My First Computer (in years)

Jun 11, 2024 programming open source

Back in mid 2020 I gave away my MacBook Pro in order to pursue using my iPad as my only computing device. I was probably experiencing burn out at some level after a couple decades doing software and needed to introduce change into my life.

It was never exactly perfect but I was able to get a lot done (including building some websites!) even if I was never quite as efficient as I had been with a "normal computer".

The New Setup #

Last month we found a good deal on a used "gaming laptop" for the kid, who then gave me his ~12 year old hand-me-down desktop computer.

The desktop is a 7th generation something or another but it has 16GB of ram and a big 4TB disk for media along with a smaller SSD to run the operating system from along with enough onboard video card juice to power two 1080p displays.

So far the only thing that feels slow is when I'm moving around large files on the spinning disk hard drive, everything else seems snappy and responsive.

Projects I'm Hacking On #

Here's a few projects I've been poking at in between job applications and business emails - really enjoying the tinkering experience and finding tools to solve some problems.

• Highscores - the kid has a website with video games he's working on and I got frustrated that my glorious high scores weren't being documented so I've been working with him to integrate a Supabase backed high score leader list. For sure the project I'm having the most fun working on.
• Umbrella Report - I continue to poke at my local news front page. I've got a lot of ideas for this, but for now I'm just bringing in the data and trying to find different ways to look at it.
• lobbler (Like a scrobbler) - I've got a little gateway between YouTube Music and last.fm, although when I got about 25% of the way finished I realized that neither side's data was particularly stable and I wasn't sure how I wanted to proceed. Still considering this, because it seems silly to not have a history of the music I'm listening to.
• jb.com - fresh coat of paint - coming soon
• What Now - Household oriented task management. I started this project in part to build the same front end interface in a few frameworks, it's unlikely to get to a stage where other people would use it.
• PDXFTL - I've also started rebuilding the very dusty code I wrote to make our podcast website. My hope is that I'll be able to extract a sort of template for others to use to push their own shows sometime soon.

Cool Software #

Having a desktop PC running Ubuntu has also provided me a few opportunities to play with some software as a consumer:

• freshRSS - Self-hosted google reader that you can serve from a docker container, helpful as I'm trying to get back into the swing of keeping up to date on web development happenings in 2024. RSS! Wild.
• EMBY - I like this Plex competitor a lot, but the Apple TV app is trash.
• Signal - I was used to Apple devices that gave me access to SMS from my iPad or my laptop before, Signal does the same thing with the benefit of not having as much of my data go through Apple's servers. win / win!
• tmux / neovim - Returning to the terminal with tools that are familiar but much more modern has been incredible.