It was an ordinary Friday evening. The parcel had arrived with the courier that morning, but I only opened it after dinner, with that silent ceremony I perform every time new hardware shows up – as if opening a box too quickly were a form of disrespect toward the object. Inside was a HUNSN 4K. Small, almost ridiculously small. A mini PC in a form factor that fit in the palm of a hand. I put it on the table, looked at it. Looked at it again. And then an uncomfortable thought occurred to me. I had ordered it from a Chinese reseller, paid with a credit card, through a completely traceable payment infrastructure, from one of the most centralised and surveilled commercial ecosystems in existence. To build a homelab that would let me escape centralised and surveilled ecosystems.

Tuesday morning, 9 AM. After a routine patching session, a long-standing ZFS storage system running Solaris 11 suddenly stops talking to its Windows 10 clients. The culprit is the usual, maddening SMB dialect dance: Windows pushes for SMB 3 on security grounds, while Solaris's native service struggles through the negotiation. Two days of banging my head against the wall – hard – and then the discovery: OpenCSW. A community that maintains updated packages for Solaris where the vendor long since threw in the towel. Updated libraries, sorted dependencies, problem solved. There are volunteers out there patching critical systems better than the official vendor ever did. Worth knowing.