I have a PHP/Symfony project boilerplate that I use for all of my projects and I added static site generating to that boilerplate. That allows me to make a static site and then easily switch from static to dynamic if I need to. The only thing I need to change to make the switch is my CI configuration. It has already come in handy on a couple of projects and it doesn't require any special maintenance since I'm just storing the output of my dynamic app.

I started working on a snood clone. It's' still unfinished, but I've spent countless hours playing it mindlessly:

https://www.tbmatuka.com/blog/2014-05-31

https://github.com/tbmatuka/hennin

If anyone would like to knock a thing or two off the ToDo list, I'd appreciate it :)

Until recently I was using a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E530 for sysadmin work. It was ridiculously cheap for a ThinkPad, everything worked under Arch Linux and best of all it had a numpad, which I needed. It was mostly sitting on a desk and not moving around much, so the weight and size weren't a big deal.

I just took a look and the newer model E540 can be ordered with a full HD screen (15") which weren't available on the older ones.

This one may not be as bad as the ones in the article, but it still gave us a few weeks of work upgrading kernels on a couple of thousand production servers: http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...