This is a tale of serendipity. Before I get too far into the
tale, I want to make sure I am not accused of burying the
lead: my wife is expecting our first child. Because of that,
I have begun the process of moving all of objects out of room
(and either trashing out, reorganizing or finding new homes
for them) in order to turn it into a nursery.
I came across a chunky HP computer. Frankly, I needed a break
and so I was looking for a way to procastinate a bit, so I
said to myself "well, we're probably throwing this out
anyway, so let me see if I can get Linux on it." And so it
was done. Also praises be Linux Mint for easy installation.
As the kind of work I had been doing was physically and
mentally exhausting both, I took an extra long time on the
tinkering process, so much so that I started feeling guilty.
I realized that I had a solution that I was looking for a
problem to solve, one of my great critiques of the madness
passing for innovation, let alone an economy.
The worst of the feeling came when I sent over a collection
of books I had ripped from Project Gutenberg. It only took a
second, as text files are light, and it would be enough
content to last me years of reading, but that only made it
worse. Why was I trying to pretend I'd be using the computer
for years? It was just something I was going to trash out to
make room formy new life. This appeared to be just dumb
mission creep.
But then I realized the computer had a CD drive. Well, there
it was, a use! We had old CDs and DVDs and it'd be nice to
have a player if and when ours goes out. I grabbed a CD and
tested it out. It brought Rhythmbox up as the player. I saw
from this that I could extract the CD. Nice, I would like
back-ups. This got me to wondering how much memory the old
clunker had. I looked it up to find there were over 400
gigabytes -- holy crap! Clearly this machine was from before
the time it was thought everyone should put all their stuff
up in the cloud. Not only can this device store all of the
public domain books I could ever read (any flash stick can),
but now it will store more music than I could ever listen to.
This computer that I thought I was going to get rid of is now
getting VIP treatment, the most likely to have my mechanical
keyboard plugged into it. I am going to keep the cord to
power it in the garage, taped down to one spot, but then keep
the device itself inside so it isn't exposed to temperature
extremes. I take it out and explore the Internet Archive,
finding what from the history of blues and jazz I can
download and add to my collection.
All in all a good hobby.
Update. This also became the computer I used for Tiny Core
Linux.
--
This work is hereby in the public domain.
Do what you want with it.
