I’m only about 6 weeks out from the last post on here, which is pretty good for me, just in that I haven’t outright forgotten about doing this yet. So, some quick things I’m thinking on right now:
Linux Experiment is largely over. I decided I wanted to also play video games, especially with the whole work from home situation, and yeah that pretty well still sucks on Linux. I did have the dual-boot situation going on but the problem with that is that rebooting also sucks. In the end, the Pentium system is now Windows 10 Pro full-time and has taken full residence on the (surprisingly slow, though you’d have to be really fancy to know that) 512GB M.2 SSD rather than the AlertSeal. The AlertSeal will live on to do other things, probably. On the plus side, I do now have a real email client, in that I can actually just use freaking Outlook, which is not as good as the Mac version. (Unified inbox is not a hard thing to miss.)
The dumb PC is still going strong and is my daily driver now. I have the MacBook Pro set up for use as well but the main system is the Windows box. I have 3 monitors connected because why the hell not and I can still attach two more to the actual GPU because why the hell not. It did get an upgrade to 16GB RAM, mainly to keep Docker from bitching, and will get upgraded to a real Core i5 soon. (Speaking of: I upgraded from 8 to 16GB RAM and have never been less enthusiastic to upgrade my system. Mainly because I didn’t think to look beforehand, and I should have just spent the not much more to get 32GB. Oh well.)
One of the nice things about having fancy mechanical keyboards, even the relatively cheap TecWare ones I have and enjoy quite a bit, is that at least the keycaps all come off relatively easily. Makes the keyboard super easy to really clean. Both my TecWare ones also have a key switch puller so I can reduce the whole thing to a flat plane for cleanup (though the key switches are much harder to remove). Especially now, having the ability to pull all the keycaps, douse them in bleach or whatever, and put them back on relatively quickly is a nice thing.
The Wyze people put together an alternate firmware package for their Wyze Cam product that turns it into a basic webcam. It works pretty well. Enough that I got a separate Wyze Cam for just that purpose (for now, and those things are $20 new so). They’re good security cams by default as well. But now I really have to clean out the office, since, because it’s a security cam at heart, it’s got a wide-angle lens on it.
This past week or so has been an utter failure in this regard but getting in a pretty regular neighborhood walk has been a nice perk. For now, it’s not stupid ridiculous outside and everything being in bloom means it’s also rather pretty through my neighborhood.
Working on personal software projects (or projects in general, it’s not like I’ve played with my guitars much either) is even more difficult when you’re also working from home. Oh well. I also rebuilt the Pentium 133 Win98 system (sort of) so at some point I’ll clean that up and do a write up on it too.