This tree is along the snowy road. But it started to rain and later that day the snow was turning to slush.
This is not necessarily good for the road’s iciness: we live in the shade (no direct sunlight because of the mountain), so the rain falls on the sheets of ice on stretches of road and instead of melting the ice, it just adds to it.
[daily log: walking, 3km; dogwalking, 3km]
A few months back (in September), I finally received a new laptop computer, that I’d ordered last year. I’d ordered it so far in advance because the laptop is made by a new company that is making an effort to sell open source laptops that come “bare” (without operating systems installed). That company is called framework (link). I thought it was such a cool idea that, given that I was hoping to buy a new laptop anyway, I went to the effort to pre-order.
My last two laptops have both been lemons. There was the “XNote” – a South Korean domestic brand, which was just a piece of garbage running windows 7. And there was the rather pricey HP laptop I got right upon returning to the US in 2018, that had several disappointing issues (including a useless battery and having Windows 10 installed on it, which is a tautologically defective operating system). HP specifically managed to make the warranty service so arduous as to effectively prevent me from availing myself of it, so I was stuck with it. I’ve been using it, these past years, as a desktop (hence always plugged in, and therefore without any need for its broken battery). I reformatted the harddrive and put Ubuntu linux on it, and it runs fine, such as it is. But for what I paid, it remains an intense regret.
So I was in the market for a laptop, I guess. But it was in the back of my mind and a low priority. For financial reasons, too.
But this framework idea appealed to me. I have strong feelings about “open source” and “right to repair”, and this new company seemed committed to these principles.
I received the laptop with some internals uninstalled – so it was up to me to put it together: a kind of faux-“kit” computer. Here are some pictures. I installed the “hard drive” (actually solid state), the memory. The CPU and wifi were already in. I added some little plug-in doo-dads that make up the external plugs for it.
Once it was all together, I stuck in a USB stick with a Linux install ISO on it, and installed Ubuntu and got it working the way I like.
I held off reviewing it because once it was all set up, I didn’t use it very intensively for the following few months. But during my travels down south, last month, I got to use it quite intensively, and it proved 100% reliable and without disappointment. That’s the first computer in a decade and a half that I can say that about (“knock on wood”).
Here it is yesterday running some updates (at command prompt screen, of course). I like linux because I get to completely control that.
ㅁ wingsnake came dark, lighting and clouds and rain monkey and raven grinned and danced benevolent orca sailed the surrounding sea when monkey killed the wingsnake at deity encompassing darkness's garden tree the wingsnake was not dead but burrowed down the monkey was hunted, deity darkness was deceived by wingsnake monkey fled to the mountain raven made a plan with monkey but first needed orca's help trick orca into bringing the sun and they make humans from moss and discarded bones deity darkness is defeated but each year returns in the beginning the sea serpents had wings
– a free-form poem. I wrote this sometime around 2016 – it is an outline of some cosmological material for my imaginary world called Mahhal. I recently found it in some old notes (having forgotten about it).
