My friend Tom Hollingsworth posted a good piece on New Year’s Day, talking about writing more, and the balance of video and text, and more. It was an inspiring read, and there’s a lot that I probably could have said in this post if I hadn’t read his post first.

Go ahead and give it a read. I’ll wait.

Now back to rsts11, in a quick review and a look forward…

Looking back to 2017

Visit rsts11travel for travel technology, caffeination, and loyalty program advice wherever we go!

In 2017 (or more accurately, New Year’s Eve 2016), I launched rsts11travel, splitting out travel content (technology, caffeine, and loyalty) to its own site. The year-end review for rsts11travel went up on New Year’s Eve. This year I’ll try to keep the two blogs rolling at a similar pace, and there will continue to be crossovers as we had in 2017 where the content warrants it. And I still have a slight hope of coming up with a better name, but for now it works.

On the rsts11 side, we looked at NBASE-T and the Modern Office (part 1, part 2), Internet connectivity on the road (part 1, part 2). I made a fun build in a misleading case, inspired by our look at Antsle’s personal cloud servers — and they followed our Xeon-D direction later in the year. And I met with Opengear at InteropITX, with a conversation on video with them later on about the state of out-of-band management.

Moving ahead into 2018

I’ve been getting back into hardware (as opposed to getting surrounded by hardware, which I’d been excelling at for years). This has been partially due to a renewed interest in cryptocurrency mining, so there are a couple of posts in the posts-in-progress folder about some hardware designs and a beginner’s guide to cryptocurrency mining.

There are also a couple of project machines (like the Microserver Gen 8 that I finally upgraded to a Xeon E3) that are overdue for coverage as well. I have some other interesting gear in the lab that may make its way onto the blog as well (especially if I can figure out how to reset a particular SDN device to factory defaults).

Invoking Bartles and Jaymes…

As always, I appreciate my readers’ support in any form. Comments and feedback here, on Twitter at @rsts11, or Facebook at @rsts11 help me target and track coverage for the blog. Buying things through my Amazon links (like an Omnicharge 20, or pretty much anything through an Amazon link on the site), or taking advantage of other referrals listed on the support-us page can help fund acquisitions for review, cover the minimal ongoing costs of the blogs, and maintain respectable caffeination levels along the way.

Where do we go from here?

Let me know what you’re looking for from rsts11 this year. Would you watch videos, and if so, what sort of content are you looking for? Maybe you want more product reviews (retail and enterprise?), or system and solution builds?