Well, I got a new NVME SSD to install into my computer, and when moving partitions around, I managed to corrupt the old drive. Good thing there was nothing important on it, as I was planning on doing this upgrade, so I hadn’t migrated too much to it yet. I lost a couple days worth of stuff, but again, nothing essential. All my essential stuff was either on another computer, or backed up. I did try to recover it out of curiosity, and failed horribly. Probably would have tried harder had the data been more important. In the end, I repartitioned and formatted the drive. The drive itself wasn’t damaged, just my methods .
Stuck In A Rut
I’ve recognized that I’ve gotten a bit complacent over the last few weeks. As a result, some of my goals have started to suffer. I’ve written less then I would have liked, and I’ve put off a few things here in there. I’m not going into specifics, this isn’t really about that. Plus, I wouldn’t want to give away any surprises. In any case, I’m going to take full advantage of this weekend and start sorting shit out. It’s the only time I really have to get anything major done anyway. You know, since I’m an adult with a job and… ugh, responsibilities.
First thing on the docket is to get the second room of my little rental cleaned out. I’m going to turn it into a little workshop to work on some videos for YouTube. I hope you like Linux. I’m not going to try starting the videos yet, because I don’t want to overwhelm myself. I need to get a lot of other things done so that I can feel comfortable enough in myself to create. It’s going to be a couple weekends, and a couple trips to the Home Depot. I also need to get a door installed on that room as well. Not sure how I’m going to tackle it, seeing as the current door is just a hole punched into a brick wall. I’d have to frame it somehow, and it has rough edges. I’m sure I can work it out.
Another goal I need to take care of, I need to get a new workstation to act as my central command center. I don’t really have money for that right now, so I’ll have to make due with what I have currently. I’ve got a savings plan in place, so I’m sure I can work it out. I’m going to also need a new microphone, because what I have sounds horrible. All things that aren’t super urgent. Try not to judge too harshly when things do start appearing, I’m building this all on a pretty tight budget.
Finally, I need to just write more. I don’t think there’s anything else that needs to be said, it’s just a thing that I need to do. Let’s see how it goes.
Thermostat Drama
Well, I figured out the issue with the A/C. Somebody got it in their head to save money by turning the thermostat up, so that the A/C wouldn’t cut in as often. I mean, yeah, I get it, nobody likes to spend money if they don’t have to. At the same time, it’s really hot out. We have central air for a reason. From a finanicial and environmental aspect, I see it as honorable. From a trying to sleep at night so I can go to work the next day, I’m like, no. Let’s decrease our carbon footprint somewhere else. Anyway, the temperature is now set at a reasonable setting. It’s not cold, but it’s not unbearably warm in the house anymore. No need to go to extremes.
Summer is too Hot
Summer is too hot. Thankfully, the basement of my house stays super chill. I have the A/C running, of course, however upstairs is not keeping up with the heat outside. It’s only in the high 80’s, so it should be doing just fine. I’ll have to get that looked at. Don’t really have anything new to add today as of yet, maybe I’ll post later.
Laptop Broke
I had an old late model 2009 Macbook that I purchased for $100 and upgraded for about another $100 about a year ago. It finally kicked the bucket and went to the digital graveyard in the sky. Thankfully, it survived long enough for me to replace it with another cheap laptop that I can use for on the go work. Anyway, the Macbook I had upgraded to 8GB of RAM, and installed a 500 GB SSD drive, then reformatted it with my preferred Linux distribution. It didn’t have to be super powerful, as it’s not my main system, but rather just a on the go, light duty computer I can use to keep up on social media, and work on some code. Since the HDD and the RAM is new in it, I can scavenge those for another system, and they should be just fine.
The real bummer was that it died after setting up my new laptop, but before I could migrate important things off of it that I would need on the new system. I was also planning on giving it to a friend who is in need of a system of a similar spec as that Macbook, which I will no longer be able to give him. The good news is that the new laptop is 80% setup, it has my keepass, but I still need to recover my ssh and PGP keys off the old system. But enough with my sob storry, on with the specs of the new machine!
For around $400 ( it was on sale ) I bought myself a Dell Inspiron 15 5570 laptop with a 1 TB hdd, 8 GB of RAM, Intel Core i5-8250U, and Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU. It still has one unused sata slot, and an unused m.2 NVME slot which I plan on populating. I also plan on upgrading the RAM. I haven’t opened it up, so I’m not sure the exact configuration of RAM modules inside, so I’ve not determined the cost yet. It does have a built-in SD Card slot, which is helpful since I’ve been doing a lot of work with Raspberry Pi projects. It also has an 8x DVD +/- RW drive, if you care about optical media. I’m unlikely to ever use it, but who knows, I may want to burn off an install disk for someone in the future, or watch a movie, who knows. I have Netflix, so I don’t really see the point of it anymore. I, of course, removed Windows 10 Home ( which is useless, I mean, if I’m going to use Windows, it had better be Pro at least ) and replaced it with my preferred Linux distribution. It also has a fingerprint reader built into the power button, but that doesn’t currently work on Linux as yet. The fingerprint reader is the only thing without native Linux support. I didn’t plan on using it anyway, so it’s a non-issue. I don’t trust those things. And finally, it has a 15.4″ 1080p display.
The purpose of the new machine is to be a lightweight system for when I’m on the go, which I find myself needing a lot more than I had thought when I set up my command center, but a command center doesn’t travel well, so I needed something a bit more portable. At less than 5 lb.s, this machine serves that purpose beautifully without sacrificing so much power as to be pointless. If I need to do any heavy lifting, that will be done on my main system, of course.
I had meant to make this post about it *AFTER* I had completed setting it up to my liking, but my other laptops early demise made that no longer possible. I don’t blog from my main system, as well, I have to be in a certain mode to be comfortable documenting my life issues. I just prefer to do it from a laptop. My main system is great and all, but other than gaming and intense compiling operations, I don’t use it as much as I used to. It’s funny how that works out. Anyway, it might be another week or so until I post again, as I get this laptop into a more comfortable configuration with all my stuff on it that I rely on. Until next time!
Mark LaDoux 