Want to name my Wi-Fi network and computer? Want to troll me with stickers on my PC? Now’s your chance!

Update 2: At a staggering 176% of the original goal within 2 days, I think it’s time to end this crazy ride. Rests me to thank all of you – donor or not – for the incredible support and generosity. This will enable me to go far beyond “mid-tier” and build something that’s going to set me for close to a decade. I’m absolutely stunned.

Update: I did not expect this to take off, but within a few hours we’ve already reached the goal! Thanks, everyone – I’m stunned and at a loss for words, which, I can assure you, is a rather rare occurrence. The goal sits at 110% now, and I’ll leave it up for the night so this story doesn’t suddenly stop making sense (it’s 02:26 where I live). I’ll also contact the two largest donors privately and work out the details with them.

Since we started our more visible push for donations to ensure we can keep OSAlert running as an independent technology news website without having to resort to SEO spam, ad overload, and worse, a number of people have expressed interest in donating to specific goals instead of donating generically. A possible goal for this has recently come up, so I’m stepping out of my comfort zone (this whole thing terrifies me): you can now donate specifically towards a much, much-needed upgrade for my PC – and troll me along the way. Read on!

After almost 8 years of loyal service, my PC, with a 7700K and GTX 1070, is starting to show some serious signs of old-age and constant use. This machine is the main computer I have, used for both my work on OSAlert as well as gaming, and it’s getting long in the tooth. As such, I’m planning a relatively conservative, mid-tier upgrade for the machine, retaining as many parts as possible to keep costs down. I will retain the case, power supply, CPU cooler, and the various SSDs and hard drives.

My intention is to purchase the following parts:

• AMD Ryzen 5 7600X (or equivalent Intel processor, see below)
• ASUS TUF Gaming A620M-Plus Wi-Fi motherboard (or whatever other cheap-ish board)
• Corsair 32 GB (2×16 GB) DDR5 5200 MHz
• Radeon XT 6700 XT 12 GB (whatever halfway decent brand is cheapest)

In Sweden, this would add up to SEK 10900 (incl. all applicable taxes), or EUR921/$978, so I set the goal at an even EUR1000. With the state of the world as it is, as well as having a family with two young children, investments like this simply aren’t something I can do out of pocket, and that’s why people have been suggesting for months to take this step.

However, I want to make things a bit more interesting, and provide you lovely nerds with some ways to troll me. As such, I will give the two largest combined donations (as in, you can donate multiple times and it’ll count) some extra perks, designed to give you the opportunity to mess with me:

• The person who makes the largest combined donation gets to name the computer (hostname, etc.), and gets to choose the name of our Wi-Fi SSID (my wife needed some coaxing to be on board with this). Go nuts – anything goes (within reason, see below), and the names will be permanent! On top of that, you get the choose whether the machine will have an AMD or Intel processor (the GPU has to be AMD because its Linux support is vastly superior).
• The person who makes the second largest combined donation gets to have fun decorating the poor computer with stickers. Want to troll me with a giant Windows sticker, an Apple logo, or worse, the flag of Belgium? This is your chance!

Obviously, there are some ground rules here – no pornography, no hateful stuff like racism, no gore, stuff like that. We’re all adults here, and I’m pretty sure we all instinctively know what I mean. Other than that – anything goes! Any required stickers I’ll buy myself, as long as you can provide me a link.

Any donation made through our Ko-Fi will count towards this goal, and you can keep track of the progress there as well. Since I have absolutely no idea how this will go (like I said, I’m terrified), I haven’t set a time limit on the goal. So, hop on over to our Ko-Fi page and donate away!

In the meantime, I’m going to curl up in a corner because I have no clue how anyone is going to respond to this.