This week I have been trying to convince myself I need to buy another mini PC.

My Existing N100 Mini PC

I have an Intel N100 mini PC which over the years I have used for various roles. It started off life as a Windows 11 desktop PC I used for basic web browsing and office-type tasks. However this soon got replaced with Ubuntu when I started using it as a development machine when my old PC broke down. Despite the small size and low power of the processor, it was more than enough to power VS Code for web and Flutter development.

With the arrival of my Mac Mini, I repurposed the Mini PC as a media server, running Plex to stream music and movies. It worked well but as I started to install more self hosting applications on the Mac Mini I moved Plex onto that and the N100 was left unused for a while. I am currently thinking about installing Proxmox on it to run some containers, but I haven’t got around to it yet.

New Gaming Mini PC

After watching this Youtube video I have been considering getting a mini PC to use as a living room PC. Modern processors with integrated graphics are powerful enough to play most games at 1080p on low settings. And with the release of the new Steam OS I think it would rival a games console and allow me to play my existing games library without having to buy a new console.

I can’t decide if a Radeon 740M (as featured in the video) is powerful enough for my needs, or if I should look for something with a 780M, which is more powerful but also more expensive. While I’m happy to spend a couple of hundred pound on a mini PC, when it starts to get to the £500 mark I feel I’m better investing the money in a full size PC which would be more powerful and upgradable in the future.

Github Copilot Fun

On Friday, Github Copilot decided it was not going to work any longer. An Issue was causing users to be unable to use the free tier of the service if they previously had a paid subscription. I decided to move back to Android Studio for a few days to see how well Gemini Code Assist works with Flutter. I’ll update on this next week.

What Else?

Nothing else of note this week, just continuing to work on my Flutter app.