I have joined the future and have installed my first M.2 drive into my home PC. Last week I saw that NewEgg had a deal on an Intel 512GB M.2 SSD. M.2 drives are kind of a newer thing but seem to be widely supported in modern motherboards: rather than being a blocky hard drive (even a processed-cheese-block sized SSD), an M.2 drive is essentially a sliver of a control board with solid-state memory chips on-board. I don’t know how this technology differs from the kind of SSD that exists in laptops and newer PC’s, but the board I received was about as long as my pinky finger, yet has as much storage space onboard as any of the other three drives I have in the system right now. I plan on making this my OS drive — once I can get a USB stick to reinstall Windows — which will free up my current OS SSD that will take the place of the last platter drive I have in my system, making my system a complete SSD rig.

In other unrelated news I “won” an eBay auction this weekend for a WOWOTO H8 miniprojector (link seems to be a model refresh edition, but with the same specs). Apparently projectors have become my go-to thing now, as I have one short-throw model in my basement that projects on a blank wall at something like 120″ diagonal, and this portable unit will be used for our “deck theater” that we have set up. I had purchased a pull-down screen a while back that turned out to be too small for the basement, so we found a way to secure it to the three-season tent we bolted to the deck this summer. A friend who owns a WOWOTO H8 brought it over one night and it did a bang-up job of displaying content on the screen. I don’t know how or if it will work in broad daylight, but even at early dusk it seems bright enough to allow us to watch TV, have company over for movie night, or to bring out the Switch for party games. Unfortunately, we are at the end of the season and will be taking down the soft parts of the tent for the winter very soon, so the WOWOTO will have to remain dormant until the spring.

Although I got to thinking about simpits — simulation cockpits for racing and flight sims — and since I know some of the more high-end designs use micro and pico projectors instead of monitors, I wonder if something like the WOWOTO H8 would work…