Author: Peter Jones

I think my last post will be the direction I’m going to go. The more I mused in the back of my head, the more I realized I want that extra control. While the idea of buying someone else’s infinitely more powerful machine, that’s comparably priced for power, there are a stack of small sticking points. The problem is it’s like a porcupine, the points might be small, but they dig in and irritate you for the rest of your life.
I want good materials. I want style. I want expandability. I want upgradability. I want freedom to have what I want on it, rather than what someone else says. I want to not pay more to have less.
Choose life.

Build or buy. That’s the question. I think I’ll start small. I’ll start working on my Beaglebone while the Wif studies. I can plug the Beaglebone into the tv and go from there. Then, it’ll be updating. Next, build the keyboard this weekend. Either way I want a smaller, more me keyboard. Do I want to to shred a game controller for the “mouse”? Figure I have at least a free game controllers that haven’t been used this decade. I guess this leaves the kicker. How do I want to do the screen and battery?
The screen really leaves me tempted to find a commercial solution. They’re not optimized for mobile, but oh well. Option two, in Captain Lazy realm, would be to grab one of the controllers off of eBay. The advantage of this would be I could look at ways to reduce the price, in terms of power, of the backlight. Option three, which shouldn’t be on the table at this time would be driving the pins directly, or using an FPGA, with a salvaged LCD.
After all that, add up everything and add the juice.

Back to thinking about this, which means I’m back to running my head in circles. I think for efficiency I might just buy. It still bums me out about the premium that gets charged to not install Windows, and I’m still in the situation of asking why a lot, bit I think I need to get productive first, picky later.
I’ll start by looking at the one offering from System76, and compare does with big boxes to see how that feels.

There’s a lot of them. I should finish some. I think I should make shit a lot more. I think I’ll be productive after work.
Though, full disclosure, I’m very happy with how well England is doing right now, though I’m not sure why France never got around to picking that war. Europa Univeralis is a time sink like no other.

I’m thinking of fast growing harder vegetation. Oohhh. BlackBerry canes could be awesome.
Full disclosure, this would be for growing, harvesting and “finishing” furniture. But yeah.
Blackberries. Grow, mould, harvest, smooth (where you sit), lacquer the ____ out of it.
Blackberries.

Look into other sugar sources for brewing. Extraction rate counts.

System is mostly working. I now have Steam up which means all productivity stopped. It was by far an annoying prices though because i guess Steam thinks bundling libraries with software is a good idea.
Next steps include checking which driver I’m using for video, finding it why I have audio, and trying more window managers.
On the production side I’ll start trying to get phant working. I’m starting to become more sure that I made the right choice in abandoning Mint (and other more user friendly distributions).
To clarify though, Mint is great, just not for what I do.

…because my battery is dying. Obviously I should plug my phone in.
More importantly:
Should I live dangerously and when I get to doing LFS, use the book as a guide bit go sideways and build from current stable source? Probably yes.
After I do the book through the first time.

Oddly enough, this is the first time I installed vanilla Debian. Over all I’m pleased so far in the absence of over arching bloat that I’ve seen in most distributions that aren’t Slackware. Right now I have all my usual productivity software installing: Arduino, Fritzing (which I’ve never used), Steam… you know, productivity.
At a later point I’ll get going on Linux From Scratch. I think it’s all the bloat that kills me. Any time I have Gnome, KDE, and something else all installed at once by default, it hurts me on the inside. Having a service installed and running that periodically searches the network for new services, I have to wonder why. One of the inherent advantage of Linux is it’s relative lean-ness, deny everything make exceptions security policy, and customizability ability. When two of the most popular distributions fly in the face of that, it makes me sad. It’s great that I no longer have to look at Windows 10 upgrade reminders, it would be nice to not have to look at people wanting to recreate a free version of that hell.
Maybe this weekend I should recompile my kernel. It’s been a while since I’ve done that.

Mint seems to be getting more and more unstable asi remove services that shouldn’t be in a default install to begin with, let alone continuously running. When I get home I’ll be (probably) switching to vanilla Debian. In the process of that I’ll kill all my other partitions other than where I have spate data living. Once I have my spate data saved, I’ll kill that position and might start going LFS.
Everyday I get older, I get more annoyed at the way people do shit. I am the old man on my lawn yelling at kids and the government.