Rescuing a Raspberry Pi 3B

It is often said that the most sustainable computer is the one you already have. In my case, it was the one a friend had.

The Origin Story

This Raspberry Pi 3B was salvaged and gifted to me by my good friend Alex (SV1TAY). It had seen better days and its Wi-Fi chip had given up the ghost, but the heart of the processor was still beating strong.

In the spirit of **permacomputing**, I decided to give it a second life. It doesn't need Wi-Fi to be useful, it just needs a good LAN cable and a purpose.

The Restoration

I cleaned up the board, flashed a fresh OS onto a new SD card, and gave it a home worthy of a retro enthusiast. It is now housed in a **Kintaro Super Kuma 9000** case—inspired by the classic SNES—complete with a proper heatsink to keep it cool.

[IMG] My Raspberry Pi in its Cool Kintaro Super Kuma 9000 case

It is a "good boy" now, sitting quietly in the corner, doing serious work.

What It Does

Despite its age, this little board is now the heart of my home network:

**Pi-hole:** Protects my entire network from ads and trackers.

**Jetforce:** Hosts this Gemini capsule you are reading right now.

**Web Mirror:** Translates this capsule to HTTPS for the web.

**Auto-Backup:** Backs itself up to a USB drive every night.

Under the Hood

For those interested in the technical side, I am running this on a headless Raspberry Pi OS.

I wrote a Python script to mirror this capsule to the web, preserving the ASCII art and applying a dark mode theme. I also set up an automated Rsync script for backups. You can grab the code below if you want to build something similar.