As noted previously, it is time I replace Turk. Its replacement arrives tomorrow, and I have decided to name it Ted, after Ted Lasso. A fun merging of my naming conventions between TV characters (Marvin & Turk) and my server names after soccer coaches (Klopp & Schmetz.)
I have been running Lubuntu on Turk, largely to ensure it ran well on the older hardware. Ted will be a much newer and more powerful laptop. Not quite top tier, but definitely leagues ahead of Turk. Given that, I am planning to keep Ted as a dual boot system, with it running Windows as well as Linux. I have decided to give OpenSUSE a go, so we will see how I like it. Otherwise I might soon be replacing it with Ubuntu or one of its variants.
The new machine will arrive tomorrow, and with it I'll begin moving in.
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Replacing Turk
After a number of years, it is finally time to replace my long in the tooth Acer laptop. It's nearly four years old, but it was a budget purchase at the time and I had a number of issues with it. Only after replacing the hard drive and switching it over to boot on Linux, did I get it to work. Since then it's been my daily driver for non-work stuff. It is far from a beast of a machine, but it got the job done for my uses (internet, coding, Minecraft, etc.)
After doing some research I decided to go with a beefier machine that was on sale at Costco, an MSI gamer laptop. I don't plan to use it for gaming, but given that I spend 99% of the time I'm using it plugged in, I figured the beefier specs were good.
The real question is what to name the machine. Is it Turk2? Or is it something new?
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Interview with Nadella
A bit of a longread but I greatly enjoyed this interview with Satya Nadella. I didn't listen to the podcast and just read the transcription. Some great insights into how Microsoft, or perhaps Nadella, views Microsoft and its challenges. I particularly liked the insights that he gained during the pandemic.
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Two Important Tools with the Waning Days of RSS
Kill the Newsletter - Create a one-use email inbox where every email it receives is turned into an RSS feed.
FetchRSS - A website which allows you to create an RSS for a blog-esque website including a very easy to use picker to identify the different elements on the page that can build the RSS feed.
With these tools, I can turn so much more of the information I consume online into an RSS feed to be imported into my RSS reader.
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The Surface Duo is more than 50% off on Amazon. If I didn't still love my Note 9, I'd consider it. I know the phone got panned but I love the concept of the dual screen.
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Third Linux install in as many days. As it turns out, when I abandoned Bunsenlabs, I accidentally installed the 32-bit version of Lubuntu on the laptop. Oops. Finally got it figured out while triaging why I couldn't get Sublime Text to work on the machine. So, we're back set up and moving into the laptop all over again.
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12 Learnings of Claude Shannon
Written by the authors of the excellent biography of Claude Shannon, they distill learnings down into a list of 12 things and lessons for life. I greatly enjoyed the biography and learning about someone so important to the development of the modern computer and who possessed a keen intellect beyond what most possess.
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