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It's 4:19AM and I'm awake because I made the mistake of taking a nap earlier. Shouldn't have done that. No sir-ee bob. I've been very restless lately. I feel like I need to be productive at all times. It was my day off, so I repurposed an old laptop yesterday. It had an Unbuntu install on it from around 2019 and I wasn't sure exactly what was on it. Turns out, the music collection I had been lamenting as "gone" was in there. Everything from 2008 to around 2021-- just hanging out on this old laptop. I thought I'd lost it years ago when I killed my main desktop PC to save my uncles work computer. I suppose it's not ~dead~ perse. It just needs a power supply and I'm not buying one. Still, I backed it all up, loaded that music onto my phone, and am glad I did.

I swapped out Ubuntu for clean Mint install. I could have updated Ubuntu and installed Cinnamon, but I decided against that because of this. The laptop is a Gateway from 2012. It ran a six year old version of Ubuntu just fine, but I was initially sceptical that it could handle Mint with Cinnamon. Somewhat surprisingly, it runs wonderfully. When I looked at the specs, the machine has 12GB of RAM. I must have put a spare in it for safe keeping at one point because I wouldn't have bothered to do that intentionally. Even with it's 2012 era mobile focused CPU, there doesn't seem to be any issue running software like VScodium.

What I have now is a fully functional machine with every piece of software I need running perfectly. It's even got a 3.5mm analog audio input, which just last week I was pissed off at my modern day laptop for lacking. Not to mention, the keyboard on it kicks major ass. The keys have just the right travel, and it's almost silent compared to every other laptop I have.

My next project is a 2015 era HP laptop with 4GB of RAM and a Celeron. It ran Windows 10 like shit from the moment I got it. Why pre-install an OS on something that can't run it? I bought it due to an emergency, otherwise I'd have been far more discerning. I just needed something to pay bills with. I'm not sure what to install on it. I have machines for virtually every OS I'd want to use, and of course there's WINE for when I'm not doing anything important. Why dual boot when I can repurpose e-waste? I don't know how I ended up with so many laptops, but here we are. This is a far cry from the first one I bought in 2010. That Laptop was an e-machine. It too had a celeron, but I believe it only had 2GB of RAM. It ran Windows 7, and for a time, I used it extensively. It was completely dead by 2012. It's hard drive lives on in a modded original Xbox my daughter uses to play Simpsons Hit & Run.

See, and that's the thing. Nothing is ever truly obsolete. I'll use a Palm TX to take notes for an NES game I'm playing on a 90's CRT while recording the gameplay on state of the art laptop. There's no reason to give up on old stuff if it can be made to serve a practical purpose today. I don't think about it while I'm doing it. Everything's a tool to get the "job" done. I'm not going to play NES on a modern display. The palm is literally designed to take notes and does it better than my phone. The laptop has a massive SSD in it, so I can record forever. That's tech from the 80's, 90's, 2000's, and 2020's working in tandem for me and it makes me happy. I know I could record the same footage from an emulator and use notepad for notes. I suppose I would if I didn't have the means to use the setup I have. More likely, I wouldn't bother at all to do any of it.