paralogue.org

I poked a bit about this in the minimalism thread — but I have a problem. I'm starting to get really into collecting computers.

Why? I think so many of them are pretty, so many of them are inexpensive, so many of them are capable of very specific things, so many of them can do great things with the right constraints. And I have started to believe more strongly in purpose-specific hardware over the past year. I carry a 3DS with me, an e-reader, etc. etc. Instead of aiming for the tools around me to do everything well enough, I tend to pick out what I want to bring with me places based on what I see myself doing or needing done. And then I keep them doing those specific things.

And why does that matter? Um. Hmm. Have you ever seen "Recovery of an MMO Junkie"? It's a super cute, super sweet 12-episode anime where a girl burns out from her job and goes back to being a NEET playing MMOs and she crossplays as a guy and I guess I'm not sure what spoilers are for the series anymore, but she goes to someone's house and the first thing she sees is his keyboard and thinks, "oh my god. This is the keyboard you use to play the MMO. This is the actual one." Like seeing something intimate, seeing a part of his naked body.

Computers are appliances. But we also choose them to extend ourselves. I think computers and hardware are a form of self-expression, but then on top of that, that multiplies outward: they enable us to do different things really well, or only somewhat well, or extraordinarily well. You configure macros and aliases. You pick the right specs. You get the goddamn Sound Blaster card. The personal computer magnifies an emanation of a person, from a pure impulse to an entire world. I believe strongly in the caves.

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What computers?

Well, here's my current slate:

• keina is my Mac. It's an M1 Pro, 16". I received it as a work computer and bought it back when I left. I at the time was skeptical of huge machines (I had been using an Air for a while, and really liked it), but I started to come to love the feeling of having this huge deck, this control panel-ass experience with me. I use it at home when I'm doing my job; when I'm working on music (Logic Pro); when I am doing graphics work (Photoshop + Pixelmator both!). When I'm on the road, I'll bring keina if I see myself even kinda possibly having to do work, if I see myself wanting to watch a movie with a friend (best display and speakers I have), etc.
• satsuki is my gaming laptop. It's a pink Razer Blade 14, running Windows 11 Pro, with a nice 3070 Ti in it. It's super light; it's got a great OLED on it; it's basically my fun machine. The downside? The battery life is, like, sub-2 hours. It seriously bugs me! So much so that I question whether I can bring it with me when I travel, even though it's lighter than the Mac and pretty to look at. keina lasts literally two full workdays in a row without needing to be charged, no matter what I seem to be doing. I can charge satsuki with a USB-C cable, but if I'm going to be gaming, then I'll probably need to bring the actual 85W power cable, which is another downside for travel (since I try to bring a single USB-C cable for all my devices and just top them up as they need it). I also just have yet to want to play PC games when I travel. I usually bring the Steam Deck if that's what I want to be doing, so satsuki is essentially a glorified home machine. I considered selling her off (they still sell for like, $3000 on eBay just for the colour, I think — they don't make them in pink anymore) and building out the perfect AMD+Wayland VRR NixOS gaming desktop, but then I decided against it. I had satsuki already. She is essentially a collector's item. She plays everything I need perfectly. She makes me feel relaxed.
• MINICROSS is the home server. It's a Mac mini M1 that I bought back in Vancouver when I sold off my old 2017 iMac (MACROSS8299) that was in the closet, serving as the server before her. It had bard running on it, when I ran bard for my old Discord server. It has, like, 16TB of space (just the same 8TB drive mirrored, honestly) for watching movies and anime at home. It is also a backup space for old stuff like university papers or mirroring my music library.
• yomiko tsubasa is the old satsuki. In like, April, I just went out and bought a brand new Thinkpad X1 because I was having a crisis. When I'm setting up computers, when I'm getting an environment just right, when I'm learning something new about how they work, when I enable possibilities and sort out issues — I feel really calm. And I really needed some space where I could do that, to chill out. I thought that I would replace keina with her as my main computer of choice. She's tiny, has decent battery life (like, 11 hours?), is plenty capable. I got NixOS going on her; I got a nice config; I got everything down pat where she could do everything keina could. But as hardware, keina was simply better? If I was watching videos, I would prefer that screen. If I was listening to anything, keina had a nicer experience. I gave her to the CEO of our company as company property, and I recently recalled it. I think that I want yomiko to be the "fun machine" for travel, like satsuki but a bit more capable of holding a charge, since I care more about doing low-demand things on longer battery than playing, like, Code Vein at 165Hz, when I'm on a train for 6 hours.

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Past and present

So I've had this disease before. I actually bought a Pinebook Pro when I was burning out at my job in 2020ish. I decided I would go for Arch Linux, since I hadn't worked with it before, and I got Sway going, got it to the point where everything was set, but it was severely limited. It is low-spec enough that Chrome is just not tenable, so we're talking no Electron apps, no application-specific web browsing, nothing but like, Dillo. I ran Midori when it was still a nice Webkit wrapper (I think they changed codebase now). I was also just frustrated with it; Wayland and X didn't seem to share a clipboard so I couldn't reliably move data around and having this Pinebook for just using vim seemed like too limited of a use case for me. I just gave it away when someone asked for it.

This past week, I was visiting my folks and my sister showed me this Thinkpad T500 she was using in high school. Using with an asterisk — it had, like, two one-paragraph reflection responses and then otherwise was untouched. She said it was similar now with her college laptop; she just doesn't use computers. No one at my parents house does. Just, you know, phone and iPad.

So, here's the thing: it's 15.6" inches, 4:3 screen, running a Core 2 Duo and 2GB RAM on Windows Vista Business. It is quintessential, like, 2006-2008 business computer. It's heavy as fuck, it has a pre-IPS screen. But it had Chrome on it, and would you look at that? Chrome ran decently enough. "Can run Chrome" is actually a decent litmus test for whether you need to stick it in an era or whether you can try to utilise it for the current world, just, you know, sparingly. That's a total bummer.

I went to a computer store around the corner and got it a 120gb ssd, replaced the RAM and brought it to 8GB. Decided I would try out Void Linux and IceWM, and keep the idle RAM at, like, 280MB. Thus we get tsubasa.

I've been using BadWolf on it as a web browser which runs real fast (but keeps JS off by default and wipes cookies every launch, which honestly pisses me off!) ... but I'm not sure what the best utility is for it. I think it's a good boomer computer — a mid-2000s, mid-range machine with some cheats enabled, called "an SSD and like 4x the RAM that's normal."

It's effectively a great computer for playing 90s and early 00s games on an era-appropriate display (tons of stuff will look weird on a 4K display), and hey, Diablo 1 runs at a rock-solid 60fps on Void. But it severely limits compatibility using Void — Steam won't launch, for some godforsaken reason — and I've been wondering if I should try a more standard distro for better compatibility with Lutris et al. Or, god forbid, like, Windows XP! If you use XP then you can't go online or really use Steam or whatever. I just don't want to be stuck digging up GOG installers for games on an ad hoc basis.

I think she can handle Steam in no browser mode, and I think all old games are gonna function great under Proton. (The test comes when we try Guild Wars 1, which also won't work on Void, which is just simply unacceptable).

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Anyway, so that is my special interest thread. What about you? Do you have this illness?

Anyway, so that is my special interest thread. What about you? Do you have this illness?

Have kept many old computers as time capsules. The farthest I got with Linux was Ubuntu on a netbook I once left on top of a car before driving away. So there’s that machine somewhere (it still works), a heavy gaming laptop I bought used off a Dubstep DJ, a laptop handed down from a family member’s job, a tablet/laptop hybrid which performs remarkably well and a custom tower which I bought used from a close friend at a stellar discount.

I wonder what the statistics are for people who own computers nowadays. Wouldn’t want to live without one, too much fun.

Enjoyed reading your post.

Want to visit Akihabara and see street vendor computer parts

oh i'm glad someone else is in the camp of seeing computers as a means of personal expression… honestly that's a really big part of why i find computers enjoyable and it has been for a while… ever since i learned how to enable the dock suck effect in os x tiger honestly.

but there's a certain comfiness that comes with setting everything up in a way that just feels right for you, and i've done a lot of searching over the years to figure out what feels right for myself – bit by bit, piece by piece. sometimes i worry that the more i pursue this goal the more idiosyncratic i'll become, but i also think i passed the point of normalcy a decade ago. i guess now i think about it as akin to how custom-tailored clothes will always fit yourself better than they could anyone else, and if you had the choice, wouldn't you rather wear something that fits you perfectly than something that'll do a roughly good job fitting everyone who is shaped approximately like yourself?

and then you fall in love with using vi editing on dvorak but with the movement keys rebound from hjkl to ehtu because everything needs to feel Right.

in the sake of not boring everyone i'll just write about the few that seem the most important:

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kumatora: kvm build, daily driver
Birthdate: September 1, 2020

back when navi (see below) was becoming just a bit too outdated to be usable, i started thinking about what i wanted my next daily computer to be, with my only guideline being that i wanted to dump a bunch of money into something that'd last me a while. the two options i came to were to either spend $3,000 speccing out a pretty decent mac, or to take that same amount of money and make the most overbuilt linux pc i could with the budget. my only hangup with going that route was the risk of being alienated from my creative tools, but once i was told that it was possible to run windows in virtual machine on linux at near-native speeds, i guess my heart was set.

enter kumatora: a machine built to do everything i'd ever want to do. she's got power, she's got grace, she's got two intentionally-mismatched gpus and slightly-broken rgb. and i love her, truly.

kuma originally ran gentoo up until this year, because gentoo charmed me and i thought that it would make it easier to set up virtualization… plus the fact that you emerge packages into the system tickled my aesthetic sensibilities. i also used to be really into trying out different virtual machine configurations, but the only vms that now see regular use are a local server, a windows 10 install that ostensibly was for gaming and music production and now mostly gets booted up for zoom meetings, and a super secret encrypted vm that was originally designed for doing sick and twisted shit but then i couldn't think of any sick and twisted shit i actually wanted to do so it's now just an anime seedbox.

eventually, after a couple years of broken dependencies piling up, i decided that gentoo was just too much work to upkeep for little return. it finally hit me that the operating system bell curve meme is less about what your operating system says about your iq and more about how much iq you want to put into using the operating system, and i'd rather spend my iq on other things these days. so i switched to fedora, since that was the distro i'd clicked with most in my vm hopping, and it's since given me 10% of the trouble that gentoo ever gave me.

maybe the big thing i learned from all this is that i tend to gravitate toward the tools that are available to me. like, i tried so hard to get back into music production on windows, but the friction involved with booting up the vm, logging in, starting the program, redirecting asio, etc. was just enough to discourage me; meanwhile, furnace is something i can boot up and jump into within seconds, and while the chiptunes i make aren't "as good" as what i'd be able to make with a proper daw, it feels a lot easier to break past my blank canvas syndrome with it. i also haven't played many games at all on the windows side either, which makes me slightly regret cheaping out on the amd gpu that runs on the linux side…

isidol: nas build
Birthdate: December 11, 2023

i'd been memeing about wanting a nas for years, but never quite felt like my storage needs were enough to justify getting one. however, once kuma's 6tb storage drive was getting dangerously close to full, i decided to pull the trigger.

i couldn't find a good off-the-shelf option that had enough drive bays to give me both the capacity and redundancy i wanted, had decent specs, and didn't cost an unreasonable amount. so i just looked into building one myself. when researching for the build, i heard about the jonsbo n2 case which looked alright and has a five-drive bay, and then once i started speccing out a potential build for the n2 they released the n3 which has an eight-drive bay, and at that point my fate was sealed.

60tb usable (8x10tb with double parity), 32gb ram, a core i5 for some reason… it's seriously overbuilt, but i was always bad at half-measures. plus the extra processing power means that i could use it to run services and play pretend at my dream of running the polycule intranet, except the polycule dream is dead and my roommates have no interest in any of this stuff anyway. but it's still ok to dream, right?

so now isie and kuma have become a symbiotic pair, bound together by a handful of nfs mounts. i have a domain that i have hairpinned to the nas, i have some services that i run but rarely use because it's easier to just pull up videos on my computer than find them in jellyfin, i fall asleep every night to blinkenlights and the chunk-chunk of eight hard drives spinning, god's in his heaven, all's right with the world.

navi: hackintosh build, former daily
Birthdate: December 30, 2015

after my previous computer (a mac pro named iji) began to be too outdated for regular use, with it stuck on like 10.6, i decided to invest in something new. since i had only really used macs, i planned on getting another mac, but since i also was living off $21k a year at the time, i decided to save a little money and build a hackintosh instead.
the final build came out to be about $850 for specs equivalent to a decently-built imac at the time, and even though getting it to boot the first time was a nightmare, it eventually stabilized and became only a little janky to use.

since a lot of my music work was done on it – a lot of which will only render properly on it – i plan to keep it around as a kind of archival pc. but i still am able to get some use out of it every so often: as a cd ripper, as a computer to do mac things on that are harder to do on other operating systems (like merge pdfs), and mostly as a stepmania box. though even there, the only modernish version of stepmania that runs well on it (or runs at all!) is outfox.

foxdreamer: ibook g4, donated oct 2021

my roommate's dad works in IT, and one of the perks is that he gets to take home his organization's retired computers every so often, which means i get asked every so often if i want to take one of them off his hands, and i usually end up agreeing.

but this era of design was so comfy!! it's such a nice and chunky size on my lap, early os x is cute to use, and i dunno it brings me joy. i only wish i could figure out a good use for it… writing? simple stuff with milkytracker? it is able to natively run KDX which, if we're talking about the capability for software to shape virtual spaces, this inspires feelings in me.

misty: sony vaio pcv-1154, donated may 2021

ok this machine is theoretically really cool. i mostly associated the vaio series with its notebooks, but this one was designed to be a desktop multimedia pc. it has both a dvd reader and a separate dvd writer built in, inputs for a whole bunch of memory card formats, multiple av outs – all in a layered case that reminds me vaguely of the x68000. which makes it feel rare and cool!… despite being a windows pc.

when i got it, it had been upgraded to windows 7 (?!) and having a tough time with it, so that would need to go. a few weeks later, while netdoll was over at my apartment, we decided to see if we could do anything fun with this machine. our first thought was to put haiku on it, but we couldn't make it past the bootloader. we tried a few other operating systems, but none of them seemed to take either (even netbsd, which is supposed to run on anything, right?). as a last-ditch effort, we tried openbsd, and for some reason that one managed to boot and install to a workable desktop.

it currently sits unused, and i think one of the fans disconnected itself when i moved it to where i live now, so i'd need to look into that…

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despite all the computers i have, i still want more, but maybe that's just because i (also) have this particular sickness. like, i think it'd be nice to have a more modern laptop, so i can work on stuff while in my bed (soft, accidentally fall asleep easily) rather than in my chair (less comfortable or ergonomic than i hoped when i bought it), but it's also not a very high priority for me. i also kinda want a pc-9821, because i enjoy writing for the soundchip and i'd love to move my life more in that direction, but i honestly wouldn't know where to put it nor would i have the skills to upkeep it.

maru wrote:

And why does that matter? Um. Hmm. Have you ever seen "Recovery of an MMO Junkie"? It's a super cute, super sweet 12-episode anime where a girl burns out from her job and goes back to being a NEET playing MMOs and she crossplays as a guy and I guess I'm not sure what spoilers are for the series anymore, but she goes to someone's house and the first thing she sees is his keyboard and thinks, "oh my god. This is the keyboard you use to play the MMO. This is the actual one." Like seeing something intimate, seeing a part of his naked body.

oh god i watched that one! i found it equal parts cute (the premise), idyllic (the guild and the dream of having an online nakama), and frustrating (the romance between two incredibly passive individuals). still, i enjoyed it and i'll be cheering sakurai on in her eventual transition.

i don't know if i get the same thrall over seeing the exact hardware that someone else uses, but i do have a fascination in just seeing how people configure their desktops. like, one of my favorite places to browse through is the linux.org.ru gallery, since it's been running since 1999 and has now become a time capsule of deliberately-chosen configurations. (r/unixporn might be another analogue, though that one coalesced around a defined aesthetic and has remained that way for years).

but, in the spirit of sharing the personal experience with my personal computers, i minds well upload a pic or two? i might bump the desktop thread with some pictures on the software side, but on the hardware side…


i've been told that my bedroom is "a vibe," though that word always felt too polysemous to place much faith in. my dream is to make this into a cozy place – a pastel sanctuary reserved for the pure of heart – but i could also see others reading it as the sort of place where a girl with glasses and frizzy hair is going to tell you more than you ever wanted to know about some dance dance revolution knockoff you've never in your life heard of.
which is harsh, but true, and while you're here let me tell you about a rhythm game called "in the groove 2"—

the second is a closer look at the goods: kuma, isie, and my UPS down below.


were i smart i would've dusted all this beforehand, but i'm running on the conviction that capturing the experience is the most important facet of this endeavor.
were i smart i also wouldn't put them so close to each other either, since the heat from one is just going right into the other, but space is kind of at a premium here and i've yet to think of a better solution.

Watermoon!! Your workstation is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

What struck me is how much you work with desktops. I literally haven't owned a desktop since 2006. I feel like I was always on the road, always needing to be ready to move. But fine, here's some photos of my dim little parlour (I seriously need more ambient lighting in here).
That's satsuki and keina. I move the cables from machine to machine when I go from fun mode to work mode and back. Probably should just buy a kvm already.

I don't really like working here. I don't know what it is. It's just not enjoyable. It's not aesthetic. It's like this mess of wires and monitors that I can't seem to get to feel Right. I think if I were smarter, I would go far more basic, with a single desktop and perfect cable management and a monitor sitting on a goddamn stand, for crying out loud.

satsuki too was a very unwise purchase, but she is truly the nicest, pinkest, sleekest little laptop I could ask for. I think she is truly my favourite, even if I need to use the Mac to make anything right now (and am too scared to change my workflow as of yet...)
I just discovered that tsubasa cannot run Guild Wars 1 any faster than, like, 5 FPS. Needs a ... ATI Radeon 9000 at minimum and we're running the HD 3650. Should be better? And yet, and yet, and yet. This seriously bums me out! GW1 is not a game I have had to consider "high-end" for a while now! And she can do everything in Chromium just fine without a hitch, so wtf.

awwwww~ though that's interesting, since i haven't actively used a laptop since undergrad. though maybe that's partially a reflection of having a more homebody (hikki) lifestyle and partially because i see laptops as more fragile. there are so many things that can do them in, and they're harder to repair if something does happen to them. it's maybe related to the reason why i've been averse to spending more than a few hundred dollars on a phone: the only one i've had that has made it past the three-year mark is the one i have right now; all of the others have met unfortunate ends before that point.

i do think that what you have is nice, and i like the arrangement of screens here, so maybe it's just a matter of determining your priorities and deciding which direction you'd want to move toward. have you seen any other workstations you'd like to have, or even rooms?
personally, i prefer having things a bit cluttery, even to the point of being boxed in by it. and i see rooms like this and are enamored with them. but what i find comfy another would find claustrophobic, and there are plenty of nice aesthetics to be found by going in a more minimal direction.

i also like looking through pcpartpicker's completed builds page every so often to see how people have laid out their spaces. they tend to aesthetically lean more in the battlestation direction, but some fun ones still pop up every so often.

and i support you having a pretty pink laptop. you deserve to have a pretty pink laptop!

I adore y'all having names and a naming scheme for your computers! It's so sweet.

For a while I named my standalone Linux boxes after planets in Ursula K Leguin's Hainish cycle, but now I just have "the computer I'm using" and some old ones.

Current one is a Thinkpad GenL4 running Win11,and my older Thinkpad X230 (I adore it but the size was kind of awk). They have been Properly Stickered but otherwise I don't treat them as much as love you all do.

I've never actually owned a normal desktop tower setup -- my family was well off enough I always had a laptop, aside from my dads old PC tower that had DOS and a refurbished tower that my former roommate gave me (donated from her ex's family), which I named anarres/urras. I gifted it to my sister after hers died, but she ended up not using and relied on a laptop as well, I told her she should keep it in case she ever needs it but I won't lie I miss it, I learned Linux on it with arch as a headless server and then I put in a wifi card and was able to use it as a workstation, it and my X230 I have a lot of nostalgia for it

Also yeah, Watermoon you have a gorgeous room and setup. I'm sitting here kind of in awe of it.

I can post photos of my sticker'd laptops later if I can figure out a good place to upload them.
On the topic of computers having singular purposes -- apparently Kindle as a platform used to allow "apps", but later removed it. A hobbyist developer talked about this choice (to really cut down Kindle, or at least the Paperwhite ereader ones that aren't focusing on being general purposes tablets) as Kindle as being a very successfully "pure" platform. I think with the internet becoming defined by big social media spaces that encourage (by design or by nature) lots of eternal scrolling, it also means general purpose device can kinda feel like the same general attention trap.

One of my friends has been getting into modding iPods (which are now discontinued!!) and using that to try to log off while still being able to listen to music, although any modern iPod probably has a browser and apps. Given how much minification has worked, having several bespoke little computers for each purpose (reading, gaming, music) honestly could kind of work.

JennyDog wrote:

I can post photos of my sticker'd laptops later if I can figure out a good place to upload them.

You can just upload anything here. It's under the full post editor. We have tons of disk space.

Watermoon inspired me to really clean up my space. I got a KVM and some more lighting and simplified the display.

I was seeing if I could sell off satsuki the past few days, but given little attention I'd rather just hang onto her. Use her until I can't! One day I'll have no choice but to build an insanely overpowered Linux desktop.

JennyDog wrote:

I adore y'all having names and a naming scheme for your computers! It's so sweet.

For a while I named my standalone Linux boxes after planets in Ursula K Leguin's Hainish cycle, but now I just have "the computer I'm using" and some old ones.

it's a nice little peek into someone's personality, right? plus it's fun to anthropomorphize these nightmare boxes, and i can admire people who have a set nomenclature for how they name their computers.

though my naming scheme is a lot more freeform and contains stuff like "powerful girl i wish i could kiss," "girl with cool name from novel i really like," "powerful girl i wish i could kiss," "person who left a very sweet comment on a dumb video i made," "admission that i wish i were lain irl," "period-appropriate waifu," "star trek reference but the computer came with the name when i got it and who am i to change that."

maru wrote:

Watermoon inspired me to really clean up my space. I got a KVM and some more lighting and simplified the display.

I was seeing if I could sell off satsuki the past few days, but given little attention I'd rather just hang onto her. Use her until I can't! One day I'll have no choice but to build an insanely overpowered Linux desktop.

that looks really nice!! also shoutouts to tigermilk; definitely one of the more stylish b&s covers (though really a lot of theirs are).

i've been going back and forth as to how much i want to make framed lp covers a part of my interior design taste. like, part of me feels like a poser for doing so, because i'm much more partial to cd collecting than lps… but also you can't show off jewel cases in quite the same way. so right now i only have a few.

…it also doesn't help that my taste for records that i like both the music and the cover of range from pretty expensive to downright unobtainium…

watermoon wrote:

it's a nice little peek into someone's personality, right? plus it's fun to anthropomorphize these nightmare boxes, and i can admire people who have a set nomenclature for how they name their computers.

though my naming scheme is a lot more freeform and contains stuff like "powerful girl i wish i could kiss," "girl with cool name from novel i really like," "powerful girl i wish i could kiss," "person who left a very sweet comment on a dumb video i made," "admission that i wish i were lain irl," "period-appropriate waifu," "star trek reference but the computer came with the name when i got it and who am i to change that."

I don't even know where my pattern came from. It started in the winter this year -- previously my two computers were "dust" and "quartz" and when I started using my Windows machine instead, satsuki just felt like a good name. I just like the way the name sounds. I looked up twin names that match it and got keina. Then I started picking Japanese names to fit the era. I think my previous names were iMACROSS82-99 for the iMac and then before that, napstabook for my old MacBook Pro (2011 vintage). The Windows laptops of my college years and earlier I can't tell you. I probably did name them.

I spent a weird amount of time today OS hopping to play around on various computers. The good news is, I'm not as destructive as I used to be. Instead of just willy-nilly formatting perfectly working computers I try out an OS on a separate drive now.

I was trying out the Pop! OS alpha on satsuki but that one couldn't even render to my external monitor. Then when I tried Fedora the same thing happened -- I came to the conclusion this is some Optimus hijinks and disabled the internal GPU (since the external HDMI port is hooked directly to the dGPU on this laptop). Then everything worked. Even my game sync issues in the past were no more. So, use discrete card only and everyone loves you. But that feels like a weird tradeoff to make! I still feel fundamentally like this machine performs best under Windows, so here I am.

Tsubasa I had to rewipe anyway -- I was trying Vista a bit, but I couldn't get past the "Please wait..." on the install on two separate ISOs... I have it on Windows 10 LTSC with Ultimate Windows Tweaker additions for low-spec PCs and it actually performs really nicely now. Pale Moon sits at like 250mb RAM, the whole system in basic use around 2.2GB, with an 8GB total means that it has a healthy amount of pressure and all games mid-2000s or so run at 60 FPS flat on a nice big 4:3 TN. Yay!
(I have her prefetching the rest of the maps from GW1...)

Got the files uploaded!

Here's my new one. and my old one, it hasn't had as much sticker glory to it: I actually did most of the sticker decorations at the same time, I went from being a zero sticker gal to a maximalist sticker gal. I'm keeping some spare space on them in case something special comes up.

So, some recent updates on my nerd shit.

- Decided to rename yomiko to tsubasa because with Fedora on her instead of NixOS, she's amazing. She's my wings. She's a total joy to use. I can't really get all the creative stuff I want so far, but I'm figuring it out.

Since she's gone from "close but not quite" to "my favourite," I migrated some stickers and applied my remaining ones.
This also left the former tsubasa unnamed and without purpose. Tsubasa Mark 2 is less than 2 pounds and gorgeous to look at. Tsubasa Mark 1 needs a purpose. So I was playing around with 9front and all — I think I might try FreeBSD and treat it as my experimentation computer. Maybe she really is yomiko, then?

Otherwise, I've been playing with Tailscale and it's really cool. Suddenly I can have a personal network I access anywhere I go. Like it's not all perfect — I can't get huge media shares over SMB working flawless — but I can serve myself basic apps built on databases. I can keep central storage for most normal-sized-files at home and synchronise it as I like. My big win here was using Immich instead of Apple Photos or the like. Finally, something cross-platform, something smooth and nice to use. I was playing with Hydrus, but am settling with Shimmie2.
Collect photos from the internet? Well, now I just need some sort of browser extension using the Danbooru API to help tag things as I save them. And for them to symlink themselves into a wallpaper rotation folder as they come in... but hell, I can do that now! Everything is UNIX! Nothing is just "write it into a Node server" or whatever! Shimmie2 is a PHP deploy using 0% of my CPU!

I've been talking to friends about their burgeoning projects and it's all experimental computers. I think this sort of tinkerer mindset has me going down the right path.

maru wrote:

Otherwise, I've been playing with Tailscale and it's really cool. Suddenly I can have a personal network I access anywhere I go. Like it's not all perfect — I can't get huge media shares over SMB working flawless — but I can serve myself basic apps built on databases. I can keep central storage for most normal-sized-files at home and synchronise it as I like. My big win here was using Immich instead of Apple Photos or the like. Finally, something cross-platform, something smooth and nice to use. I was playing with Hydrus, but am settling with Shimmie2.

Collect photos from the internet? Well, now I just need some sort of browser extension using the Danbooru API to help tag things as I save them. And for them to symlink themselves into a wallpaper rotation folder as they come in... but hell, I can do that now! Everything is UNIX! Nothing is just "write it into a Node server" or whatever! Shimmie2 is a PHP deploy using 0% of my CPU!

i'm glad you found a booru that clicks with you! when i tried out something like that years ago (though i forget what i used), i remember both uploading and tagging to be a real pain, but it sounds like you've found a way to handle both of those.

i'm also a bit jealous of all the stickers you both have put on your laptops… i wish i could be into stickers, but it feels so… permanent.

Woah that's awesome! it's cool seeing stuff being setup and working like this :)

I feel like stickers are like tattoos supposedly are -- I never used stickers, until one day i bought like $40 worth of stickers and decorated two laptops. then i've left room for more significant, neat or cute ones.

So I had gotten into remission with my computer shenanigans. Then lately after a friend came over, it got reignited.

So, in sum:

• satsuki: Razer Blade 14. Windows 11 Pro. Last time I used this was to beat Atelier Sophie 2 and I just felt like having to do it on PC made me less inclined to play it. Very few games will make me want to sit at my desk. I wish I could've just played it in bed, on the sofa, whatever. So, I recently moved her to be a Big Picture Mode computer on the TV and took the Steam Deck off of it.
• Steam Deck: Has no name! Maybe should fix that. Mostly a VN device for bed or travel or whatever. Or a roguelike device. Whatever. Still counts as a computer.
• nanami: a Thinkpad T500 17 inch beast I rescued from my sister's basement, put 8GB of RAM in it and an SSD and it's like, Fine. It's got a Core 2 Duo and it needs to be running Windows to run any games decently. I put FreeBSD on it making it entirely useless. So, I need to put Windows 10 LTSC back on. But then I sort of don't know what to do with it other than 2000s games.
• tsubasa: Thinkpad X1 Carbon is still around. As my lightest and most precious she ends up coming with me on trips a lot. But, if my partner needed another computer, this is probably the one I would give. It's the most useful and recent with the least purpose in my life.
• keina: MacBook Pro. Still more or less my main PC, though, who knows now.

And yes, now we have sadako, this ThinkCentre M710s sitting on the side of my desk.
An i3-7100, 128GB SSD, yes it is definitely 2010s computer lab stuff. A librarian's computer. It had Windows 8 -> Windows 10 on it and left there. We ended up going with OpenSUSE for no reason besides curiosity and then put MATE on it after it defaulted to IceWM (if you don't want KDE or GNOME: that's what you want, right?).

We hit a weird hiccup with the DPI on that, but then got into MATE; we thought WiFi didn't have drivers (we're using a dongle that seems to max out at 20mbps) but it did, as soon as you boot into a desktop. Then we were figuring out graphics. Intel HD 630 on a 4k display; compositor wasn't having fun, but it turned out you need to set Xorg to use modesetting or something, and then it runs nicely.

Today I went out and decided to put a GT 1030 in it to help ease the bottleneck a bit, and yeah, it's comfy now! Firefox is good, can run whatever heavy web app you need, YouTube, plug into my Navidrome server well enough. Guild Wars runs at 60 fps on 1080p, very nice.

I guess when it comes to "what's the purpose of this?" it's more that I haven't had a desktop computer in twenty years. The feel of a desktop is very singular to me; it feels like a site, a space, a portal, a distinct appliance; I have a ton of portable devices that feel nomadic. I had an iMac for a few years in there, and it was better, but not the same as this box I crank open and start tweaking. I don't know how to describe the phenomenological difference. So I would prefer to think of plugging another machine at my desk as a 'visitor' and this desktop as my fun, default PC. My preferred desktop environment, childhood games and stuff I come back to. Something I can continue to tweak at and upgrade to an extent.

Also I ended up spending like 3 hours tonight figuring out Nvidia drivers. tldr; combo of TPM and the kernel being afraid of the Nvidia module and maybe defaulting to Intel drivers in the Xorg from the other day? It kept booting to a blank cursor without much guidance, and pinpointing the issue was not necessarily easy. It normally means "Xorg doesn't know how to render something so it's just not gonna do anything", and when nouveau is blacklisted, it comes down to whether it's allowed to use the module, if the module can even be loaded, etc.

i guess i should contribute one of these huh. i have a lot of computers..... people just keep giving me them and i'm starting to think they're taking advantage of me somehow (by giving me free stuff? idgi :p). they are all precious and i try and love them as much as i can

• desktop: the workstation. doesn't have a cute name unlike most of the others for some reason. runs win10 themed to look like win7. 26tb across 9 disks. where the actual work gets done (music, video, software, ..). been in use since like 2016 but i don't think a single part is the same anymore except maybe one of the hard drives. photo of that setup below
• astraea: webserver, debian. thinkcentre m58? core 2 duo, 2gb ram, 200gb ssd. owns port 22 and 80 and 443 of the ip and proxies requests to all the websites on the other servers, plus serves my main website and files i need to share and other miscillany. stole it got it for free from school years ago. hangs out in my tiny closet with all the wires.
• satsukitane: webserver, debian. some "compaq" thing. pentium dual and an nvidia 7100 (?? i didn't know that), 4gb ram, 500gb ide disk an old friend of mine's dad salvaged out of some security camera device (actually two but one died) + 2tb disk for archival. runs the song-of-the-day service, plus various people have logins so it's a general dumping ground for stuff, webpages, cronjobs, ..
• tomoko: webserver, debian. some hp thing. weird 3-core amd cpu. 16gb ram, 1tb disk(!). doesn't really do much these days but i use it for development sometimes and it runs a discord bot and a postgres. it has docker installed so that's where i put containers and other heavier feeling stuff when i have to.
• oregano: the mac mini 3,1 that's under my tv i watch stuff on to chill out. just has some smb shares from desktop perpetually mounted and i play them in vlc. os x 10.9 and it can barely keep up with 1080p at the best of times. also runs an airplay server so i can in theory cast stuff to the speakers over there (there being.. the other side of the room. i tend to just use ajaxamp (lol) and crank the speakers at my desk)

there's also like 4 more towers including a duplicate of maru's thinkcentre sitting around but i don't know what i'll do with them yet. would you like one

laptops:

• Macbook Pro: 2012, 13". os x 10.9. was given it with the purpose of getting precious video footage off the dying original disk.. was my primary laptop computer for the past 4 years or so. used it to track an album and some shows, wrote most of my website on it.. audio output jack has been busted for as long as i've had it so i have to use a stupid usb thing. has all the cool stickers. now generally supplanted by..
• hiyori: an identical 2012 mbp but running arch linux and gnome. cause i needed to run actual software (firefox, vscode, ..). she comes to the park with me these days but i love them both very much and was rather conflicted about this.

not really in use but still notable are:

• thinkpad t61 - i grew up with this one (9). first ran vista, then some linuxes, then osx 10.9 as a crappy hackintosh, then linux again. the fan bearing or something is broken so it doesn't get much use, and also i can't find the power adapter in my room!
• ibm thinkpad t22 - i grew up with this one first (win2k). this isn't the same one cause the real one got thrown out at some point :< but i wanted something with a serial port to talk to my oscilloscope so i found another a few years ago. there's some problem with it where it'll just die (something bad in the power circuitry.. i'm scared) so i don't touch it anymore.
• imac g3 dv (ruby). runs os9 and osx tiger and sits on the other desk looking pretty.

there's also an mbp 2011 15" (dead gpu), some tiny macbook air (i use it as an ip camera sometimes), a couple white macbook 1,x's, mbp 2008 15" (dead gpu), powerbook g4 (i need to find a new adapter for it cause it's pre-magsafe), nec versa 6050mh (windows me), some 201? imac, some others.

here's the pic of my desk, where i do my uhh... software engineering. i'm sorry for the mess. most people don't get to see this you know
join me next time when i talk about my cameras

So I'm trying to stop having so many damn computers. Especially laptops, which feel like transitory artifacts.* I desire WORKSTATIONS lately. So now we're running Debian, mostly!
I realised that if I promoted Chikara to home server, then I could excise an extraneous Mac mini and trade in the MacBook Pro, keina -- my most trusted adviser, my main computer -- for a current Mac mini (itsuki). Then I'd just have a fun computer, a media production computer, and the Thinkpad for on-the-go. Still slightly too many computers -- in a better world, the first two computers are just one computer.

I got my external drives onto btrfs, hooked up Debian, saw that it all basically worked, and Docker performs way better on Linux anyway -- so it's actually really low use. Chikara has loads of like 0.03 while running 4 containers and being a glorified SMB share. (Evidently, it needs to be running more stuff.)

So now my old gaming laptop satsuki is basically plugged-in only, Nvidia GPU only, no Optimus crap, and we're going to run MATE of course. And it runs really well actually! Very happy with it. Everything opens immediately. Games seem to run fine. I really wanted to clean up my desk, and I feel like I have now. It's tidy. The only tidier thing I can do is to just have one computer. But I'd have to become a GIMP master for that. Or figure out Photoshop or something.

So yeah, the count is currently ... three daily drivers and a home server. And other devices in storage or ... Gah! Still too many computers!!!

*In listening to the Steve Jobs biography lately I've been struck by his initial "digital hub" strategy where you'd have a home computer that was the source of truth for your iPod or whatever else. But then after they released the iPhone and the iPad, the surplus of devices inadvertently downgraded the importance of the home computer, and Jobs started calling the iPad "a post-PC device," which is terminology I think Apple is still using? Unfortunately he didn't consider that his post-PC device would downgrade all human relationships with computers to nothing but manipulating zombified consumption slates and issuing nothing other than gut-level, low-epistemic-certainty reflexive responses to a set of database farms. Yes, I think this is a really big unsolved problem -- one that he basically died before confronting properly, because he tried to make the iPad more of a production device in subsequent generations, but I don't know if it ever really took. And in response, he introduced consumer-oriented cloud storage as a product, which then re-introduced thin client computers as the main artifact, absolutely destroyed any sense of privacy as a result, and then inadvertently brought us here where we have stuff shoved into OneDrive by default.

8sumint wrote:

here's the pic of my desk, where i do my uhh... software engineering. i'm sorry for the mess. most people don't get to see this you know

So what's it look like now?

watermoon wrote:

maybe the big thing i learned from all this is that i tend to gravitate toward the tools that are available to me. like, i tried so hard to get back into music production on windows, but the friction involved with booting up the vm, logging in, starting the program, redirecting asio, etc. was just enough to discourage me

after hearing maru talk about getting an iphone again, it made me start thinking, like, for all the times i've thought about what i'd want my eventual kumatora replacement to be, none of those have a defined use case lined up for them which'd justify switching. in fact, i've instead become less and less interested in the use cases that i had built kuma for: compiling gentoo, maintaining linux as a hobby, gaming on windows. meanwhile, the atypical use case i do still care about – music production – was such a hassle on windows that the extra steps just added more demotivation working against me.

but lately i've been feeling my conviction growing stronger. i want to throw myself back into songwriting. i want to become a picopop princess. and when i think back to just how easy iji and navi made music production, the choice became simple: get a mac studio.

maru: “バカ。mac miniが十分だよ。”

so i went and kitted out a mini with 32gb of ram and a 1tb drive for $1,400. and even though it's only half the cost of what kuma was, i feel pretty confident that in the end it'll let me do more?

infanity: mac mini m4
Birthdate: July 25, 2025

i consider this purchase to be a bet on myself. even if i've come to appreciate linux and kde quite a lot, i'm doing this because i want to believe in myself. i know that i have the skills, the experience, and the support to be the kind of person that i want to be, and i think that this system offers me the best chance at getting to where i want to be, so now the only thing in my way is myself. and if i can't overcome that – with just about everything going my way – …i will cry.

as for the name infanity, it is the daydream city that has been building in my mind: layers upon layers of walkways leading down into the depths of glow, skyscrapers floating atop a pool of stars, in a land where it's always night.
like infinity, like insanity, like fantasy, like infantile. it's such a lovely word with many facets to it, and the fact that i took it from lain is unrelated.

and as for kuma, i stripped out the weaker of its two gpus, put win10 ltsc on it, and gifted it to my wife as an upgrade from the razer laptop she got in the mid-2010s. i was a bit worried that it wouldn't be strong enough to run the games she might want to run on it, but recently she's been sinking most of her gaming time into sonic robo blast 2 custom levels, so i may have been worrying for nothing.