Of rabbits
Hm, I'd like to get out of the house today and work on plots.club at a local coffee shop. Got my MacBook, got my phone, got my AirPods, let's hit the road.
* * *
Ahh, this is a great Americano. Why don't I come here more often? All right, a couple hours while the in-laws watch the little guy. Let's refresh the main branch of my plots repo down to this machine, and... Well, shoot. Have I never worked on plots on this MacBook? No problem, I'm sure the config won't take too long to set up.* * *
Jeez, I forgot how annoying it can be to switch dev environments when my primary machine is a Windows PC and my travel device is a MacBook. I've got it--I'll start utilizing some containerization, get a little Django developer image set up. That'll smooth things out in a jiffy.* * *
What a pain containerization is in Windows. I'm glad I'm going the open-source route with Podman, but it feels silly to communicate with it via PowerShell when it's running in WSL anyway. Eh, might as well just install it in WSL directly; I've been looking for a reason to mess around with Linux a bit more.* * *
WSL is a lot of fun to use, and setting up these development environments using Linux has made the whole thing a lot more seamless. Though this whole process probably wouldn't have been a headache in the first place if I just daily drove Linux. Maybe I should consider dipping my toe into that pool? I'm sure it can't be too much trouble to wipe out the OS on my old laptop from college and install a Linux distro on there.* * *
Shoot, looks like the battery on this laptop is totally shot. I'd really like to give this a shot on a separate machine instead of messing with drive partitioning... I can't imagine a spare battery for this would cost that much, right?* * *
Sixty dollars plus shipping for a replacement battery?? Jeez, I bet I could find an old laptop for that price with a working battery. Huh, this is an interesting video walkthrough on old laptops that stand the test of time. I had no idea these old Lenovo ThinkPads were so beefy. And a lucky bid on eBay could net me one for fifty bucks?* * *
Nice, this ThinkPad got here in no time at all and it's in great condition. All right, let's get a Linux distro on this puppy. What have I been using in WSL? Ubuntu? I'll just use Ubuntu.* * *
But what if I didn't use Ubuntu?* * *
EndeavourOS seems like the best balance of the more customization- and optimization-heavy distributions1 while still having a relatively user-friendly wrapper that will keep me on the straight and narrow. Eh, why not?* * *
This is loads of fun. Installing packages is a breeze and gives me exactly what I asked for, no fluff and no bloat. And look, this package manager even has VS Code. What a nice transition it'll be from VS Code strictly on a Windows device, to VS Code running in WSL, to now utilizing it in Linux.* * *
Why is VS Code missing so many extensions on Linux? Oh, wait, it looks like this is an open-source community fork of VS Code. How do I get the normal version of VS Code? It was a pretty mindless download on my PC.* * *
What in the Sam Hill is an AUR?* * *
Okay, praise be to the Arch Wiki for walking me through how to acquire, build, and install binaries from the AUR. That was more work than I expected, but hey, learn something new every day. Let's get these VS Code extensions installed and get the environment back up and running.* * *
Sure is quiet on this laptop. Let me pull Spotify up on my phone and get my AirPods on. Seems silly to have to connect these AirPods to my phone to listen to tunes when I have this perfectly serviceable laptop in front of me.* * *
...Do I dare try?* * *
It's that easy to go from "you can't do anything Bluetooth-related on this machine" to "your AirPods will now automatically connect to this laptop upon logging in?" I know it's not much tougher on Windows, but man, I just really expect roadblocks in tech anymore. Anyway, onto the music. Well, wait a second. Let me look something up first.* * *
Phew, there are so many cool music playing approaches on Linux machines. Spotify seems so droll. What's this? mpd + ncmpcpp? Wow, those are some really cool-looking setups. I didn't even know you could run a music player entirely out of a terminal.* * *
What am I doing? I could just type "spotify" into my browser and have music playing in seconds. Or I could install the client! No reason to waste time on this.* * *
Okay, I only had to re-read both the mpd and ncmpcpp docs twice, but I've got the configuration all set up and I'm ready to get some playlists spun up.* * *
Remember iTunes? I sure do miss the days that I owned my music and it lived on my device *right here.* No connection errors or timeouts. No throttling. Knowing that a few bucks might have made it to the band instead of fractions of a cent. My Bandcamp library is already pretty well-stacked, how about I just download a few albums down to the machine and it gives me a decent starting point?* * *
Wow, I forgot how much space audio takes up when it's not a bunch of compressed-to-heck MP3s that I ripped off of Limewire in 2003.* * *
Look, I built my own PC back in '14, it can't be that hard to add some extra storage to this ThinkPad, right?* * *
This SATA SSD installation was a total cinch. Once the DVD drive caddy replacement gets here next week, that'll net me 2.25 TB total across the three drives in the machine. Plenty for my music and anything else I want to live locally moving forward, then I should be good to go. While I'm waiting for that caddy to get here, I might as well pop in this new 1080p screen replacement--* My wife walks into my office *
"Hey babe, do you think you're ever gonna work on that little website of yours again?"
"What does it look like I'm doing?!"
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A (mostly) true rendition of the last ~month of my life, inspired largely by this scene from Malcolm in the Middle.
1EndeavourOS is a fork of Arch...... by the way