2024 in a Nutshell

It's hard to believe that 2024 is wrapping up. I have been keeping busy at work and in my free time, but haven't taken the time to translate any of my notes to the site. Here's a quick recap:

Switched to Linux: In June of 2024, I made the jump to Linux on my personal machine. Prior to that, I was using a 2019 16" Macbook Pro that I purchased from work. When my wife's MBP failed, I gave her my laptop. For the last few years I have been working my way free of all requirements for Windows or macOS, and this seemed like the perfect time to make the leap. As someone who has actively used Linux personally and professionally for years, it was an easy transition. I kept a lot of notes and I plan to document it all. Linux Mint (not that you asked).

HP z640: At that same time, I bought a refurb HP workstation from eBay. It's a 2012 HP z640 with the dual-Xeon card. It's a 32-core beast and runs Linux like a champ. I had a lot of fun selecting it, and I'm very satisfied with my $160 purchase! I was worried it was going to be loud and hot, but it's whisper-quiet. I chose this model because it has a 950 watt PSU, and that's plenty for me to try out a variety of GPUs. I ended up ordering a Quadro k2200 for $30 on eBay just as a starter, and it has been really solid for my day-to-day use. It's satisfying to take a machine that is basically eWaste and put it to good use as my daily driver. (The tower's name is Orthanc.)

(Aside: we are crazy as a society. The idea that we need newer, faster machines every few years is such a crock. I think we're being tricked by a business. Reuse!)

Gaming on Linux: Inspired by my new rig (I call it Orthanc), I went down a "build a gaming rig from an Optiplex" rabbit hole in June. I learned a ton about options for low-cost builds and graphics cards that still had life, and this inspired me to dig into gaming on my Linux machine. I was surprised at how well most of my games ran, and I even got Diablo IV running on the k2200 (sluggishly on the under-powered k2200). The whole thing made me nostalgic for older games and I played through Diablo II and started playing Skyrim for the first time. A lot of fun!

2015 Macbook Pro Battery Replacement: I had two 2015 MBPs with bad (bulging) batteries. This particular model was one that is particularly hard to service as a user, but I disassembled it, dealt with the awful glue that Apple used to make it such a pain, ordered replacement battery, gave it a thorough cleaning, and replaced the thermal paste. It pretty much required a full teardown, but I ended up with an amazing laptop with nice battery life running Linux Mint. Actually useful!

Linux Mint: My personal life is all on Linux Mint these days, and I've been quiet happy. I have had a Linux desktop always since 2007-ish, and I have tried a lot of distros. But I hadn't given Mint a spin since 2015 or so, and my z640 came with it installed. I did a fresh install, but decided to give it a whirl, and I've been quite happy. The large community and desktop focus is nice, Ubuntu base offers compatibility with most things, and there just hasn't been much incentive to jump. I even did the 21.3 to 22 upgrade on two machines and it was easy. Runners up: Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE.

File Syncing: We have a family subscription to Office 365, mostly because my wife uses Word for her job as a writer/reviewer. With it comes 1 TB of OneDrive storage, which has been very convenient for me. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't offer a native Linux OneDrive client, and this was really the last app that was a daily requirement for me. As an alternative, I set up an rclone sync to OneDrive, and use Unison to sync between local machines. This has been so much better than the OneDrive client for me specifically that it's hard to express how much better I like it. With plenty of storage in Orthanc, I've also moved to a world of local-first files, with a robust set of backups. Such a good setup.

Linux Stuff: I've been having lots of fun digging into aspects of Linux that I had previously glossed over. I've started using AppArmor and bubblewrap to sandbox applications, and it's been fun to feel like I can carefully limit what is running on my system. I've also enjoyed tinkering with the configuration of my new/old tower's OS. It's been a good time.

Programming: Not as much this year, maybe because I do a lot at work. I wrote a good chunk of a text adventure framework in C, and used a test-driven approach. I spent some time learning Ruby and Go, and some time with the löve game framework. I wrote a small utility in Rust called feedfind-rs that is handy for discovering the RSS feed for a particular site. I honestly don't know what I want to do with programming in my freetime.

RSS Feeds: Definitely worth mentioning that with the switch to Linux I also leveled up my use of Thunderbird and RSS feeds. I'm finally building a list of sites with content by people I want to follow in a totally sustainable, exportable, open-source-able kind of way. It's been very liberating! Oh, and Mastodon has continued to be awesome for me.

Notes + Obsidian: I feel like this was the year that my personal note-taking really leveled up. I'm using Obsidian. Nothing surprising. I like open, text formats, and Obsidian makes it nice. I'm using the Flatpak with zero plugins (for security reasons) and some Flatseal policies to limit its access. Sometimes I skip Obsidian and just use neovim instead.

NO FUCKIN' AI, M'KAY?: Goddamn am I sick of "AI". The number of times I have wasted time because someone has pasted some LLM slop and I have to spend time figuring out what's wrong with it... Honestly, I know it has uses, but I'm at the point where if it's not by a person I'm not fucking interesting. You can take your slop and go... I dunno, somewhere else I guess?

There's more! I know there is. But that's plenty for a 2024 recap. I've taken so many good notes that I plan to put into blog posts eventually!