2025-02
2025-02-04 Tuesday
Yesterday, I installed FreeBSD.
You see, I picked up a very old 15″ MacBook Pro. Very Old like around a decade? I paid not more than $50. The battery officially “needs maintenance” but it is fine for web browsing or playing games while sitting on the sofa. Or it was, because Apple stopped supplying OS updates and then Google stopped supplying Chrome updates on the old MacOS and then Steam dropped support because it uses Chrome as an embedded browser. So, just slap Linux on there . . . but if we’re doing things in The Old Ways why not try FreeBSD?
FreeBSD was my first free Unix Operating System. I must have first used it in 1996? It is a great server OS, and made a fine desktop in the old days as well. Sometime in the aughts I transitioned to Ubuntu Linux, just because a more mainstream OS tends to have better support.
So, I busted out my old 4GB Cisco-branded USB key and tried it out. The crisp white fonts detailing the bootstrap felt comforting, probably from Old Days. The installer set up ZFS and added a user. From there I had to bust out a USB wifi dongle that had driver support. I worked my way through setting up nvidia drivers and X windows and KDE, and . . .
Once Plasma was running, it was easy enough to switch the display scaling to 150%. I was mostly home!
It was more effort just to get that far than I am used to with Linux. But, I enjoyed working my way through The Handbook like it was the late 90s all over again. That we watched an episode of “Babylon 5” while the system churned through a pile of Internet downloads really got that 90s vibe going. I couldn’t su. Then I recalled the wheel group, granted myself access, then installed sudo.
Alas, I got into trouble installing steam and google chrome because something was wrong with the Linux emulation required for both. And I had no clue how to get the internal wifi working. And the dongle was slow. Like 90s Internet. So, the next day, I busted out a 16GB Kingston USB device and brought kubuntu in. Quick work. ubuntu-drivers figured out how to activate the internal Broadcom wifi, though I had to manually sudo apt install nvidia-driver-470, but FreeBSD had given me the clue for that earlier:
So, you could say, the visit to FreeBSD had been worth the trip.
2025-02-07 Friday
Yesterday I set out to catch up on bills. First order of business was to wipe the old phone and put it in the return mailer to get some trade-in credit from Google. I then noticed that my personal workstation was lagging on keyboard input. I tried a reboot. It got stuck at boot and soon after, stuck at BIOS. Fearing the worst, I started removing components: video card, M.2 daughter card, RAM … not until I disconnected the 2TB SATA drive did the system show signs of health. That was my “mass storage” where I keep the Photographs and Video. I dropped by Best Buy and grabbed a 2TB M.2 card . . . because there are actually slots on the motherboard, then I began the process of pulling the backups down from rsync.net.
My troubleshooting was backwards, you might figure: why not disconnect the hard drives first? Well, in my work life, I encounter bum hard drives often enough, and normally what happens is the system boots, there’s a delay in mounting the failed device, and then boot completes with an error message. Not booting at all . . . I guess this is a difference, probably, between a server-class motherboard and the thing I have in my home workstation which has blinky lights on it to appeal to gamers.
Didn’t get through any bills. And I had a Letter of Recommendation to write — my first, which I apologetically delayed. This morning, I ran up to The Office for All Hands, which got postponed . . . doing Something New is always somewhat intimidating. I was tempted to ask an AI for guidance but I’m a Gruff Old Man from the previous century, so I googled up “letter of recommendation” and got a nice template to follow. Combining that with a little more research and a little bit of writing talent and a desire to Come Through for Someone I wrote up what I felt was a pretty decent Letter of Recommendation and I hope my grateful friend finds some success in their endeavor.
Yay me for personal growth. Yay friend if they get the position! (Or even if they don’t. Personal Growth all around.)
2025-02-21 Friday
This obsession with the immediate “unburdening” of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. Garbage responsibility is something we’ve long since abdicated not only to faceless cans on street corners (or just all over the street, as seems to be the case in Manhattan or Paris), but also faceless developing countries around the world. Our oceans teem with the waste from generations of averted eyes. And I believe the two — local pathologies and attendant global pathologies — are not not connected.
The modern condition consists of a constant self-infantilization, of any number of “non-adulting” activities. The main being, of course, plugging into a dopamine casino right before going to sleep and right upon waking up. At least a morning cigarette habit in 1976 gave one time to look at the world in front of one’s eyes (and a gentle nicotine buzz). Other non-adulting activities include relinquishment of general attention, concentration, and critical thinking capabilities. The desire for deus ex machina style political intercession that belies the complexities of real-world systems. Easy answers, easy solutions to problems of unfathomable scale. Scientific retardation because it “feels” good. Deliverance — deliverance! — now, with as little effort as possible.
