Urgh. The "official" Brother Linux drivers are crap. You get a 32-bit x86 only binary. The visible parts of it such as the shell scripts are really badly written (and break if /bin/sh is dash and not bash). The .deb files are created by alien. They install files in strange locations such as /usr/local. I could never get it working with cups and ended up using lprng and manually configuring it. Then it really doesn't work well. For example, it always adds a huge margin to the top of every page so I have to adjust the margins to be 0 at the top if I actually want something to print how it is meant to be. And they don't maintain it at all. The driver I downloaded when I got the printer is still the latest.

Under my contract, my employer has to pay me for on call but what they do is have me on call for just 1 hour. If I need to come in, I'm expected to stay till the problem is fixed. It's especially annoying over Christmas because I'm stuck in the local area and can't visit family yet get paid virtually nothing.

I've got two monitors, keyboards and mice but only one computer (running two X servers). So my wife can use one while I use the other.

I've got an Thecus N2100 and the performance as a NAS isn't great. The CPU isn't powerful enough to take advantage of the gigE interface. For what you want, I'd get something more powerful which probably means an x86 box. For anyone who just wants a home server that doesn't consume too much electricity so can be left on all the time, a small ARM based box is great. I'm running Debian on it and it's really useful.