On hostnames, my computers in 2017 and change plans
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There has been quite a buzz all around the phlogosphere about the
three topics mentioned in the title of this post, I'm not gonna even
link all relevant posts, you already read them all. But I have to add
my own bit of information to all of them and I'll do it in a single
post.
Hostnames
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I've been naming my computers after french cities in the last two
decades. There was (or in some cases still is) at least one paris,
toulouse, marseille, bordeaux, calais, nantes, ineker, nice, caen,
lyon, troyes, tours and I'm typing this on vichy. I even can't
remember why I'm doing this - I don't speak french, I never set my
foot on french soil, except when I was boarding ferry to England in
Calais in 1995 - but I do it for years and I'm just used to this
naming scheme.
My computers in 2017 and change plans
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I started 2017 with a HP Elite 7300, a Core i5-based PC under my desk.
It was there for last two years, since I bought it for a very good
price ($40) in our company. I never got used to it and did all
important home/leisure tasks (photo editing, browsing, programming) on
my 2004 PowerMac G5. Therefor I sold the HP in January and went back
to G5, which I've been using since 2009 as my desktop machine. I don't
mind the slow speed of the machine as most of stuff I do is slow when
I'm slow, not the machine, but in the second part of the year the
machine started to be too noisy for me. It has nine fans, which was no
problem when it was new or just moderately old, but in the age of
fifteen they have their service life almost over. So in the December
I decided to abandon the G5 for good.
In the area of laptops, I started the year with HP EliteBook 6930p,
a 15-inch, Core 2 Duo equipped business-class machine. For my daily
train commuting I had 10-inch Atom-based laptop. When I stopped using
the G5 on desktop, I decided to sell both my laptops and replace them
with somewhat newer MacBook and make that MacBook replacement for both
my ancient desktop and not-so-ancient, yet still vintage laptops.
To make this process easier, I built a AMD64-based fileserver from
scrap parts, put inside it four spare SATA drives (~1.5 TB together in
RAID 5) to collect data from all those computers, sort it and then get
rid of all of them.
I have quite a collection of old computers and I think there is no
need to have similar collection of computers for daily use. So, that's
where I'm right now - trying to sell the laptops, sorting data on my
fileserver and for all the rest using a 2006 MacBook from my
collection. After I have enough money, I do a quantum leap from
2004 technology to something 2014+ and hope to live happily another
eight years as I did on my PowerMac G5.
