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26 Jan 2025 : How lightly did I tread in 2024 #
We're already well in to 2025 and I've not yet got around to performing my annual carbon audit. This will be my sixth year, and even though the numbers are always closer to the approximate end of the scale, that means it's got to the stage where it's possible to start identifying trends.
Here's all of the data I've accumulated so far, including my carbon footprint for 2024 (i.e. the year to now). This data covers both Joanna and me, so for two people. It's not exactly household data because between 2019 and 2022 we were actually working in different countries, so were technically two households. But since then we've both been living under one roof again.
What can we say about these numbers? The headline result is that this year is joint-lowest on record at 7.73 tonnes of CO2. Lower is better, so this is a result I'm happy about. The other similarly low year was 2021, but that was slap bang in the middle of the pandemic, so rather a special case.
This year has been a relatively "normal" year, for some understanding of normal. If you account for the pandemic, I'd argue there's a good trend in the numbers: a decline from the high of 14.47 tonnes of CO2 in 2019 to nearly half that amount this year.
To understand why, it helps to look at the numbers that have gone in to the calculation.
As you can see, the biggest behavioural change has been a reduction in flying. This is partly — but not entirely — due to a change in circumstances. While living in Finland I was never able to find a practical alternative to flying between there and the UK (the shortest ferry and train alternative was a three-day trip). Now I'm in the UK I'm no longer making this regular journey. On top of that one of my 2024 new year's resolutions was to make twelve ecological improvements to my life. Avoiding flights was one of those and thankfully Joanna has been incredibly supportive in making this happen.
Despite this restrictions we did get to travel on holiday in 2024, but strictly by train and ferry. Avoiding flights did also impact my work plans and I'm grateful to my colleagues for also being supportive. I'm glad I was able to stick to this and the results are, I think, clear.
That's not the only story in these numbers. You can also now start to see the impact that switching from gas central heating to an air-source heat pump in 2022 has made. Natural gas usage has dropped right down (we still have a gas cooker, but I'm hoping to change that). The combined power usage, measured in kWh, is substantially lower after the change, giving an indication of the improved efficiency.
As a side note, it may seem odd that gas usage in 2023 was negative. That's due to our energy company not predicting the change caused by the heat pump and having to give us a rebate on anticipated gas usage. It's not ideal for the numbers, but I couldn't think of a better way to deal with it.
Another thing that's become clear is how much impact the pandemic had on our energy use. The four flights I took in 2021 were completely offset by other carbon outputs when compared to last year, when I took no flights at all. The pandemic really did hit the world hard.
As always I've used these numbers to offset my carbon output for last year, using the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to support cooking stoves in Malawi. To be honest, I don't know whether this really makes a real difference to my climate impact, but it feels like a good cause either way.
More importantly, it's becoming clear that these annual audits have genuinely affected my behaviour, which in the longer term, may be the bigger win.
To generate the carbon output numbers above I used Carbon Footprint Ltd's carbon calculator. According to the same site, the average worldwide carbon footprint per person is about 4.79 tonnes. Taking into account the fact Joanna and I are two people, that now puts us below the average for the first time. It's a pretty clear conclusion, at least for our lifestyles: to really make a big difference, stop taking the plane.
Comment
Here's all of the data I've accumulated so far, including my carbon footprint for 2024 (i.e. the year to now). This data covers both Joanna and me, so for two people. It's not exactly household data because between 2019 and 2022 we were actually working in different countries, so were technically two households. But since then we've both been living under one roof again.
| Source (CO2 tonnes) | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electricity | 0.50 | 0.40 | 0.59 | 1.14 | 1.66 | 1.37 |
| Natural gas | 1.18 | 1.26 | 1.66 | 0.81 | -0.25 | 0.02 |
| Flights | 5.76 | 2.26 | 1.90 | 5.34 | 1.32 | 0.00 |
| Car | 1.45 | 0.39 | 0.39 | 1.01 | 1.00 | 1.12 |
| Bus | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.02 | 0.01 | 0.31 | 0.22 |
| National rail | 0.08 | 0.01 | 0.02 | 0.00 | 0.70 | 0.47 |
| International rail | 0.02 | 0.01 | 0.00 | 0.04 | 0.01 | 0.01 |
| Coach | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.03 |
| Taxi | 0.01 | 0.01 | 0.01 | 0.01 | 0.01 | 0.01 |
| Food and drink | 1.69 | 1.11 | 1.05 | 1.35 | 1.07 | 1.07 |
| Pharmaceuticals | 0.26 | 0.32 | 0.31 | 0.06 | 0.13 | 0.13 |
| Clothing | 0.03 | 0.06 | 0.06 | 0.12 | 0.23 | 0.23 |
| Paper-based products | 0.34 | 0.15 | 0.14 | 0.37 | 0.38 | 0.38 |
| Computer usage | 1.30 | 1.48 | 0.75 | 0.93 | 0.23 | 0.23 |
| Electrical | 0.12 | 0.29 | 0.19 | 0.03 | 0.01 | 0.03 |
| Non-fuel car | 0.00 | 0.10 | 0.00 | 0.12 | 0.92 | 0.92 |
| Manufactured goods | 0.50 | 0.03 | 0.03 | 0.05 | 0.11 | 0.11 |
| Hotels, restaurants | 0.51 | 0.16 | 0.15 | 0.10 | 1.21 | 1.21 |
| Telecoms | 0.15 | 0.05 | 0.04 | 0.03 | 0.05 | 0.05 |
| Finance | 0.24 | 0.24 | 0.22 | 0.04 | 0.02 | 0.00 |
| Insurance | 0.19 | 0.11 | 0.10 | 0.04 | 0.04 | 0.04 |
| Education | 0.05 | 0.00 | 0.04 | 0.01 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Recreation | 0.09 | 0.06 | 0.05 | 0.03 | 0.06 | 0.06 |
| Total | 14.47 | 8.50 | 7.73 | 11.65 | 9.25 | 7.73 |
What can we say about these numbers? The headline result is that this year is joint-lowest on record at 7.73 tonnes of CO2. Lower is better, so this is a result I'm happy about. The other similarly low year was 2021, but that was slap bang in the middle of the pandemic, so rather a special case.
This year has been a relatively "normal" year, for some understanding of normal. If you account for the pandemic, I'd argue there's a good trend in the numbers: a decline from the high of 14.47 tonnes of CO2 in 2019 to nearly half that amount this year.
To understand why, it helps to look at the numbers that have gone in to the calculation.
| Source | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electricity | 1 794 kWh | 1 427 kWh | 3 009 kWh | 4 101 kWh | 5 975 kWh | 4 947 kWh |
| Natural gas | 6 433 kWh | 6 869 kWh | 9 089 kWh | 4 439 kWh | -1 362 kWh | 136 kWh |
| Flights |
36 580 km 20 flights |
14 632 km 8 flights |
25 542 km 14 flights |
36 042 km 20 flights |
7 233 km 4 flights |
0 km 0 flights |
| Car | 11 910 km | 2 000 km | 3 219 km | 8 458 km | 8 369 km | 9 364 km |
| Bus | 1 930 km | 40 km | 168 km | 133 km | 3 080 km | 2 065 km |
| National rail | 5 630 km | 400 km | 676 km | 0 km | 19 638 km | 13 184 km |
| International rail | 64 km | 1 368 km | 513 km | 8 684 km | 2 322 km | 1 914 km |
| Coach | 0 km | 0 km | 0 km | 0 km | 0 km | 1 200 km |
| Taxi | 64 km | 37 km | 100 km | 100 km | 100 km | 100 km |
| Tube | 0 km | 0 km | 0 km | 0 km | 100 km | 100 km |
As you can see, the biggest behavioural change has been a reduction in flying. This is partly — but not entirely — due to a change in circumstances. While living in Finland I was never able to find a practical alternative to flying between there and the UK (the shortest ferry and train alternative was a three-day trip). Now I'm in the UK I'm no longer making this regular journey. On top of that one of my 2024 new year's resolutions was to make twelve ecological improvements to my life. Avoiding flights was one of those and thankfully Joanna has been incredibly supportive in making this happen.
Despite this restrictions we did get to travel on holiday in 2024, but strictly by train and ferry. Avoiding flights did also impact my work plans and I'm grateful to my colleagues for also being supportive. I'm glad I was able to stick to this and the results are, I think, clear.
That's not the only story in these numbers. You can also now start to see the impact that switching from gas central heating to an air-source heat pump in 2022 has made. Natural gas usage has dropped right down (we still have a gas cooker, but I'm hoping to change that). The combined power usage, measured in kWh, is substantially lower after the change, giving an indication of the improved efficiency.
As a side note, it may seem odd that gas usage in 2023 was negative. That's due to our energy company not predicting the change caused by the heat pump and having to give us a rebate on anticipated gas usage. It's not ideal for the numbers, but I couldn't think of a better way to deal with it.
Another thing that's become clear is how much impact the pandemic had on our energy use. The four flights I took in 2021 were completely offset by other carbon outputs when compared to last year, when I took no flights at all. The pandemic really did hit the world hard.
As always I've used these numbers to offset my carbon output for last year, using the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to support cooking stoves in Malawi. To be honest, I don't know whether this really makes a real difference to my climate impact, but it feels like a good cause either way.
More importantly, it's becoming clear that these annual audits have genuinely affected my behaviour, which in the longer term, may be the bigger win.
To generate the carbon output numbers above I used Carbon Footprint Ltd's carbon calculator. According to the same site, the average worldwide carbon footprint per person is about 4.79 tonnes. Taking into account the fact Joanna and I are two people, that now puts us below the average for the first time. It's a pretty clear conclusion, at least for our lifestyles: to really make a big difference, stop taking the plane.
5 Jan 2025 : Reckoning and Renewal, Part V #
The old year is now old and the new year is still — relatively — new. Which means it's time for me to look back at my old year's resolutions from 2024, review them, admit my failings and then, as if lacking any form of self-awareness, make resolutions that I think I might keep in 2025.
This being the fifth instalment you know the drill and I'll try to keep things brief. So let's get straight to my list from 2024.
Second we have my resolution to do something practical in Rust. I've continued attending and following the Rust reading group at work, but I admit that I've yet to find a practical outlet for the skills I've been learning. This falls entirely down to lack of motivation. If I really wanted to I could have found something, but the fact is it's much easier to work in a language I'm already proficient in. I don't plan to move it to my 2025 resolutions — there's no point in forcing it — but I'll keep it as a general goal. Doing this would offer real personal benefit.
Third is my desire to make twelve incremental ecological improvements to my life. The idea was to try to find roughly one per month. In practice and, somewhat to my surprise, I came within touching distance of achieving this. Many of the improvements were small, but that was the point: continual small improvements that could accumulate to become bigger aggregate improvements over time. I tried to keep track through the year:
Finally, I committed to going to at least three events at the British Library. In this I succeeded, visiting the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination, Beyond the Baseline: 500 Years of Black British Music and Medieval Women: In Their Own Words exhibitions. Honestly, all three were fantastic; better even than I'd expected. So I'm glad I committed to this.
In total then for 2024 it's 2.83 out of four: a pretty good result in my world. So what's in store for 2025?
Here are my planned resolutions for the year ahead:
Given all this, I'd love to move off GitHub for my personal projects. The obvious alternative right now seems to be Codeberg given its strong open-source and community credentials. So I'd really like to resolve to move all my projects there. Unfortunately moving existing projects to a different platform can be destructive (for example with loss of issues and open pull requests). I'm therefore resolving to start all new open source projects on either Codeberg or my self-hosted git server. I should also start moving existing projects, but that'll have to be on a best-effort basis.
Next up I'm resolving to do something recreational outside the house at least once per week. This might sound strange to a normal person, but I spend so much time inside and online that I can easily go an entire week without doing something recreational in the real world. Of course, I often leave the house for work, shopping or other non-recreational activities. But the plan here is to do something fun. It could be going to the cinema, visiting friends or just going for a walk in the local countryside. But it should be something. I've run this past Joanna and she's on board with this: it'll be a combined effort.
Finally I plan to read at last one research paper each week. This is an idea I stole from Dr Esther Plomp, a researcher I know through her contributions to The Turing Way. Dr Plomp committed to reading one paper a day but I've diluted this to one per week to suit my own lower standards. I'm also keeping my definition of a "research paper" pretty loose. If I end up reading a book chapter instead, that's fine.
So those are my three resolutions. I thought about including several others, but I think it's important to stay focused. Here are a few that didn't make the cut:
With my home server back up and running I feel in good shape for the year to come. So, roll on 2025! See you in twelve months with the results in Part VI.
Comment
This being the fifth instalment you know the drill and I'll try to keep things brief. So let's get straight to my list from 2024.
- Start working through "Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction" by James V. Stone.
- Do something practical in Rust.
- Make twelve incremental ecological improvements to my life.
- Go to at least three events or exhibitions at the British Library.
Second we have my resolution to do something practical in Rust. I've continued attending and following the Rust reading group at work, but I admit that I've yet to find a practical outlet for the skills I've been learning. This falls entirely down to lack of motivation. If I really wanted to I could have found something, but the fact is it's much easier to work in a language I'm already proficient in. I don't plan to move it to my 2025 resolutions — there's no point in forcing it — but I'll keep it as a general goal. Doing this would offer real personal benefit.
Third is my desire to make twelve incremental ecological improvements to my life. The idea was to try to find roughly one per month. In practice and, somewhat to my surprise, I came within touching distance of achieving this. Many of the improvements were small, but that was the point: continual small improvements that could accumulate to become bigger aggregate improvements over time. I tried to keep track through the year:
- I planted our family Christmas tree from last year and miraculously it's still apparently healthy in the garden twelve months on.
- Joanna and I looked seriously into buying a new car, but decided that it would be better to keep our existing, 15 year old, car instead.
- I avoided using the dishwasher for 12 months. I've replaced it with washing up by hand, being careful to keep water usage low enough to be more efficient than the dishwasher would be.
- When I take a shower I now intentionally reduce the heat. Previously I always showered with the maximum, now I reduce it by quarter of a turn. It's a small win, but has the potential to be improved on in 2025 with an extra turn of the tap.
- At the recommendation of a friend at work I'm now buying only certified shade grown coffee. Apparently this is much better for the environment.
- This year I made special effort never to travel by plane. Given my previous years' failings I have plenty to make up for here. But I succeeded in making zero flights this year.
- When choosing my new home server, low power usage was a primary requirement. The device I ended up with is fanless and averages around just 12 Watts.
- I've also made a special effort to travel by train. Joanna will attest to this, as she's been very supportive when travelling together.
- Between June and August I cycled to Cambridge and back for my work commute seven times out of a possible 13. So there's room for improvement, but still better than the five I managed in 2023.
- Last January I offset my carbon output from 2023 with 10 Certified Emission Reductions.
Finally, I committed to going to at least three events at the British Library. In this I succeeded, visiting the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination, Beyond the Baseline: 500 Years of Black British Music and Medieval Women: In Their Own Words exhibitions. Honestly, all three were fantastic; better even than I'd expected. So I'm glad I committed to this.
In total then for 2024 it's 2.83 out of four: a pretty good result in my world. So what's in store for 2025?
Here are my planned resolutions for the year ahead:
- Prioritise Codeberg over GitHub.
- Do something fun outside the house at least once per week.
- Read at least one paper per week.
Given all this, I'd love to move off GitHub for my personal projects. The obvious alternative right now seems to be Codeberg given its strong open-source and community credentials. So I'd really like to resolve to move all my projects there. Unfortunately moving existing projects to a different platform can be destructive (for example with loss of issues and open pull requests). I'm therefore resolving to start all new open source projects on either Codeberg or my self-hosted git server. I should also start moving existing projects, but that'll have to be on a best-effort basis.
Next up I'm resolving to do something recreational outside the house at least once per week. This might sound strange to a normal person, but I spend so much time inside and online that I can easily go an entire week without doing something recreational in the real world. Of course, I often leave the house for work, shopping or other non-recreational activities. But the plan here is to do something fun. It could be going to the cinema, visiting friends or just going for a walk in the local countryside. But it should be something. I've run this past Joanna and she's on board with this: it'll be a combined effort.
Finally I plan to read at last one research paper each week. This is an idea I stole from Dr Esther Plomp, a researcher I know through her contributions to The Turing Way. Dr Plomp committed to reading one paper a day but I've diluted this to one per week to suit my own lower standards. I'm also keeping my definition of a "research paper" pretty loose. If I end up reading a book chapter instead, that's fine.
So those are my three resolutions. I thought about including several others, but I think it's important to stay focused. Here are a few that didn't make the cut:
- Complete "Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction" by James V. Stone.
- Complete all the exercises in Linear Algebra Done Right by Sheldon Axler.
- Add Cambridge live bus info to an app.
With my home server back up and running I feel in good shape for the year to come. So, roll on 2025! See you in twelve months with the results in Part VI.
3 Jan 2025 : CWWK i3 N305 Fanless Mini PC first impressions #
Late last year I invested in a CWWK Fanless Mini PC to replace my previous home server. It took me about a month of deliberation before I finally settled on this over other potential options available, so I wanted to share my initial experiences with it.
This particular device is the snappily named "12th Gen Intel Firewall Mini PC Alder Lake i3 N305 8 Core Fanless Soft Router Proxmox DDR5 4800MHz 4xi226-V 2.5G". It seems to be available under a range of different brand names, but I believe CWWK is the manufacturer.
I've spent the last three or four days configuring the hardware and software on it so that it's just as I want it. Here are the main things I've configured on it and which I plan to make most use of:
But before I talk about my experiences with the device itself, first let me say something about its delivery. I ordered the device direct from CWWK on 2nd December. Between then and the 17th December I heard nothing from them, which gave me considerable pause for thought and made me rather nervous.
The website looks legitimate at first, but the more you look at it the more dubious it looks. Support is provided through a GMail address and the shop still shows Shopify branding (the Social media links point to Shopify defaults). While the support questions I asked before ordering were answered swiftly, following my purchase my questions went unanswered. If you search the web there are several automated reports of the cwwk.net site being bogus. On the other hand you'll also find forum posts claiming that everything went fine when ordering from them.
I'd resigned myself to the server never arriving and me losing my money when on 17th December I received an alert claiming a package was heading my way, along with a tracking link. The package eventually arrived from China ten days later with server and everything else enclosed, intact, working and just as expected. So, apparently not a scam after all!
Nail-biting period of angst aside, CWWK fully delivered my order and I don't regret that I bought it direct from them. But I'm just a random person on the Internet, so if you're thinking of doing the same please don't take this as being any sort of evidence!
The best way to describe the hardware itself is solid. Heavy and solid. It looks a bit like a standard metal-encased mini PC, but sporting a wild haircut. That's because this thing needs a big-ol' heat-sink to dissipate excess energy during periods of heavy use.
It's also bristling with ports: four 2.5 G Ethernet ports, eight USB-A ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, a micro SD Card reader and power in. There are no USB-C ports.
Some notes about this configuration: there are other very similar devices available that have USB-C ports. If I planned to use this as a desktop replacement I'd absolutely want USB-C ports. I'd want it powered over USB-C. I wouldn't want any USB-A ports at all.
But I plan to use this as a headless server, equivalent of a cloud device, so I expect to plug devices into it only very rarely. So for my purposes the lack of USB-C isn't a problem. But I'd very much expect others to feel differently about this.
Although it's great to have 2.5 G Ethernet, in practice I can't really make use of the full bandwidth on my home network. The Intel i226-V network controllers that provide the 2.5 G support are too new to be picked up by anything except relatively new Linux kernels, which is something to be aware of.
For software, I'm running Ubuntu 24.04, which is the first LTS release to support the Ethernet ports. With this, everything is working just great.
From a performance point of view I've so far found it to be excellent. Desktop performance is completely usable, although that's not something I'm concerned about. More importantly for me I've found performance as a network server to be great. To be honest, my previous server had become noticeably slow at serving Nextcloud pages. That had an Intel Atom N2800 CPU with two cores, compared to the N305 in this device with eight cores. That's a big jump up so it's not really surprising it feels so swift.
Being fanless you can't hear any activity from it unless it's the dead of night and you stick your ear right up against it. But the chassis does give off some heat. While idle it stays mildly warm — not warm enough to be comfortable bath temperature — but during burst usage it gets a lot warmer. It's never hot though and placing my hand firmly on it has yet to feel uncomfortable.
I bought the device bare-bones for $327.40 including the expansion board that increases storage to five M.2 NVMe slots. I spent £141.34 on 16 GiB of SO-DIMM RAM, a 500 GB Gen4 NVMe SSD (4 700 MB/s) for the operating system and a 1 TB Gen4 SSD (5 150 MB/s) for data. So the complete package set me back £400.
My last device ran for 12 years before failing, so it's a bit early to rush to any judgement, but if this one last a couple of years I'll consider that to be money well spent. Right now, it's doing the job I bought it for perfectly and I'm very happy with it.
So I'm happy. But there's an obvious follow-up question to all of this: would I have been equally happy with the other devices I considered buying?
I made fans a deal-breaker during the decision-making process and I stand by this decision. This is my first server that's had no moving parts and I'm happy with the silence and reassurance this brings. When I entered the world of computing in the nineties moving parts were a rarity and it gratifies me that by the time I leave the world of computing we'll have returned to the same paradigm.
On the other hand, it's harder to justify my decision to go with an N305 processor when I suspect an N100 would have been more than sufficient and would probably have ended up more power-efficient as well. Eight cores sounds great, but in practice four probably would have been enough.
In particular, while the solid metal case of this CWWK device is one of its best features, if I'd dropped down to an N100 processor this may not have been necessary. In summary, with an N305 the metal case is probably wise, but less so for one of the more power-efficient CPUs.
I have to conclude that many of the other devices would have worked just fine as well. Of the twelve I considered, it looks like the HUNSN BM34, iKoolCore R2 Max and Shuttle XPC slim DL30N would all have been just fine. Some of the others would have been fine were it not for the fact they had fans, came with Windows pre-installed, or lacked the space for two drives.
But clearly these are all rather personal to my requirements. It's easy to conclude that we live in a world of rich possibilities. There are numerous great options for low-power home servers and having one of these can offer a genuine quality of life improvement.
Comment
This particular device is the snappily named "12th Gen Intel Firewall Mini PC Alder Lake i3 N305 8 Core Fanless Soft Router Proxmox DDR5 4800MHz 4xi226-V 2.5G". It seems to be available under a range of different brand names, but I believe CWWK is the manufacturer.
I've spent the last three or four days configuring the hardware and software on it so that it's just as I want it. Here are the main things I've configured on it and which I plan to make most use of:
- SSH
- Apache 2
- Let's Encrypt
- Nextcloud
- File sharing
- Shared calendar
- Contact sharing
- Phone backup
- Gitolite
- Subversion
- Jitsi
- OpenVPN
- ZNC
- BIND
- Offsite backups
- Various Cron jobs
But before I talk about my experiences with the device itself, first let me say something about its delivery. I ordered the device direct from CWWK on 2nd December. Between then and the 17th December I heard nothing from them, which gave me considerable pause for thought and made me rather nervous.
The website looks legitimate at first, but the more you look at it the more dubious it looks. Support is provided through a GMail address and the shop still shows Shopify branding (the Social media links point to Shopify defaults). While the support questions I asked before ordering were answered swiftly, following my purchase my questions went unanswered. If you search the web there are several automated reports of the cwwk.net site being bogus. On the other hand you'll also find forum posts claiming that everything went fine when ordering from them.
I'd resigned myself to the server never arriving and me losing my money when on 17th December I received an alert claiming a package was heading my way, along with a tracking link. The package eventually arrived from China ten days later with server and everything else enclosed, intact, working and just as expected. So, apparently not a scam after all!
Nail-biting period of angst aside, CWWK fully delivered my order and I don't regret that I bought it direct from them. But I'm just a random person on the Internet, so if you're thinking of doing the same please don't take this as being any sort of evidence!
The best way to describe the hardware itself is solid. Heavy and solid. It looks a bit like a standard metal-encased mini PC, but sporting a wild haircut. That's because this thing needs a big-ol' heat-sink to dissipate excess energy during periods of heavy use.
It's also bristling with ports: four 2.5 G Ethernet ports, eight USB-A ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, a micro SD Card reader and power in. There are no USB-C ports.
Some notes about this configuration: there are other very similar devices available that have USB-C ports. If I planned to use this as a desktop replacement I'd absolutely want USB-C ports. I'd want it powered over USB-C. I wouldn't want any USB-A ports at all.
But I plan to use this as a headless server, equivalent of a cloud device, so I expect to plug devices into it only very rarely. So for my purposes the lack of USB-C isn't a problem. But I'd very much expect others to feel differently about this.
Although it's great to have 2.5 G Ethernet, in practice I can't really make use of the full bandwidth on my home network. The Intel i226-V network controllers that provide the 2.5 G support are too new to be picked up by anything except relatively new Linux kernels, which is something to be aware of.
For software, I'm running Ubuntu 24.04, which is the first LTS release to support the Ethernet ports. With this, everything is working just great.
From a performance point of view I've so far found it to be excellent. Desktop performance is completely usable, although that's not something I'm concerned about. More importantly for me I've found performance as a network server to be great. To be honest, my previous server had become noticeably slow at serving Nextcloud pages. That had an Intel Atom N2800 CPU with two cores, compared to the N305 in this device with eight cores. That's a big jump up so it's not really surprising it feels so swift.
Being fanless you can't hear any activity from it unless it's the dead of night and you stick your ear right up against it. But the chassis does give off some heat. While idle it stays mildly warm — not warm enough to be comfortable bath temperature — but during burst usage it gets a lot warmer. It's never hot though and placing my hand firmly on it has yet to feel uncomfortable.
I bought the device bare-bones for $327.40 including the expansion board that increases storage to five M.2 NVMe slots. I spent £141.34 on 16 GiB of SO-DIMM RAM, a 500 GB Gen4 NVMe SSD (4 700 MB/s) for the operating system and a 1 TB Gen4 SSD (5 150 MB/s) for data. So the complete package set me back £400.
My last device ran for 12 years before failing, so it's a bit early to rush to any judgement, but if this one last a couple of years I'll consider that to be money well spent. Right now, it's doing the job I bought it for perfectly and I'm very happy with it.
So I'm happy. But there's an obvious follow-up question to all of this: would I have been equally happy with the other devices I considered buying?
I made fans a deal-breaker during the decision-making process and I stand by this decision. This is my first server that's had no moving parts and I'm happy with the silence and reassurance this brings. When I entered the world of computing in the nineties moving parts were a rarity and it gratifies me that by the time I leave the world of computing we'll have returned to the same paradigm.
On the other hand, it's harder to justify my decision to go with an N305 processor when I suspect an N100 would have been more than sufficient and would probably have ended up more power-efficient as well. Eight cores sounds great, but in practice four probably would have been enough.
In particular, while the solid metal case of this CWWK device is one of its best features, if I'd dropped down to an N100 processor this may not have been necessary. In summary, with an N305 the metal case is probably wise, but less so for one of the more power-efficient CPUs.
I have to conclude that many of the other devices would have worked just fine as well. Of the twelve I considered, it looks like the HUNSN BM34, iKoolCore R2 Max and Shuttle XPC slim DL30N would all have been just fine. Some of the others would have been fine were it not for the fact they had fans, came with Windows pre-installed, or lacked the space for two drives.
But clearly these are all rather personal to my requirements. It's easy to conclude that we live in a world of rich possibilities. There are numerous great options for low-power home servers and having one of these can offer a genuine quality of life improvement.