I have been annoyed by youtube-ads for a long time.

I’ve been specifically annoyed by the fact that my TV is one generation too old to install a custom OS that allows a custom yt-app that eats ads.

I’ve been ragingly annoyed by the fact that there were pre- and post-roll ads and THREE midroll-ads in an eight-minutes-video.

Something had to be done.

The last time I have tried Linux before this recent adventure that will be the topic of this post was probably 15 years ago, during university. I have tried parallel operations on my desktop PC, and I have tried it on the netbook. It was horrible.

To expand a bit more on that: a primary use case of my computing devices is and has always been gaming. Way back when, WINE did exist, but it was mostly a “set everything up yourself, good luck”-approach. Steam? Dream on. The older the game the better the chance to somehow get it to work, by virtue of someone else having done it, but it was always an uphill battle. The elsewhere mentioned screen-size problem of my netbook also did not help.

I do not doubt that those of you who only ever used the internet, a text editor and programming languages would not have had that kind of problem. This is still a post about my lived experience, so shut it.

Why trying it again now? Because gesticulates vaguely to the overall situation I wanted to get away from Microsoft. And in the last few years the overall situation on Linux has been changing…

In which I will muse about the laptops of days present and past. Mostly to try and do this “collecting thoughts in a somewhat coordinated manner”, and to see if this works out to be a post of a length I had in my mind when making this plan or if this will be a three-sentence fluke.

I’ll not talk about the several work laptops I had over the years, those usually were Dell work-horses doing exactly what they were meant to do while running company-administrated Windows installations that usually also were doing what they were meant to, and usually saw use plugged into their respective docking stations anyway. Used on the road, or the rail, or other people’s living rooms, they also… just worked. I’d still not get one for myself, because I adore the tiny-ness of my current device, but more on that later.

So, mostly for historical reasons I follow quite a lot of blogs and webcomics, with wildly varying update schedules, and the times where I am willing to just middle-click on a folder and check everything by hand are long gone.
Dedicated rss-readers, as in “programs you run on your computer”, have the inherent disadvantage of being device-bound, which sucks between two computers, a smartphone, and a work laptop.
For a long time, my preferred solution to that was feedly, where you can make an account and collect your feeds and then access them from whereever. feedly is free with paid options (that I never used) and has been offering hallucination machine “support” lately, which (next to “you are probably the product”) was the main reason to look for alternatives.

Enter FreshRSS.

This is one part of a historic post that has been split up for republishing.

FutureSjut

Unicomp produces mechanical keyboards based on the classic IBM Model M. Those things are heavy, clunky, clicky and LOUD keyboards that provide a good amount of resistance against any use and misuse. I love this thing.

What I love even more is the fact that Unicomp also sells custom keycaps in various colours, both printed and unprinted. As you might have noticed, I ordered a set of blank key caps to force myself to finally learn blind typing. It works surprisingly well, albeit I currently find it easier to just delete a whole word and re-type it then to search for the correct key to correct a typo…

If you want a keyboard with a set of custom caps, order directly from Unicomp. If you just want a keyboard, try getDigital – retails price + shipping from the US roughly equals their price, and there wont be any hassles with customs.

This is one part of a historic post that has been split up for republishing.

FutureSjut

The other [sic] new toy is a Synology DS1515+ NAS. His name is GLADos, following established naming procedures for IT equipment.

I got myself a five-bay NAS because there is no kill like overkill, and I really wanted a RAID-10 and an additional back-up disc as well as the various additional playthings this model can run. For common home purposes, a RAID-1 with two big discs should be sufficient.

“What the fuck did you just say?”
Okay. A NAS is a Network Attached Storage – an external hard drive connected to the network instead of your PC. A RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks – several HDDs working as one volume. RAID-1 uses two discs and mirrors them unto each other – both hold the same data, if one fails you still have the other. RAID-10 is “two RAID-0 in a RAID-1”, wherein a RAID-0 spreads your data in blocks over two discs, resulting in faster access but no redundancy.
The fifth bay holds an additional backup-disc where important data will be backed up to. I once lost 1.5TB of media, I am that paranoid.

But let’s start at the beginning: after ordering the NAS itself (Conrad had the best offer among big suppliers, much cheaper than the cheapest on amazon), five WD Red 4TB HDDs, two Noctua NF-A8 FLX fans (especially recommended as quieter than the ones provided by Synology) and a 4GB RAM block (all via amazon, and no, I do not get any money for this, even if I totally should), I ended up with… some several boxes.

This is a historic post that has been re-published with minimal touch-ups.

FutureSjut

So, The Lord GabeN, in all His glory, hath heard my prayers and gifted upon me a Shiny New Toy.

The Steam Controller.
Why did I get it?
Because I’m an engineer, the subsequent pathological love for interesting new tech-stuff, disposable income and poor impulse control.
Also, I wanted to try out controller-based PC-gaming for quite some time and decided to save myself for the Light of the Lord GabeN, instead reverting to the tools used by the Filthy Console Peasants. But seriously: I really wanted to take a look at this thing. It arrived on Friday, I got it on Saturday, and over the weekend I tested a whole bunch of games with it. Here is what I found.

[Disclaimer I: I never really used a controller before, except in agony-filled afternoons when friends decided we would game on their consoles. I have no way of comparing this thing to any other controller, so I wont.]
[Disclaimer II: Depending on how things work out, there might be a follow-up post some day, hopefully addressing problems mentioned here.]