A few years ago I was trying to get into building my own small systems. I had successfully created a NAS and a Pi-hole (not exactly rocket science) and my next project was going to be a Hackintosh. I bought a $500 Chinese NUC (Lattepanda) and somehow managed to install Catalina on it and managed to run it (which was crazy to me since it had required some iffy config that I didn’t think I’d be able to get down). I then went through the trouble of building this thing into a suitcase so that it was a “laptop”, though decidedly bare bones. The next time I powered it up, it promptly burned through something, powered off, and I now had a ~$800 suitcase brick.

That one slapped me down so hard from my techy fantasies that I put away my tools and never touched another project again. My NAS & Pi-hole also stopped working after a few months, and I decided that that was enough of a sign from the universe that I wasn’t meant to be wasting my time, money and effort on something I was decidedly not intelligent or strong-willed enough to see to fruition.

I was also hoping to make it my “out” of support work which I’ve been doing for almost two decades. But with that project died my dreams of being able to rise above my own limitations as well, since I’ve repeatedly proven to myself that whenever I try my hardest at something, I’ll simply still fail eventually.