I have a desktop two floors away in my basement. I got a steal on an HDBaseT extender which includes 4K@60hz HDMI and USB 2.0 over a single cat6 cable. It works pretty well in my case, but you can see from those specs there are some compromises. If you could pass through a single wall you can leverage more standard cabling and higher speeds.
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For those interested in trying a Mac or going down the Mac + External Drive route, Mac Miniās are currently on sale in the UK for Ā£539: Amazon.co.uk
Arguably one of the best value Macs ever made, given Appleās history of usually charging extremely over-inflated prices. I guess they want to use the Mini to get people into the Apple eco-system.
You can use this guide to install macOS on an external dive and set your Mac to boot from it: Install macOS on an external storage device and use it as a startup disk ā Apple Support (UK)
I tested it with a standard USB-C external SSD (such as this 2TB Crucial which is just Ā£119) as well as one in a TB4 enclosure (more expensive but faster) and it worked fine with both (You wonāt need a faster TB4 drive unless you are editing 4K footage or doing something that requires something quicker than 350MB/s).
The added bonus is if youāre considering becoming a digital nomad the Mini would be perfect to act as a server (with something like Apple Remote Desktop) to let you dial into it whenever you need any of your files.
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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Digital Nomads & Frequent Travellers (Tips/Advice/Chat)
Good to know. I just saw that ACASIS also offers enclosures for 2 disks (with RAID support)
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BTW it does seem like upgrading the onboard storage is not a very complex procedure (for those that can microsolder), if you can get hold of the storage NANDs that are compatible. Even more so for minis it seems that the chips are not soldered on the mainboard but use a proprietary M.2-like board, so if you can get a hold of one with higher capacity, replacing it is very trivial.
Have you looked perhaps at local repair shops offering such services in UK? I will have to upgrade mine in a few years as 128GB storage NANDs that have a maximum of 150 TBW paired with not enough RAM will kill those chips fast.
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Good option if you want RAID Nic, tho Iād probably stick to time machine for backups, and possibly prefer separate enclosures to prevent overheating if I need more than a single drive.
You invalidate the warranty if you do that Dav and also lose many of the benefits of using an external drive (physical security, resale value, resale risk, etc)
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Speaking of which, do you have a recommendation for an external fan that can be used to f.ex. blow on the backside of an all-in-one PC during the summer? My iMac Pro is whizzing hard most of the summer and it absolutely destroyed my desire to work on it (weāre talking that both of its fans almost never drop below 2200 RPM 
) . Sure I can close the door and turn on the AC and it calms down in 5-10 minutes butā¦ you know, summer? Fresh air, ability to see the greenery outside etc.? 
Iāve been trying to find an actually silent (or minimally noisy, say maximum 25-30 dB) external fan for a while and give up every time. Maybe I am not doing something right.
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I would try cleaning the fans first - dirt build up can slow them down. But yeah, I suspect Apple intentionally put old intel mac fans into overdrive as my MBP started doing the same and for things that it never needed a fan on for previously.
I did end up buying one of these:
https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B01DZYUSEA
They are relatively quiet. But honestly, I would just think about selling the iMac and getting a base model Mac Mini if you have a decent monitor (or able to convert the iMac) - the base model Minis are better than our throttled intel Macs imo, at least in terms of QoL/general use.
If Apple offer 14 day money-back then why not give one a goā¦
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Primary
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900 (12 cores/24 threads)
- GPU: NVidia RTX 3090
- RAM: 32GB
- Display: 43" Dell
u4320qP4317q - Input: Logitech ERGO k860 (en-UK layout)
- OS: Manjoro with KDE
Secondary
Asus Zenbook 13.3", 4 core, 16GB.
Used for developing when Iām out and about, like sitting at a cafe. Obviously noticably slower than my main system, but works remarkably well for most tasks.
Software
Iām just listing the ānon-obviousā stuff that I find a bit extra interesting, that not everyone might be using.
- TMuxinator - Great shell session manager. I always create a config for each project I work on so I can simply do
mux ls(as an example), to bring up exactly the editor panes I want, start the apps I require etc etc. - Taskfile - Simple but increadibly useful task runner. I canāt be bothered to remember a lot of shell commands, so I collect them all in my
Taskfile.yml. I can then for example do things simply by typingt psqlto connect to my Postgres server running in Docker (just as an example). It might sounds like a small thing, but Iām extremely happy that I have it. A bonus is that just typingtgives me a list of all my defined tasks, and a little description of what they do. - Lokalize - Localization software for handling my .po files.
- rkvm - A virtual KVM that works well with Wayland (it actually doesnāt care about display server). I sometimes prop up my laptop next to my main screen if I need more screen real estate. This happens very rarely, but when it does, I love using rkvm.
Room for improvement
Everything is really fast and enjoyable except one thing - Iām using CLDR for my l10n, and itās slooooow. Every time I use gettext to extract strings to .po files Iām greeted by āGenerating Ls.Cldr for 3 localesā¦ā, and it takes like 5 seconds on my primary, and up to 30 seconds on my secondary system(!). This makes l10n a bit of a drag.
If anyone has any tips here Iād be most grateful 
Edit: I got the monitor model wrong, fixed that.
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Itās still a $8000 machine and itās still my main one. And itās an all-in-one PC, pretty tightly packed inside too. It is a risky endeavor and I will not event attempt it.
I suspect not many around will even dare opening it up if I mention how much it costs and that Iād like a compensation if they bust it. And mind you, here on the Balkans we have some mighty fine repairmen. They just open stuff up and help, they are not impressed by brands or anything else really.
But Appleās craftsmanship makes repairing their stuff difficult.
Weāll see. I want to do it but I am pretty afraid and I am absolutely not ready to just move everything to my Linux laptop just yet. So it would be a folly to just risk blindly.
Thanks for this. 
Iāll research it and similar ones.
Extremely difficult here in Bulgaria. I have to drop the price from $8000 to like $2000 and people will still send me snark messages asking me if the machine can dig gold and cook food (yes, this happens). The second-hand market here is brutal, if itās above 500 EUR usually nobody will buy it. People see second-hand tech as a way to get cheap deals and nothing else. So yeah, not happening unless I get super lucky.
Iāll still list it when the time comes though.
I donāt. That would be another sizeable expense. iMac Proās display is amazing and I suspect Iāll never truly replace it fully but oh well. [sighs]
This is not a thing in Eastern Europe. You buy it, itās yours, no returns. Itās not legally expressed of course but I knew people who took shop owners to court over a returnā¦ and lost.
As Eminem famously sang: āYou got one shotā.
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I felt the same way about my MBP which was heavily specād, however it just became unusable to the point I just got the Mini out of frustration to see if it was as good as people were saying it was - it was. It can do pretty much everything I used the MBP for, and quicker and smoother. So for all intents and purposes it is a better machine based on what my MBP had become (useless).
Now would I say the same if I was comparing the Mac Mini to when my MBP was brand new (before all of Appleās introduced obsolescence) absolutely not! The MBP on day one (and for the first year) was a beast. Apps opened instantly, it unzipped files very quickly, copied files to external drives super fast, could handle large graphical files, could play 4K videos without the fans coming on etc.
I also suspect we may have been mislead about Apple Silicon - I need to do tests for this but I am fairly sure when I first got my MBP I could transfer around 1.5TB in just over an hour, but doing the same with Apple Silicon (using the same external drive) takes significantly longer. It also has problems with Spotlight where it keeps forgetting files or they arenāt getting indexed. However I accept this is atm just a hunch, and unfortunately we donāt really have a choice - we can only buy Apple Silicon devices now and Intel Macs are just too painful to use.
If you can get $2K for your iMac you could buy a Mini and a nice ultra wide Del monitor for that 
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Nice monitor Erik - do you seat it further back on the desk? Do you do video editing as well? What made you opt for a 43" display?
Yeah, itās definitely pretty far back on the desk
Back when I got it, ultra-wides with high resolution werenāt that common at a reasonable price point, so I looked around a bit and found this one. The way I arrange my windows when developing really benefits from having a bit of extra height rather that width, so Iāve always been a bit particular towards ātallā monitors, rather than the extra wide ones.
Iām sure thatās just a matter of habit though. Iād probably come up with some nice way to arrange my stuff if I was using an ultra-wide too.
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Fair point, that could work. But I admit I donāt want to invest in Apple for much longer. Iāll buy the next iPhone and one Macbook and thatās going to be it and Iāll migrate away over the course of the next several years.
Or maybe I am just procrastinating some really important other things now and am hand-waving hard.
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