Amateur IT and DIY activities

I plan to build a FreeNAS box in the near future. I have an old Dell Poweredge server I can repurpose for this but for a number of reasons I can't do this yet. One reason is that I intend to use 2.5" hard drives harvested from other machines but they currently have data on them. I have a bunch of other drives of varying sizes doing nothing. I intend to build another NAS box with desktop bits and bobs and transfer the contents of the 2.5" to that secondary box. It's only an interim solution. Bear in mind, these projects are very low budget. They are also about learning.  Low end machines I've two old desktops that I don't currently use for anything. They aren't the most modern machines. Arguably the better of the two is a Novatech machine with 4GB of RAM and an Athlon II X3 425 (actually a quad core chip with one core disabled).  The micro ATX case has two 5.25" drive bays (one occupied by a SATA optical drive) and two 3.5" drive bays. The PSU is ...

I've always been one for thinking about small IT and related DIY projects. Don't always do them and those I do don't always happen as quickly as I would like and some don't turn out the way I want either. Even so, researching and planning for abortive projects does provide some satisfaction and can result in learning. Some things have got out of hand. Whilst I do have increased enthusiasm for undertaking small projects, not kept either my garage or powered shed particularly tidy and in the latter case, maintained. There is no room to undertake projects. I'm effectively prohibited from undertaking most of my projects in the house. Sure, software projects I can do anywhere but, at the moment, can only use the Windows dev (among other things) box intermittently. And that box needs some attention. Getting the garage and shed themselves back into order are projects in themselves but they are necessary to enable to enable other projects. Garage is the priority as it is th...