https://thepile.com/guides/Recent content in Guides on ThePile.comHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usThu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://thepile.com/guides/optiplex-proxmox-homelab/Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://thepile.com/guides/optiplex-proxmox-homelab/Walk into any office IT closet, hit any university surplus auction, or scroll your local listings for thirty seconds and you’ll find them: stacks of retired Dell OptiPlex 7040s, 7050s, and 9020s. Five years ago these were boring beige boxes glued to desks. Today they’re the single best entry point into a useful home lab, and most of them sell for the price of a takeaway lunch. The recipe in this guide assumes a Core i5-6500 OptiPlex 7040 SFF with 8 GB of DDR4 and a 256 GB SATA SSD — the spec I’ve found most consistently in the $40-$60 range.https://thepile.com/guides/thinkpad-x230-coreboot/Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://thepile.com/guides/thinkpad-x230-coreboot/The ThinkPad X230 is, by most reasonable measures, an obsolete laptop. It shipped in 2012 with a chiclet keyboard everyone hated, an IPS panel that was only kind-of okay, and an Ivy Bridge i5 that struggles with modern web bloat. None of that matters: the X230 is also the most-supported Coreboot target outside of a Chromebook, the screen can be swapped for a 1080p IPS, and the keyboard can be replaced with the classic seven-row Thinkpad layout.