2023-04-04                         from the editor of ~insom
   ------------------------------------------------------------

   I moved into this house at the start of the pandemic, a few
   months into lock down. Because we're cautious and our work
   and school all went remote, we basically spent the first
   year we lived here, mostly indoors.

   Every now and then I'm walking down a hallway or turning on
   a lightswitch or something and I'll get a little flicker of
   a reminder of what that felt like -- when this house was our
   whole world.

   (I don't have a point or anything, but I think if I don't
   write these things down they will melt away and I won't even
   remember that I felt like this).

   ---

   I'm doing some computer Spring cleaning, or a refresh.

   I've reinstalled my personal laptop and moved some computing
   tasks around, apt updated etc. I've tried to go with as
   little customization and packages as I can. I'm also trying
   to make the important stuff (like tiny.tilde.website)
   repeatable so that when they break I can fix them without
   too much stress.

   I drew the line at installing Ansible or Chef, though.

   I bought a new PC specifically for Linux and doing Rust +
   database work. I have several computers and mostly they have
   8GiB of RAM and an okay CPU but, despite what Slashdot
   commenters used to imply, a lot of smaller computers is not
   really the same as one big computer.

   Those mini PCs I run ttw from are great because they are low
   power and they run 24/7. But they're not fast. My laptop has
   a great battery life. But it's also not fast. Like any nerd,
   I have some Pi's hanging around: same deal.

   I do have a good gaming PC, but it runs Windows and I'd like
   it to stay that way -- also there's something about having
   things semi-dedicated for different settings that I enjoy.
   This is why I have a 20 year-old Haiku laptop for IRC and
   Gopher/Gemini/writing. It's a PC that is purely for calm,
   text-based leisure!

   Also, for what it's worth, I don't feel like one big machine
   is a replacement for several small ones -- I could stuff
   128GiB of RAM into the Acer I bought and virtualize
   everything else, but then when it fails I am going to have a
   very very bad day, all at once.