gives me native resolution on my 1440p monitor, but only up to 1600x900 on my 1080p monitor. (blurry 1080p monitor)
• Plugging in the XPS under Windows gives me 1080p resolution on both monitors. (blurry 1440p monitor)
• Plugging in the XPS under Linux Mint initially gives me 1440p on my 1440p monitor and nothing on the 1080p monitor, but after some cable wrangling and settings changing it now gives me 1080p resolution on both monitors. (again, blurry 1440p monitor)
• I haven’t tried plugging my Latitude to it but I would guess it’s the same as the XPS.

Until I replace the dock with something more capable, I just have to live with a blurry monitor when I’ve plugged my laptops to it. The graphics card connects to the displays directly so there are no problems with using it with my desktop PC.

Other non-monitor things that plug into the dock are:

• Microsoft Wired Keyboard 600 - It’s an acceptable keyboard. Nothing extraordinary about it.
• Logitech M220 Wireless Mouse - I like its size and the silent buttons. Having said that I’ve had issues with the buttons and have since jammed in small pieces of folded up tissue paper to make sure the shell buttons actually click on the small buttons on the PCB.
• A pair of Infinity speakers - these actually came with my very first PC which was an IBM XP machine back in the early 2000s.

Sitting in a corner of the desk is a Raspberry Pi 4 that is my backup Pi-Hole server and also drives a small 128x32 OLED display for news feeds and weather.

Living Room

For TV I have a Sony Bravia 49” TV - KD-49XH8096 is its exact model name - great naming sense from Sony as always… It runs Android TV so it supports Plex natively, which is good because that’s what I use for my home media. Plugging into the TV are:

• PlayStation 4 - lightly used. Still need to finish Kingdom Hearts II on it. I have finally finished Kingdom Hearts II, yay?
• There is also a PlayStation 5 now that I bought on discount last holiday season. I enjoyed Astro’s Playroom very much, especially the GPU song.
• Dock for the OLED Switch - also lightly used.
• A Chinese TV box 🇨🇳 for when dad comes over - after reports of spyware on these kinds of boxes I applied a much more restrictive filter list for this box specifically on my Pi-Hole setup.

Other tech I have in the living room are:

• Sitting below the TV is a 128x32 Hanover flip dot display that used to be on a bus as a front destination display. It now functions as a clock with weather forecasts, and regular news updates via RSS feeds.
• To the side of the TV there is a Dell Optiplex 9020 Mini which I call DellBox - again from eBay with a i5-4590T processor, 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage. Originally it came with Windows 10 but I’ve put Ubuntu 22.04 on it - I use it to run a few Docker containers (including my primary Pi-Hole server, and Grocy to keep track of food in my freezer), a LAN Minecraft server and to drive the Hanover flip dot display I’ve mentioned earlier with a Python script.
• Sitting by the sofa is my Synology DS920+ NAS with a 8TB total usable volume. It hosts my Plex server as well as a few containers such as Bitwarden via Portainer.
• Also by the sofa is a EPSON SX420W printer. It prints stuff and scans stuff.

Portable Tech

I have two phones that I use regularly:

• Sony Xperia 1 iii is my main phone with my personal SIM fitted. Still on the big side but I’m really liking the tall aspect ratio.
  • The camera’s pretty good too (although my skills are not) - if you ignore the telephone lens which looks much paler in colour than the other two lenses.
  • 👍 to the headphone jack as well.
  • Pairing with the Xperia is a Galaxy Watch 4 that I’ve bought during a Black Friday sale.
• Recently I’ve gotten myself a Surface Duo on the cheap as my foldable tablet/ work phone, as it now has my work SIM instead of the company-provided Galaxy A52 (The A52 was very laggy at best). I use the Duo to talk notes at work meetings, light emailing when away from my work laptop, and as a e-reader on my commutes. I find this two screen approach to foldables more fascinating than the ‘mainstream’ flexible display. As a start, the screens shouldn’t suffer from fatigue failures after folding open and close too many times. But with rumors saying Microsoft looks to abondon this two separate screens approach it’s bit of a shame this class of foldables isn’t getting adapted by more OEMs.
  • For note taking I use the Metapen Surface Pen M1 - no pairing required, reasonable price, and charges via USB-C so it’s pretty good for my use.
  • My biggest issue with the Duo is unfortunately the software. The software is buggy:
    • Whilst walking, it would disable one of the two screens for no apparent reason.
    • If I fold the screens over sometimes the screen that’s underneath gets activated. 😑
  • All in all, great hardware, bad software. Bit of a theme with Microsoft…

I’ve also resurrected my Pixel 3 from my drawer and tried to turn it into my travel phone. Not only is it smaller than the Xperia, it also has eSIM support which lets me put on overseas data eSIMs such as Airalo on the phone, rather than faffing about with pre-paid SIMs.

For listening to music:

• I also have a bunch of iPods mostly off eBay, except my 1st gen iPod nano which is my first iPod ever, but I don’t use it because 1. the battery life sucks; 2. it might be a genuine fire hazard – the one I use mainly is a 5th gen iPod in black.
• For my noise-cancelling needs (commuting and planes) I use Sony WH-1000X M3. It also comes with a jack-to-jack lead so I can plug into my iPod as well. Having said that recently I’ve found myself gotten lazier and just paired it with my Xperia.
• For other times, including doing Teams calls at work, I use a pair of ZSN PRO X earbuds. It has a really low impendance so it’s very easy to drive.
  • For using it with my Duo for calls I need to couple it with a USB-C to jack adapter/DAC that I had from my previous main phone (Pixel 3) because the Duo doesn’t have one.
  • Having said that, I’ve also gotten lazier and just paired my Sony headphone to my Duo instead.

For games, in addition to the OLED Switch mentioned earlier I also have a Steam Deck - it’s the 256GB model, no internal mods, and a 256GB SD card. This I think is the single reason why the PS4 and OLED Switch have become so lightly used.

Recently I brought a used Sony a6400 camera body off eBay and (separately) a bunch of used lenses, in a bid to improve my photo-taking skills - we’ll see how that goes.