!Vivobook on the road
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rawtext.club:70/~xiu
2023-02-16
Eora/Sydney, New South Wales
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Offline multiple-IMAP Mutt is finally up and running on
my little Vivobook[1]. It's not exaggerating to say I was
anxious about setting it up. Although I am willing to
tweak and play with tech, I get nervous about bricking
devices. Possibly an irrational fear from having spent so
much time with devices by manufacturers who'd rather
people don't look beneath the chassis.

Anyway, the need to travel arose, so I put my big bitch
pants on and made it happen. My setup is isync/mbsync +
msmtp + folder-hooks, and I'm proud of not just following
verbatim a bunch of tutorials. I actually exercised some
critical thinking and adapted the steps to my own
situation. Enduserness--; Confidence++

This little project did good things to my brain. I
remember learning this is how email works back in the
good old days of POP3 and Eudora. But over the many years
of using Outlook, Gmail, webmail and mobile devices
designed like toys, I'd just... forgotten.

Beyond the protocols, email is just text and files and
the programs that read them. It's not some untouchable
proprietary magic -- even though it sounds like some Big
Tech players are trying to turn it into that.

Oh, and while this was in the works, I also stumbled upon
how to customise the little status bar at the bottom of
the screen. Yeah, okay, OLD NEWS to anyone reading
this, but I didn't expect something as modular as
i3status to even exist let alone be so straightforward to
customise. So, I was impressed. Is this just what Linux
life is like? I feel so empowered!

Anyway, here we are in Eora/Sydney for a few days. This
laptop is an 11" banger and under 1kg. My backpack feels
SO LIGHT, even with three paper books in there (a
journal, a planner, and a novel) as well. So I'm like,
double-stoked.

Okay, it's only day 1 on the road with the Vivobook.
Things could still go tits up. But tonight, I'm feeling
pretty good about it.

[1] gopher://rawtext.club/0/~xiu/phlog/2023-01-15-permacomputing-manjaro-i3-asus-vivobook.txt