There are basically two approaches to moving overseas. One is to pay for a
shipping container or portion thereof and move just about everything with you,
which is slow and expensive. The other is to ruthlessly pare your life down to
what you can fit in a suitcase and a backpack and start afresh in your new
destination. I have taken the latter option twice previously in my life. It is
most assuredly not easy, but I have always taken a degree of pride in being the
kind of preson who _can_ do this. That pride is feeling rather hurt right now,
though.
One would think that this process would get easier with time, but actually I
have to say that paring down for this most recent move was the most difficult by
far. Maybe this is just a memory problem, where previous moves are less
horrific in my mind now years later than they were at time, but I don't think
so. Getting my life down to around ~30kg of stuff that fits in one suitcase and
one 35L hiking pack was really hard and painful and required me to get rid of
things I didn't really want to. Throughout the whole process I went to great
lengths to make sure that as little as possible went to waste and was rather
sold, donated or recycled where possible, and I'm pleased with how I did on that
front. But I'm not pleased with the idea that I'm not doing as well as I used
to at not accumulating things and at not getting attached to the things I do
accumulate.
Because the whole experience is still fresh in my mind, and because I know that
the move to Finland is highly unlikely to be permanent and this means that I'm
going to have to do this yet again further down the line, I have been thinking a
lot lately about how I want to live in Finland, with regard to physical
posesesions, and I might write about this at some point in the future.
Anyway, for fun, here is a list of all the computing devices I will be taking
with me to Finland, ranked in order of freedom, because why not?
* My homebrew Z80 microcomputer. This has 512KB of RAM (banked in 32KB pages)
and two RS-232 serial channels. It occupies first place here because literally
every byte of software this things run was hand-written in assembly by me. None
of the peripheral chips are smart enough to have firmware, so the contents of
the ROM chip are about all there is! Oh, well, I guess the CF card that acts
as a hard drive must have a controller in it, but this is still the least
proprietary computer I own by a large margin.
* Two Raspberry Pis, a model 1B and a model 2 of some kind. This basically acts
as media centre and a (slow, rarely used) file server. The 2 was an upgrade to
the 1 (I hoped the extra CPU grunt would speed up file transfers, as the FUSE
NTFS driver is quite heavy and I think it was the bottleneck with the 1B. The
1B has not been used much since, but I'd like to give it a new lease on life in
Finland, perhaps install NetBSD on it and use it as a SLIP gateway for the Z80
machine. The Rasperry Pis are relatively open hardware, but I think the
graphics processors still require binary blobs to run, so this is less free than
my Z80 but more free than everthing else.
* A refurbished ThinkPad X220, which is my main daily driver for work and for
pleasure. I have always been a big fan of the ThinkPad X series. It's running
Debian Jessie (stable), because I hate updating things and am perfectly happy
using years old software. I have to use non-free wireless drivers and I'm using
Lenovo's proprietary BIOS. However, the X220 is apparently pretty well
supported by Coreboot, so once I'm settled in in Finland I'm hoping I'll be able
to flash that. Then, freed from the BIOS whitelist, I can install a new wifi card
with libre drivers, and then this may jump to second place in the list.
* A Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini. I use smartpones, but I am not really enthusiastic
about them, and every phone after my first has just been the most recent thing
that a friend of family member has discarded after upgrading to the latest shiny
thing. I really can't tell much difference between them, possibly because I
always immediatley install Cyanogenmod or thesedays LineageOS, and don't install
anything from Google, which means my phones don't do most of what I guess
mainstream users do with them anyway. LineageOS is open source, but I imagine
that all the highly integrated chips in modern smartphones are loaded with
proprietary firmware so this ranks below the ThinkPad.
* A small Lenovo Tablet, running stock Android and plenty of apps from the
Market or Play Store or whatever it's called these days. We bought this
exclusively to use when travelling on our most recent trip to Japan. Having
something larger than a phone with wifi, GPS and translation software is a
lifesaver when travelling, especially as it let us travel without laptops, keeping
things light. This has sat pretty much unused since we got back, and will
probably do so until our next overseas trip. This is less free than my phone,
but this doesn't bother me too much since I basically treat it as a
special-purpose appliance, don't use it for anything too sensitive, and in fact
have it turned off 99% of the time.
* An original Gameboy, as described in an earlier phlog entry. I imagine this
is actually an entirely proprietary system, but I have not listed it at the very
end of the list because I suspect that whatever copy protections Nintendo put in
place back in the day have now been extensively broken making it possible in
principle to run whatever code you like. As far as I know this is definitely
not the case for the final entry.
* A PlayStation 4. This is probably the most proprietary computing device I own
which I actually use as something vaguely resembling a general purpose computer.
It's also probably the single heaviest item we are taking with us. I find
myself retroactively questioning the wisdom of this decision, but we made it at
the time after looking at the cost of replacement in Finland and I suppose it
must have made sense at the time.
That's everything. It's not exactly super-minimalist, but aside from the PS4 it
would be entirely feasible and not even all that cumbersome to carry all of the
above simultaneously in a single bag, which I think is pretty neat. If forced
to rescue things from a burning building, I'd grab the X220 first because all my
data's on it, the Z80 second because it's one-of-a-kind and I sank a lot of
sweat, blood and tears into it, and let the rest burn without too much worry
because they're pretty much fungible.
