14 unhinged computing projects to make your Valentine run away screaming

With Valentine’s Day almost upon us, there are plenty of ways you can impress your special someone with your computing skills. For instance, you could showcase your Excel mastery by coding sweet messages inside .xlsx files. Or you can put your NAS to good use by building romantic projects for an at-home date.

But amidst the sweet self-hosted services and heartfelt Excel confessions lie deranged computing projects, ones that might make your loved one question your sanity. If you’re anything like me, here are some quirky (and downright unhinged) computing ideas you might want to hide from your partner this Valentine’s Day.

Every NAS is a PC if you try hard enough

Repurposing outdated systems into storage servers is a neat project, but have you ever tried to turn your NAS into a regular ol’ PC? If you’ve recently upgraded from a simple 2-bay NAS to a powerful storage server or are tired of the half-baked proprietary OS, you can put it to good use as a PC (or better yet, a container-hosting war machine) by flashing a lightweight Linux distro on it. Despite sounding rather weird, this project has some utility for data hoarders who have multiple NAS gathering dust, though it might earn you an eye-roll or two from your partner.

Two hearts, connected by one server

Capable of interfacing NICs, USB expansion cards, and HBA boards to your virtual guests, PCI passthrough is a fairly common technology used in home servers. Going by that train of thought, surely you can add graphics cards to virtual machines and turn them into gaming behemoths, right? Well, if you’re willing to put in the effort to set up GPU passthrough on your virtualization platform and have a semi-decent processor powering your server, you can build killer gaming virtual machines for you and your lover. Your wallet might not survive this project, though.

Sorry, honey, I’m busy working with Blender on my phone

When I heard about PC emulators capable of running x86/x64 titles on Android, I almost did a double take. But after trying out Mobox and Winlator, I was floored by their performance. Of course, I did what any other tinkerer would, and tried my hand at running common PC-only apps on my touchscreen companion. Although the experiment failed as spectacularly as you’d imagine, a couple of apps (including Blender, of all things) performed surprisingly well. For folks planning to try out this project, remember that you’ll need a Snapdragon (preferably at least a Gen 2) processor for the best results. Then, you’ll have a solid alibi for troubleshooting your emulated PC messaging apps when your significant other gets mad at you for leaving their messages on read.

Including Type-2 hypervisors

Nested virtualization is an absolute game-changer for home lab owners who can’t experiment with their devices after hosting essential services on their server. By allowing you to set up a cascading chain of hypervisors on your workstation, nested virtualization lets you break things inside virtualized instances of your home lab. Although running Proxmox within XCP-ng inside your bare-metal Proxmox setup will make your server a lot more foolproof, you’re bound to get strange looks from anyone who peeks into your monitor and sees multiple terminal interfaces within a web UI.

Be sure to map separate iSCSI shares!

Let’s say you or your partner have already exceeded the storage capacity of your laptop and don’t have the room to slot another SSD/HDD into the system. A NAS can come in handy by allowing you to store the excess documents. If you’re willing to mess with iSCSI block storage and RAM caching, you can even transfer your game library to the NAS and expect a responsive experience even when running fast-paced titles. The best part is that you can blame the non-existent latency every time you fumble during your couch co-op gaming sessions.

Without involving any sensitive documents

If you’ve ever had the intrusive thoughts of experimenting with your daily driver, only for common sense to override your instincts, you can clone your PC and turn it into a virtual machine. Disk2vhd and VirtualBox make this project fairly simple even for beginners, though I recommend keeping your important data away from the experimental VM. Just a heads up: you might want to ask for your lover’s permission before you involve their (virtualized) PC in your tinkering fantasies.

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Run modern games on SBCs… using GPUs

x86 systems, sure! ARM SBCs, sheesh!

Single-Board Computers are more powerful than ever, with many x86 boards (and even the newer Raspberry Pi units) capable of emulating multiple consoles. But if your SBC includes a PCIe slot, you can harness the power of graphics cards and enjoy modern games on your tiny tinkering companion. That said, you might have some trouble getting GPUs to run on ARM systems like the Raspberry Pi. And even if you do, you’ll end up with a groaning partner after carpeting your entire desk with adapters, cables, and PSU(s).

Keep an eye on the power bill

With old Xeon systems available at dirt-cheap prices, you might be tempted to pick one up for your home lab. While enterprise-grade server rigs are perfect for hardcore home lab workloads, you can even repurpose them into gaming machines. Sure, not all games are designed for dual-CPU setups and low-speed ECC memory will further cripple your server PC’s gaming performance. But it’s still a cool project if you want to try something fun with your bargain-price server. The only caveat is that you’ll have to ditch your grand date plans this Valentine’s Day, as your server PC + GPU combo will shoot your electricity bills through the roof.

You can even interrogate Nazeem about the Cloud District!

Skyrim is home to a variety of mods, but Mantella stands out among its brethren. Designed to work in tandem with a text-to-speech generator, speech recognition utility, and (most importantly) LLMs, Mantella lets you have full-blown conversations with the NPCs of Skyrim. Plus, the mod includes unique templates for nearly every named character, so your interactions with the denizens of Skyrim are bound to be influenced by their different personalities and backgrounds. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Mantella can even bring couples together. If you and your Valentine are fans of the Elder Scrolls franchise, you’ll have a blast gaslighting the AI-enhanced NPCs in Skyrim.

Not the best surprise for creative professionals

Often used for media consumption, projectors serve as amazing Valentine’s Day presents for film buffs. But if you’re a fan of using hardware for purposes it was never meant for, you can try outfitting your computing space with a projector. Assuming your projector isn’t held back by a low response time, it’s surprisingly decent for single-player games. However, everyday tasks are a different beast, and you’ll have to tweak the scaling, brightness, and screen-to-projector ratio to make the setup somewhat manageable.

It won’t replace your power-guzzling server, though

The Raspberry Pi lineup may be powered by the ARM architecture, but that shouldn’t stop you from turning it into a home server. In fact, the RPi ecosystem has a couple of noteworthy platforms capable of turning your SBC into a self-hosting behemoth. But if you’re still not satisfied, you can even build a makeshift Proxmox workstation out of the SBC as a fun experiment. That said, the fastest Raspberry Pi can barely handle two or three ARM virtual machines. So, you might want to think twice before moving your home server to the RPi and infuriating your partner when the Internet, media server, and other services stop working this Valentine’s Day.

The perfect way to torment a Mac user

With Apple switching to Silicon, Hackintoshes are no longer as viable as they used to be. But there’s no reason to back down on your dreams of virtualizing macOS. In fact, running macOS inside a virtual machine is a fairly common project in the home lab community, and you can dive deeper into the rabbit-hole by deploying a macOS container. While it’s definitely going to earn you a couple of facepalms from your beloved, it’s a fun project to bring your macOS containerization fantasies to life.

One outage, and there goes all your data

Whether you’re building a new gaming battle station or hopping to yet another Linux distro, installing the operating system onto a storage drive is usually the last step in the process. Or at least, it should be, unless you’re planning to run the operating system from memory. While the privacy-centric Tails OS is specifically designed to offer better anonymity by running on the RAM, you can just as easily use other Linux distros for this wacky project. That said, you’ll need a fair amount of memory if you plan to work on this experiment, as my RAM-based Ubuntu setup ended up consuming over 50% of my server PC’s 64GB memory.

And gift it to your partner as a token of affection

If getting an OS up and running from memory sounds too tame to scare off your Valentine who’s gotten used to your computing misadventures, how about using a flash drive as the Windows 11 boot drive? Since Rufus offers the convenient Windows-to-Go option to help you install Microsoft’s flagship operating system directly on the flash drive, it’s actually a pretty simple project. Or so I’d say, if not for the fact that USB drives have abysmally low transfer speeds compared to modern SSDs. Even on USB Gen 3.2 flash drives, the updates can take nearly an hour to finish. But if you’re willing to wait it out, you’ll get a fully-functional live USB that you can carry around and plug into any device to launch Windows 11 to continue working on your weird creations.

Make the most of Valentine’s Day with quirky but fun projects

Despite the mostly satirical and playful nature of the article, I’ll have to admit that some of these articles aren’t as much of a red flag as you’d imagine. For example, role-playing together in Skyrim with the Mantella and Skyrim Together Reborn mods can be a good bonding activity, provided you’re willing to go through the hassle of setting up the necessary tools and apps. Similarly, running virtualized instances of Proxmox on your workstation lets you tinker with virtual guests to your heart’s content. But whatever you do, never show them your home lab wishlist. And if your energy bills ever skyrocket, blame it on the refrigerator.

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