I’ve been thinking about dipping my toe in the homelabbing waters. Some parts have price history charts on sites like Camel Camel Camel and PC Part Picker, but I don’t know of any similar tool for used marketplaces like eBay, so I did my own manual data mining. Side note: If anyone knows of a more graceful way to conduct such searches, please let me know. I’m aware of web scraping tools such as Beautiful Soup, but such tools have always been just beyond my skill level to use on a whim like this.

I was looking specifically at US listings for the Lenovo ThinkCentre M720Q Tiny PC w/ i3-8100T or i5-8400T. I excluded “Or Best Offer” listings b/c I don’t think eBay shows the actual value of the offer that was ultimately accepted, they only show the original list price (somebody please correct me if I’m wrong about this). I only went back to the last couple days in July.

Figured I’d post the results of my research here in case it helps anybody else and as a sort of historical benchmark to compare against down the road.

eBay search link: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=lenovo+thinkcentre+m720q&_sacat=0&LH_PrefLoc=1&rt=nc&LH_Sold=1

Sold listings:

Background:

Typically when I’m trying something new on Linux, I search for an online guide that doesn’t assume I’m already an expert and looks like it should be easy enough for a pleb like myself to follow. Whatever it is I’m trying to do, it usually takes me multiple tries to get it right. Sometimes, when I’m venturing into new territory, I’ll derp around in a VM so I can take snapshots and then revert to the last good snapshot when something inevitably goes wrong. This approach works well for me most of the time.

But every now and then, I don’t want to use a VM, I want to use a spare laptop that I have lying around, “bare metal” if you will. It just feels more… authentic? My hesitation w/ practicing on spare laptops is that when I mess it up, the only way I know how to start over with a clean slate is to reinstall the OS and try again. This approach is not ideal b/c I mess up a lot - this is a fact of my life - and reinstalling the OS after every mistake takes a lot of time, to the point that I just stop persuing whatever project I was working on.

Question:

Is this a good use case for btrfs? How easy is it for a pleb like myself to take snapshots and then roll back to the previous state after jacking up a config file in /home or /etc or something?

Hello, I would like to request to be added as a mod for !rva@lemmy.world. I don’t know if it’s best practice to keep the (inactive) original mod on, but the current mod hasn’t posted or commented since November of last year, nor have they responded to any of my DMs. I don’t have any grand plans, I just want to help monitor for spam, potentially find another co-moderator to carry the torch in case I get hit by a bus, and hopefully grow it into a more active community. I currently co-moderate two other small communities - !caps@lemmy.world and !asoiaf@lemmy.world. Thanks!