…but usually not seriously, unless it’s by Bethesda or Bungie. But let’s back up…
The family computer was originally some variant of the Macintosh Classic–an all-in-one machine with a black and white display. The first game I played, and one my mother was obsessed with, was Crystal Quest.
Of course everyone else had Windows machines, and so knew nothing about the games I played. They played Doom, Fallout, and Quake; I played Marathon, Myth, and Avernum. Consequently, I learned that my gaming background would simply be forever different than that of most peoples’.
But I also learned that games are diabolical abominations of coding, and that the mere effort to get them to even operate on a computer was, if not a feat of engineering, then one of extreme patience.
So after years of gaming on computers and their multitude of problems, I bought an Xbox–a machine designed for the sole purpose of gaming (despite Microsoft’s ongoing attempts to make it a social platform). But some games simply cannot be played effectively on a console, and as I’m completely unwilling to use Windows unless I have to, I’ve been eying Valve’s Steam.
For those who don’t know, Steam is an online distribution and DRM platform. I hadn’t considered computer gaming in years, due to my lack of a dedicated machine and desk (and the lingering memories of technical difficulties), but with the completion of my recent command center, and with the Ubuntu computer working admirably, it seemed like a good time to try.
I visited their website, found the Linux installer, and completed the installation. And it didn’t work. Turns out that Ubuntu has its own distro of Steam, which I was able to install rather simply from the command line. It lacks the happy GUI, but that was of minor consequence. I created an account, found a free game, and downloaded it. And it worked!
The downside of attempting to turn a Linux machine into a gaming platform was the obvious lack of game choices available. I had hoped they’d be more prevalent, but a cursory preview only yielded a handful of anime adventures (most of which turned out to be pornography). So it’s a success in that it works, but a failure in that its catalog so far contains nothing of interest.
Ah well, it’s not like I need to spend more time gaming anyway. I guess that, for now, I’ll have to game socially in my living room like a normal person.
Last summer, we constructed a strawberry garden out of old wooden boxes. It worked, but it was quaint, and Liz wanted a real strawberry garden. And I like strawberries and gardens, and I was itching to finally use that saw that’s been sitting in a box in my garage since we bought the house, so this seemed like as good a reason as any.
So after procuring some 2x8s and a work table from Lowe’s, I had a perfectly respectable setup, ready to butcher some lumber:
My blood coursed with suburban manliness (and histamine–Spring allergies that did not appreciate the sawdust)! I really only needed to cut a single board in half, but it was the manliest single cut I could make!
The majority of the work was far less creative and primarily involved grunt labor: digging trenches and hammering stakes. But I had no intention of installing a garden that would shift and become unsightly, so all boards were carefully leveled and secured with corrosion-resistant deck screws:
Okay, it just looks like a box (because it is), but soon it’ll be growing delicious fruit and look way cooler.
I like making homemade pizza, and it’s especially gratifying when I make the dough. But dough from scratch is difficult to cook, as it tends to dry at the edges and remain gooey in the center. But then I considered that the baking sheet upon which I normally cook is designed to buffer temperature changes and shield the food from direct heat (having an air pocket). This works well for cookies, but undermines the nature of pizza dough–which is why pizza stones and sheets are specifically designed to transfer this heat. It was a lingering thought–one that stalks the mental periphery, waiting for the appropriate trigger.
And such a trigger came when we revisited Mendelsons. Pilfered from some industrial kitchen somewhere, a stack of bread racks sat ignored, until I gazed upon them and my memory engaged. They were large aluminum sheets, regularly perforated. For $8, it would serve my needs. I bought one.
Back at home, it seemed larger than it was in the store, and I shoved it alongside the refrigerator–out of the way and forgotten for the moment. Then, some days later, Liz suggested we make pizza…if the pizza sheet would fit. I balked. I hadn’t thought to check that it actually fit into the oven. I tried.
It did not.
Dammit.
But I didn’t come all this way to have heterogeneously-cooked pizza crust. Off to the garage!
Fortunately, the aluminum was soft, and after some patience and a couple replacement carbon cutting blades for the Dremel, I had a crudely chopped pizza sheet.
Obviously that wouldn’t do. Sharp edges would scratch the oven, not to mention my hands. But the grinder and my kitchen steel polished it down to a smooth edge without problem.
Huzzah!
Evenly cooked pizza, and I didn’t need a $100 pizza stone. And who else can say they have a custom-made pizza sheet? Frugal, and nerdy.
I sit here, typing on an HP Pavilion…running Ubuntu Linux! That’s very exciting for me, although I’ve come to understand that the accomplishment isn’t so nearly as grandiose as I had predicted. Still, it’s a happy accomplishment.
This computer was a necessary replacement. Liz’s VAIO–her college computer–had died a quiet and dignified death through inevitable hardware failure. Afterwards, she used my iMac G4–my college computer. Eventually, that too died. For obvious reasons we needed a computer, and since I was unable to justify the cost of a new mac (my own preference), and since Liz hated macs, we decided upon the HP laptop (since our apartment had a certain lack of space for a permanent desktop setup, as the computer room had been converted into a nursery). Still, we opted for something with higher-end hardware, thus the HP (dv-3186cl)–an i5 quad-core 2.27 GHz with 4 gigs of RAM. It was, and still is, a respectable computing system.
This machine served us well for years, but eventually it too succumbed to the ravages of time. The hard drive had started to wear out, the OS (Windows 7), had become increasingly bloated (the inevitable fate of evolving OSes), the battery (which we had replaced multiple times) died, and the WiFi card ceased to function.
Upon this last failure, I lost my patience and bought a MacBook Pro. It had been years since I enjoyed Apple’s OS, and I was elated at the homecoming. Liz limped along with the HP, until one day it refused to cooperate at all. And as she needed it for work, she immediately replaced it (with a newer iteration of HP’s Pavilion series). I, being ever-loath to discard technology, retired the broken machine to the mothyard (the basement), with the vague plan of replacing its defective hardware parts one day, and installing Linux.
Then I received some Amazon gift cards and decided that was the necessary excuse to begin. I hooked it up (it had no battery) and pressed the power button. And it promptly informed me that the WiFi card was inoperable. I disregarded the warning, and was then informed that the drive was likely to experience imminent failure. I ignored this message too (all the data had been backed up anyway), and continued.
Rather, I tried to continue, but was then informed that the drive failed to mount. Again, no biggie. This was just a test to see if the hardware would function at all. Perhaps the drive was fine, but the OS had become corrupted. So I began my search for a Linux distro.
My first hands-on experience with Linux was openSUSE, years ago when I had managed to install it on an old beige G3 powermac. At the time, I had it configured to be a simple Apache web server, and it had performed its duties as a platform for my first-ever blog: intellectualnexus.net. I’m happy to see that the domain lies unregistered currently. Apparently no one else has since thought to use the name. I ultimately agreed to discard that derelict machine once the kid arrived, and I had been without a web server since (until I bought my Synology).
Then my sister bought me a Raspberry Pi. The Pi came with its fork of Debian, NOOBS. That was my second experience using Linux. The Pi has lived an off-and-on existence, primary simply to serve an omni-present web page (currently a Google calendar).
In both of these examples, my familiarity with Linux had been minimal, and my hand-on experiences to be lacking in confidence. But Linux had changed since my earliest experiences, and the Internet was confident that contemporary distros were rivals in usability to the other major OS players. In fact, I had even stumbled across Dell’s product listings that included machines with Ubuntu pre-installations. I hadn’t much cared for SUSE at the time, and with Debian appearing rather minimalist, I took Dell’s endorsement of Ubuntu and searched for a package.
It didn’t take long to find. It turned out that Ubuntu has very comprehensive guides for downloading and installing. They even provided a step-by-step guide for my exact scenario: downloading the installation iso onto a USB flash drive with a Mac. With this amount of helpful documentation, Ubuntu made a good option. I picked up a USB stick on the way home from work the next day.
That night, I followed the instructions to the letter, and quickly ended up with a usable USB install drive. I plugged it into the HP and booted up, and after ignoring the error message regarding the WiFi and failing HD, entered into the install prompts. This, too, was straightforward, and after the installation completed, I rebooted, hoping to see Ubuntu’s happy welcome screen.
It certainly is pretty
But instead I was met with a new error, and this time the HD was completely inaccessible. So despite my misgivings that the drive was okay and Windows was to blame, the hardware was indeed at fault. I bought a 1TB HD off Amazon and waited the two days for shipping. The old drive, now undoubtedly defunct, was removed and relegated to the mothyard’s stack of inoperable/obsolete hard drives.
What am I going to do with an 80GB PATA?
The drive installed easily enough and I re-ran the installation (once again ignoring the WiFi error (vowing to discover how to turn that message off in the BIOS later)). The install completed much quicker this time. Apparently a functioning hard drive was the key factor. I also paid more attention to what the installation was doing, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it was automatically deciding upon the appropriate drivers for the detected hardware and removing those that weren’t relevant. In short order, upon reboot, I was greeted with the happy welcome screen which for which I had eagerly awaited.
Elegant in its simplicity
I signed in and began poking around. The default installation included the basic applications necessary to navigate a file system and the Internet. I triggered a mass application update to get the most recent versions, then poked around in the package center (or whatever they call it). There were similarities between Synology’s Linux fork and Apple’s OS (a freeBSD fork), so it’s been relatively straightforward to figure out. Ultimately, I had just planned to use the HP as a web browser (courtesy of Firefox) and a coding platform (now using Notepadqq). And it’s fulfilled these expectations.
So purdy
It’s also exceeded them. The OS is incredibly efficient, and has proven to be the fastest system I have used to date. And after discovering that a sticker had melted onto the internal WiFi card, and removing said sticker fixed it, I’ve decided to order a battery and have a completely restored workstation. I don’t know if it’ll turn out to be my primary machine, but it’ll certainly fill a niche where more technical tasks are involved. So far, Ubuntu has excelled beyond my every expectation. I offer my personal endorsement.
I don’t like connecting odd devices to my home network. A quick Internet search will reveal the problems with doing so–that manufactures have a tendency to never patch them, resulting in a bunch of small computers with large security vulnerabilities serving as network entry points.
But things can still be done right, for those who care. And after years of hearing reviews for the Ring Video Doorbell on my favored information security news podcast (which personally endorses the product), I began to consider it as an exception to my otherwise rather rigid policy.
Then some neighbors began to complain about break-ins. The tactic so often used: perpetrators would announce their presence at the front door to determine if anyone was home, and if so, to scan the interior of the home and come back later–if not, to break in then and there. This was in fact the exact type of scenario for which the Ring was designed. I proposed the option to Liz, who agreed. So we used a collection of Amazon gift card credits and purchased their Video Doorbell 2.
Admittedly, their promotional videos are a little goofy, with actors creating a scene in which a couple guys in black trigger the camera and the homeowner yells at them through the speaker and they go scampering away like deer.
But, I could do that should I choose. Through various settings, the camera and microphone activate from motion, which then records a 30-second clip, or if I acknowledge the video, it keeps recording until I stop it. And of course it activates when someone pushes the button. It’s wired into the existing doorbell circuit, which feeds the battery a trickle charge, and integrates with the old wired chime, and naturally–WiFi. Alerts are delivered as push notifications through their official applications–both desktop and mobile. And at any point I can activate the device to see a live feed, and through another button push, activate my device’s microphone so I can threaten whoever’s on my front porch.
Equally important, it updates its firmware automatically.
So far, it works as advertised, and while the price point was a little steep, they did not cheap out on its manufacture, even having included a variety of hardware/tools/wiring.
I have yet to catch any ne’er-do-wells, but that’s just as well. I do, however, have a collection of riveting videos involving me shoveling the driveway and the car leaving and entering the garage. In all practicality, it’ll probably be most useful when I’m working in the basement and can’t hear the doorbell, or to verify a package delivery, or to one day yell at the kid’s first boyfriend just for fun.
HD, but with the wide angle lens there are limitations on distance
So after years of gaming on computers and their multitude of problems, I bought an Xbox–a machine designed for the sole purpose of gaming (despite Microsoft’s ongoing attempts to make it a social platform). But some games simply cannot be played effectively on a console, and as I’m completely unwilling to use Windows unless I have to, I’ve been eying Valve’s Steam.
