Category: Tech

And along with it, a new number: (970) 234-1080, for anyone needing to contact me.

I’ve been “fi’d” – as in “Project fi,” Google’s answer to the telecom scam corporate America has been foisting on us for decades. It’s a hybrid wifi-LTE system partnered with t-Mobile and Sprint, run by Google and actually makes sense. Check it out:
Project fi

During the process of bringing Francie’s old laptop out of retirement a few weeks ago, I was looking around trying to decide what OS to install and stumbled on an unfamiliar Linux distro I decided to use called “Crunchbang.”  A Brit bloke from Lincoln, UK going by the handle “corenomial” organizes and provides it as a minimalist Debian system.  How did I go all these recent years unaware of this little gem in the midst of the hopelessly splintered Linux ecosystem?  I’ve browsed Distrowatch a time or 2, but somehow never came across it.

So in three short weeks I have completed migrating almost my entire home network to #!.  Only the Apple side of the house and the two oldest PCs going with older Redhat versions as their primary OS, simply without the processing power to run a modern kernel remain un-banged.  If you are tired of the bloatware, distracting eye candy and commercial creep being seen in the Linux world today give #! a try.  I bet you see it my way, too.

On the topic of older PCs, Francie’s, first laptop, a 5-year old HP DV9000, was recently pressed back into service due to lack of resources at work (as if THAT’S anything new!). It’s one of the early Intel Centrino Duo systems with 2gig RAM. I decided to get it ready starting with a fresh install of a distro I’d seen called Crunchbang (#!). I was drawn to it by the claimed low resource requirements for running a modern/current kernel/base and it did not disappoint. I’d highly recommend this flavor of Linux to anyone looking for similar OS features. I’d summarize #! by saying that in the context of the current world of Linux DE fragmentation, it is to me at least, Debian done right.

Probably the oldest PC on the planet still in use, and the first one I ever purchased way back in 1985, the Zenith 486 is now undergoing it’s umpteenth upgrade/rebuild.

It started as an Intel 286-based machine.  Being a 2nd generation PC with the new, highly touted 16-bit ISA bus and 20 megabytes of hard disk storage space, it was a top drawer machine at the time.  It went to a 386 and finally became a 486 sometime in the late 80’s, IIRC.  It has sentimental value and continues doing file storage duties, albeit obviously limited these days.

In expected fashion for ancient hardware, one of the drives developed an error condition precluding NT4 from booting a couple weeks ago.  To me this is just an opportunity to add a 2nd SCSI adapter, stuff some more drives in there and see how it goes running a similarly ancient version of Redhat Linux.  I just happen to have a pre-IPO copy of 5.2 waiting to be re-used on the next iteration of the venerable Z-486.