The church bells were ringing this morning as I was leaving
the house to take the recycling in to town. I've never been
terribly religious - I describe myself as an apathetic agnostic -
but it is still rather lovely hearing the bells ring their songs.
My village is lucky enough to have a church in it that still has
actual real bells - I know many others in the area have resorted
to playing a recording from their defunct bell towers. The church
folk recently, in the last couple of years or so, had some major
repair work done on the bell system. Before they became
inoperable, it was very rare they'd actually ring them, and they
never played music. Even for someone like myself, it's quite a
treat to hear them play.
I had a new project machine dropped on me today: I do some
data recovery and e-waste disposal work on the side, mostly for
people trying to recover their lost photo albums from a dead PC
or trying to safely get rid of a machine with their tax records
on it. In most cases, I'll trade the labor for the computer in
question. This time, it's a large Toshiba AIO, from around 2013,
with an Ivy Bridge i3 in it. This is the second AIO I've acquired
this way, and they are a little limited in what they're capable
of - not much RAM, not much in terms of horsepower from the CPU,
no dedicated GPU. The previous AIO, I could think of nothing
interesting to do with, so I just loaded LibreElec onto it and
turned it into a kind of smart TV. At least this one has a touch
screen - if it still works, perhaps I can come up with something
cool to do with it. I was also able to salvage a good Win10 code
and a 1TB HDD from it, so that's a nice bonus as well.
I'm already getting pretty deep into the budget right now
between home winterization, car repairs, and holiday stuff, but I
have really had the itch to build another PC lately. I have got
some good lines on pretty nice used modern parts right now. If I
had the financial cushion for it I'd take a plunge, buy some of
it up and try to build/sling some entry-level and mid-range
'gaming' rigs on ebay or something, that way I could build some
PCs without going totally broke or without totally filling my
house with unused machines, haha. I used to make some pretty
decent money on the side doing something like that with import
video game consoles/accessories years ago. It was always pretty
fun taking on a couple thousand dollars in debt to buy a bunch of
stuff you know isn't working in the hopes of being able to fix it
and still make at least enough to cover your expenses. However,
now with me having a mortgage, a car payment, and something of a
family, I don't think I could work up the nerve to take a risk
like that again any time soon.
I've found that I really enjoy writing these logs. I dunno
if anyone actually reads them, but that doesn't really matter to
me. It is something for me to look forward to doing, and I feel
like it has helped me to gather my thoughts, something I have had
a very hard time doing for the last few years. I do feel like I
come off as a bit of a rambler though. I have always had a really
hard time getting stopped in my communication once I manage to
figure out how to start. Part of this is because if I want to
talk on a given subject, I *really* want to talk about it, but
part of it is also legitimately not knowing how to change gears
or end a conversation in way that isn't me just trailing off or
abruptly stopping and walking away. In the context of these logs,
maybe I should start adding a little sign-off at the end or
something? I guess I'll have to think on that, but for tonight I
think I'm just gonna stop here - it was still the 5th when I
started writing this, and it's almost 1AM on the 6th now, haha.
