I had the most wonderful SS this year! The first time being matched with someone else in Sweden, I didn't know quite what to expect, but this was just gold.

I was sent two wrapped presents, containing a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B computer and a power supply. Also included was a tiny yule straw goat, to help alleviate the fact that the huge one in my home town had just burned down.

There was also a booklet containing instructions, including an sd memory card to hook up with the Raspberry pi.

For those unfamiliar with the RPi, it's a computer about the size of a credit card, packed with a 1.2 GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, that can run Linux from an sd card. And herein lied the next gift:

The booklet contained an equation where all variables were retrieved from me and my personal interests (in a totally non-creepy way!). Solving that equation and converting from decimal numbers to hexadecimal numbers gave me the password to log on as the root user on the Linux install. (My SS had even included some notes about whether I should trust this sd card, sent from an unknown person).

Well, the equation was easy enough to solve (not to say it wasn't very fun!) and once I was logged on, I found a .txt file with gift codes for three lottery tickets, worth some $4 each. I scratched away like crazy, winning a couple of couple of small wins, re-investing my earnings into my scratching enterprise, until I was broke (that is, until I was back to $0 balance on my account, just like before i received the gift).

All in all, this was so very thoughtful, nice and just sheer fun, I'm still smiling when thinking about it.

I'm also pretty certain I saw my SS's Reddit handle someplace, but can't seem to find it. It may have been on the parcel wrapping actually, which I've since disposed of.

Anyways, thanks a million!

The fun thing is, I had just decided, the night before receiving this, to start running a web server on my old (anno 2013) RPi!