Spring Cleaning
May really crept up on me this year. I'm always surprised when the seasons change. The beginning of a season has me makes feeling like it will last the whole year. They always seem to change faster than I'm ready for. It's May now, and summer is coming on quick.
I'm doing a little digital "spring cleaning" before the summer. I retired my thinkpad, got a macbook neo, learning a few new tricks, and doing some organizing.
The death of a Thinkpad
I bought a new computer recently. I tried to put off doing it for a long time hoping that component prices would come down. They didn't. It doesn't seem like they will for a long while. The AI trends of today are making things tough for all of us. Even with the high prices, I was forced to cave and buy a new one.
My daily driver for quite a long time now has been an old Thinkpad. Not too old, but old enough to have issues. If you took a cross section, you might be able to tell exactly how old it was by counting the layers of stickers on the lid. It wasn't the most powerful or flashy thing available when I bought it, but it worked. I used it. I managed.
It developed a chronic issue of turning itself off when the battery percentage indicator was at 65% or so, and it didn't take very long to get there.
In our planned obsoleceance tinged techno world, my laptop could reasonably be considered to be "old" (as shit) or "busted" (as hell). Actually, that is probably a fair assessment. I replaced the battery in it twice trying to fix the thing, but the issue came back after the first replacement, and again after the second. I would guess that the motherboard might be the problem and could somehow be damaging the battery. I'm not really a hardware person though, and that sort of thing is a little beyond my patience level if not my knowledge level. I'm just a simpleton who needs a reliable computer. Swapping a thinkpad battery is about as far as I'm willing to go and I probably would have kept using the thing had that worked.
I decided to replace it with a citrus Macbook Neo. It is an amazing color, and just very fun. I like the color so much that I don't want to put any stickers on it. I'm loving the neo so far. It has a lot of good things going for it: battery life, weight, form factor, nice build, and looks. It also has decent speakers (very unlike my Thinkpad), a nice screen, and keyboard. I spent a little more money on upgraded storage, and a fingerprint reader. Apple bundled those two things together. So far it is a snappy little machine and it suits my purposes wonderfully. It's really great at its price point.
It is Springtime right now, and having a new computer on a fresh OSX install without several years of files strewn all over the place just feels nice. Not having to thrash around trying to find a charge cable before my Thinkpad turns itself off is also pretty nice too.
(Digital) Spring Cleaning
Setting up a new computer is always a bit of a chore. I don't like to obsessively manage my user configurations or installed programs. I think that sort of thing should be largely fluid. Use what you need and jettison everything else. Keep it light. That's a wonderful idea, but you still need a few things on your computer, don't you.
As much as I can on the new computer I am trying to track my configurations in version control separately from one another. I don't want a huge dotfiles repo, I just want to be able to undo configuration mistakes easily and track why certain changes were made, or why I made a command alias to do whatever it does.
Some (digital) highlights:
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I decided to do things a little differently and adopt nushell as a daily driver. I think it has a lot of really great ideas and makes using the command line significantly more intuitive.
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I'm all-in on using Jujutsu over git in my personal projects now. I wrote a post recently about Jujutsu, and how interesting I think it is. I am also trying to learn JJUI, which is a TUI program that will let me work with a JJ repo in a similar way to how magit lets you work with a git repo.
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Now that I've got a macbook in my hands again I can sync my calendar across devices. That's been a very nice perk of going back to an apple computer.
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I'm making a real actual effort to get rid of the rat's nest of cables I've collected over the last decade-plus. There are a lot of them. I'm organizing the most-needed ones in a little plastic box with movable dividers grouped by connector. Everything is getting a velcro loop! Anything I don't recognize the use of is getting tossed.
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I am no longer managing a TODO list digitally. I messed around with that quite a bit the last several years and always ended up faffing around with the configuration of org-mode more than actually using it. A tale as old as org mode.
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I'm leaning less on emacs for programming. This has been another large time sink. I've struggled a lot to get LSP stuff working for whatever language I want to do things in and I've decided it is largely not worth the headache for me right now. As much as I love emacs, I like actually doing the thing I set out to do when I opened it much more than I like trying to figure out why my python LSP is crash looping.
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Speaking of programming. I'm learning the Go programming language. I use python for scripting, but it would be nice to pick up a compiled language.
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I am writing documentation for myself, and updating old documentation. It is nice to come back to an old project and have a README full of why. It is amazing how much you can forget about a project you worked on even as little as a month later.
In the spirit of "spring cleaning" a future nice to have would be a more sophisticated backup solution for my digital stuff. I use a hodgepodge of things at the moment, and none of it is really automated. I've got an external drive with a copy of all my ripped CDs, several sourcehut repos making up the things I am working on that I want to keep around, and cloud storage for whatever other miscellaneous files that I want to keep around. Very likely a bunch of TTRPG pdfs, and a lot of pictures of my dog. It's slapdash at best. It works, sure, but I can do better.
I'd like to get some kind of automated backup going for some true "cold storage". Maybe I'll give rsync.net a try.
(Actual) Spring Cleaning
Outside of the literal computer I'm tidying up some other things in my physical space, and trying to take care of some long-needed projects around the house. My gf moved in, and we're learning to cohabitate. I think it is going well, but we're still adjusting! It takes time. I had to get rid of a lot of furniture to make room for another person, and there is still even more to get rid of, and even more to put into storage. I think I'll feel much lighter once we get all the furniture swapping sorted out.
The kitchen cabinets got re-arranged. Now that there are two people living here we acutally had to get a free standing pantry for the extra storage. We moved almost everything around. I'm still opening the wrong cabinets looking for things in their old places.
The dog got a bath the other day, and they spritzed him with some kind of strawberry smelling something. He's super fluffy and smells great. I think he's very pleased about it too.
Anyway
This post is getting huge, so I'll leave it here. I am excited for the summer. It is hard to gain any kind of momentum these days with the world being the way it is. I am trying to celebrate whatever little wins I can. Hopefully you are doing the same.