2022-03-16 from the editor of ~insom ------------------------------------------------------------ Getting off C's crutches so I can learn Rust better continues. I got a new PC recently which lead me to thinking about giving computers personality. It's hard for me to tease apart from because both of those things were happening at the same time, so forgive me some muddled thinking. I'm 39, and I was pretty lucky to have a computer at all growing up, and I remember buying my first (second hand) which was a 486DX2/66. I'd _used_ other computers, but this one was mine. It ran Windows 3.1, and later 95, and I squeezed Slackware onto its 130MiB HDD. At some point it probably had a Debian install on it and I know it ended its useful life running FreeBSD 4. It did _not_ have a stable name, to be fair, but that kind of made sense: I didn't have any other computer or a network, so why would it need a name? When a name was mandatory (like a unix hostname) I probably put "aaron" or "insom". Then I read Cryptonomicon and I was intrigued by Tombstone, the mail server which plays a medium-important plot point in that novel. I thought "oh, maybe _servers_ should have names". I spray painted that machine in day-glo red and silver, like a bad version of the Half-Life branding. (Keyboard, too!). It had various RAM and HDD upgrades through its life, many CD-ROM drives and ISA cards. Later I got a Pentium II 300 as the payment for my summer job, and even later I got a Dual Pentium 100 (yes, that's slower, but it also was SMP which is cool and it had a SCSI drive). _Even_ later, the only real Unix machine I used as a personal device: a DECstation 5000/200 which was being given away by NUI Galway. These machines had long lives, being repurposed again and again, upgraded, customized and very rarely sold (which meant they didn't have to be left in good enough condition to sell at the end of their life). When I ran my first company, I built the servers we used, they had quirky names and were built in two's. The turning point in this (for me) is ~2005 when I started working for someone else. The servers were called ..co.uk. The machines on the network were named . The machine you used was yours for 3+ years and then it was scrapped and you got another. You probably never got an upgrade from its original specification. While I worked at the company, we started using virtualization. Now the physical hosts were things like `xen3` or `jcb8`, a number and a class of machine use and the VMs followed the familiar pattern. Anyway, I don't want to be all "the problem is capitalism" but ... For my personal use I've ended up amassing too many computers, of arguable quality, and I rsync my homedir from machine to machine, and install my dotfiles from a GitHub repo on a new machine. This means every machine feels like the exact same environment. Work computers are an aluminium slab that starts off fast and gets slow over the years and is replaced with a new slab. That's okay, my data is barely stored on it; I don't even back up my work laptop. That's what the cloud is for. (I did variously cover them in stickers, though, but I'd hardly say I've "loved" a machine in the last 10+ years). When I got my new computer I got my first new desktop in a very long time. Even desktops that I've had were repurposed work machines, HP G5 or G6 machines or an 8300 workstation. I decided to sell my laptop, which was also kind of powerful, and consolidate onto this new machine. This means that instead of having several "okay" computing devices, I have a _very fast_ desktop. It also means that to "do computing" I need to go sit in my office. I am hoping this makes practice helps create separation between computing and not computing (unrelated to separation between work and home, which I'm already okay at). I do have a remaining laptop, a spares-and-repairs Chromebook which I bought because it was non-functional from water damage but that I was able to get back to health. It's not powerful enough to do more than one thing at a time (certainly not on the web). I like that. It's not signed into my 1Password or synced with my Firefox account and it doesn't even have my dotfiles. It runs Bunsenlabs Linux and it's unlike any environment I use. It's its own thing.