Wanted: urgent shopping advice for NUC-like desktop

[Marco Fioretti]

Hello list.
Last month I said to myself "after the summer, I must really buy a new desktop, because this one, thanks to Linux, has been running for so many years that it may break at every moment". My desktop must have heard me, because something inside died this morning, and now it won't start.
No data were lost, but now I must order a new desktop as below asap, to meet some deadlines and not lose any vacation day!
If needed, I can assemble computers myself, but the main problem now is that I am years behind on all the acronyms, reviews etc... that one should know to make certain purchasing decisions alone. I HAD planned to do that kind of study in September, but now I just can't.
Hence, I have no preference for any make or model of CPU, motherboard, case, whatever... as long as it matches the specs below, AND as far as possible I get advice for specific makes and models, not generic technologies or product categories.
Size/form factor: NUC-like, due to change in furniture next month, this thing can only stay attached behind a monitor, or in my lap.
FANLESS, or REALLY, really silent anyway. Among many other defects, I get mad if I hear the noise of fans...
I do NOT need overclocking, support for gaming, or even wi-fi for that matter, it would be attached to an Ethernet cable anyway. I may sometimes run some ray-tracing or VR application, or even some game once a year, but not often enough to justify extra costs. I very likely need as much RAM as possible though, for the uses below, and support for two monitors too.
100% Ubuntu-compatible, obviously
Side question: it would be nice to attach EXTERNAL disks, at the highest possible speed, so maybe I'd need a system with a SATA 3 port? Or would be USB3.2 be enough in practice, to not justify that port?
USES:
- SOHO, i.e. email, word/spreadsheet processing, heavy browsing (tens of tabs open all the time)
- heavy text processing, think Perl or awk scripts parsing or writing gigabytes of stuff
- scan, tag, catalog thousands of photographs, with digiKam or scripts running exiftool and similar software
-  video digitization and light editing (with FOSS, obviously!). Next autumn I will receive tens of VHS family tapes to digitize. By "light editing" I mean cutting clips, rearranging them, adding metadata and simple transitions, and then saving everything both to disk and on DVDs, with menus. This being a family errand, I won't need top performance for it
Again, thanks in advance for your shopping suggestions.
Marco
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