A new home for my agents

August 2026

I'm a frugal person, and it's always difficult for me to throw away well working things, even if old and completely not needed anymore. This is why, over the course of years, I kept accumulating old laptops and tech.

After checking in my "tech box", which now contains 4 laptops, and around a hundred USB-C cables, I decided I needed to do something. The timing was also perfect since I was losing access to my cloud resources and needed a persistent, always-running home server.

My victim is this old Lenovo X201 laptop. I originally bought it back when I was travelling regularly to Costa Rica, since the humidity was damaging my more expensive Macbook motherboard.

Lenovo ThinkPad X201 laptop — The new home: a Lenovo ThinkPad X201.

It's a beauty that runs Arch Linux but hasn't been booted in the last 8 years. Initially I wanted to just run it as a headless home server:

Lenovo ThinkPad X201 fully disassembled on a desk, with motherboard, keyboard, screen and other parts laid out — Teardown in progress.

But then again I feel bad about throwing away the perfectly working LCD display, so I decided to create a beautiful, bamboo-wooden picture frame instead.

Having access to a laser cutter, the Epilog Mini, I let Claude generate a beautiful SVG design and print it. Finding a thin, reasonably priced bamboo sheet of wood is actually more challenging but Ikea comes to the rescue.

After a bit of tinkering I manage to fit all components in, and get this beautiful thing out:

Lenovo X201 LCD screen mounted in a laser-cut bamboo wood picture frame, showing a small heart icon on a dark screen — The finished bamboo-wood frame.

I then hanged it on the wall with a cable cover (for power and ethernet):

The framed X201 screen mounted on a wall, showing a family dashboard with weather and local events (personal calendar blurred) — Mounted and running as a family dashboard.

On the software side, I went with a minimal Debian install. Funnily enough, the only way to turn it on is by sending a Wake-on-LAN magic packet, since while putting it back together I never found a good way to keep the power button working.

Right now it's running:

MiniDLNA media server, serving files to my smart TV and phones.
An agent that generates a daily dashboard with my events, the weather, and the kids' schedule, built with Claude Code and regenerated (UI included) every day to keep it fresh.
An eBay agent that manages the items I'm selling and watches for specific listings I'm looking for.
A Gemini Live API voice agent with face detection that greets you differently depending on who's looking at the camera. I keep having fun adding tool calls to it, it can now print things on my printer.
A couple of game servers, right now Subnautica multiplayer via Nitrox.

Overall, a lot of fun. But I'm running a bit too much on this old, slow PC, temperatures average 65°C, not helped by the poor ventilation. So I might be in the market for an upgrade soon, maybe with a GPU for local AI too!