This article was originally published in the 07 April 2021 edition of the Cherokee Post Herald.
I started cleaning out a few things the other day to rearrange a room:- I’ll save you the anticipation because I can’t arrange anything for anything. What I did find, though, was a number of things that I have, for one reason or another, just stopped using. Old laptops, flash drives, a floppy drive and floppy disks, the list goes on.
The design of the room, and you’ll see how this plays in here if you follow along, the design of the room called for some technology to use. Now, the nicest computer that I pulled out of the room was an old Lenovo laptop that, quite frankly, overheats and didn’t seem to have the resources that it should have for use as a daily-driver. Among the technology in said room was also an old Dell that used to belong to my grandfather that had such a small amount of processing power that was... comical... to say the least. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it crashed when I tried opening a small document. Anyway, I started thinking: Most of what I use on a daily basis is starting to age, some things better than others, so what if I could squeeze some extra life out of these old clunkers?
So, after cleaning out that room, my what-I-call-madness kicked in, and I did just that.
It took a little bit of digging to figure out exactly what I needed to do, but eventually I was able to find something that worked for me and whatever it was I was working with.
The first thing I did after I had room was work with the Dell; the weakest system I have that can still connect to a network. Knowing that there’s no real way I could use this for any real amount of work directly, and thinking how I use an old and crappy netbook for a backup internet connection, I figured that it would happily live as a file server, and I could have a bit of fun with it too. To make a long story short, I have a file server running what is functionally equivalent to Windows 95.
The hard part in that whole scenario was tracking down the libraries I needed to get the thing to work, but now that it’s rebuilt with a new SSD, I can happily say that it runs 24/7 with the exception of power outages and a monthly upgrade.
My second major project was actually the laptop I’m typing this article on right now, the aforementioned Lenovo. Because it has a considerably higher amount of power and resources in general, this was a much easier project in both time and ideas. Sure, I could set it on a table and have it collecting dust while it gets treated like a server, but it still has a lot of potential, assuming I’m willing to cut a few corners. Some of my closest friends know that I’m a Linux junkie, and that I often can get the same performance and usability out of a decade-or-more-old piece of technology, so I simply threw a copy of my software of choice (Arch Linux, better known as “Not for the faint-of-heart”), used a lightweight desktop and gave it a bit of a paint job so it feels much like a copy of the all-too-familiar Windows XP. I could go on and on with the things I’ve been able to repurpose or scrap for parts, but we don’t have time for that in this article, sadly. The room ended up being a success (so far, as I haven’t finished it), and so far, along with being a bit of a throwback stylistically, it’s provided a number of things a great place to not only call home, but also a way to show that, no matter how old and apparently useless, they can always serve a purpose someway, somehow.
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