Blog
2025-08-13: I'm up later than intended. Cyberpunk 2077 drew me in. Turned around twice and it was midnight.
I fixed a couple typos and spelling errors in the last post. I spent most of my time getting a sense of the feel of that 2011-era craptop, at the expense of typing accuracy. I think I have an addiction to terrible, tiny laptops because now I want to get the closest modern analogue to that thing: an Asus Vivobook Go, which is a modern 11.6 inch laptop. It's one of very, very few laptops with that form factor, which also ships with a regular SSD instead of a terrible little eMMC chip. Another laptop for another day.
If I'm totally honest though, I get why ~14 inch slim laptops have basically taken over the market for the smallest computers though. They're kind of a happy medium, not as unwieldy as a big laptop, but still big enough to not feel cramped to type on. I'm not sure there's actually that much of a space gain on the new one, since it has much larger bezels. In any case, I'll probably use the tiny potato for testing the practical limits of modern Linux on an old machine. Its RAM and storage expansions, alongside the worst CPU for that model, is a fun hardware combo for investigation. I just wish the touchpad worked normally ;-;
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2025-08-11: I'm writing this on one of the most anemic little computers I have ever seen!
I won this thing on an ebay auction a week or so ago. I placed the minimum bid and figured others would chime in. Lo and behold, nobody else bit. Turns out, these specs were plenty of reason to stay away. Despite the decent amount of ram, that i3 processor is very, very, very slow, and that drags down virtually everything you could possibly do on it.
On the plus side, it seems to be in good working order. The battery still holds a charge and everything mostly seems to work as expected. One annoying thing is that the trackpad struggles to register multi-touch, which made GNOME a no-go. Xfce is working great though! It has an edge scrolling bar that requires a bit of adjusting to, but I'm getting the hang of it. I'd like to hold onto this thing as a disposable travel machine, something where I wouldn't be too heartbroken if I broke it.
I had one of those Asus Transformer Books around 2014 and I absolutely loved the smaller form factor for research and web browsing. It feels like 14 inch laptops are typically the smallest you regularly see nowadays, but I have a soft spot for little 11.6 inch netbook/ultrabook sized machines. I really wish this form factor was still popular outside the school-issued chromebook market.
I debated getting an old Chromebook, but those things came with eMMC storage, which is notorious about aging poorly. By comparison, the SSD and ram expansion on this thing seems to be the best performance I can expect for a little potato like this.
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2025-08-10 I was zonked after work on Friday, between the trip to get the car stuff taken care of, and interviewing an intern candidate yesterday. I had dinner and conked out early, then woke up just after midnight. I ended up staying up for a while, then going back to sleep sometime after the sun came up. One of those days, ya know?
On the plus side, I managed to get a lot of house work done today, then when to a local festival with a friend this evening! I'm up later than I should be since my sleep schedule is borked, but I'll be turning in shortly.
Also, I managed to get some new RAM installed in my decade-old gaming rig. This thing is now rocking an i5-4790K, an AMD RX 6650 XT, and 32 GB of RAM. Which, frankly, is overkill for most of what I play. I'm sure that GPU is somewhat bottlenecked by my motherboard but it's perfectly fine for everything I play. I'm basically keeping this thing alive until some critical components fail. The lovely thing about the Linux ecosystem is that hardware support sticks around far, far longer than Windows! I'll probably turn this into a home media server or something down the road. Heck, I may try getting some cheap components on ebay and building one from my old i5 and a GTX 1660 I have sitting around.
Also also, I decided to install Debian 13 on my gaming rig, despite past experience telling me that Debian is usually a poor fit for gaming PCs and that Fedora is obviously the better fit. Why do this? Because! Really though, I have this preoccupation for finding a Silver Bullet distro, one that meets my wants and needs at every level. When Debian 13 was still in testing, it was wonky to try to game with. Too many packages were getting removed/updated to keep things consistent for how I set things up. Now, however, it looks like things are setting up nicely. Since 13 got its stable release today, I'm hoping it will do the trick! I am letting Retroarch import my classic game library overnight and I'll test Steam/Lutris/Retroarch sometime tomorrow. IF all else fails, Fedora will be ezpz to reinstall.
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2025-08-07: Got the car sold. My feelings are kinda all-over-the-place about it. I'll be writing something more extensive about it in a little while. I have found that a lot of my cars have been representative of where I am in my life, so this feels like closing a chapter. One that's as much of a mixed bag as the car itself. I'll put a link to it here, and under the Writing section on the navigation panel. I gotta get this out of my system while it's fresh.
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2025-08-06: Two big things!
#1: I succeeded at installing a new CPU into my gaming rig! I got the top-of-the-line CPU from this chipset. Jumping from a mid-tier i5 to a really good i7. It's still a decade or so old so it can't hold a candle to new machines, but it'll extend the life of my machine. I also have more ram coming, to bump it up to a ridiculous 32 gb.
The vast majority of games in my library are pre-2020, so I'm not exactly pushing the cutting edge for my games. However, Microsoft Flight Simulator was an awful lot to ask for my little i5. Good thing I didn't ask it to play it too much, just a cool 1,800 hours D: (I'll definitely be putting a review or something out. It's far and away the software I have used more than anything else during my downtime this last half-decade.
#2: I am selling a car! I've got someone in my family who's been needing a car after some financial setbacks. I've had an old, low mileage honda as a "getting through this chapter" car after a natural disaster. It has some quirks because of an accident history, but I spent like, a year getting a lot of its issues sorted out. Here's hoping this lil thing gets them through the chapter they're in.
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2025-08-02: After fighting uphill for a bit, I have GrapheneOS working on my phone. I tried this a few months ago, but was not 100% sure if it would affect the rebate I was getting for my phone. Now that it's paid off, we should be good though!
I also just started Cyberpunk 2077. It's. . . interesting? The controls feel a little clunky to me. It and The Witcher 3 both feel like triple-A euro-jank. I've been wanting to check out the anime, Cyberpunk Edgerunners. It's apparently a tear jerker.
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2025-08-01: It's officially the dog days of summer. We climbed well over 100 degrees this week. It's been miserable. Blehh.
