So, I was laid off a few months ago. Not my fault. RIF. These things happen. I've wanted to use this time to blog more, but I keep getting started on posts that blow up in scope. So, I'll start writing extemporaneously about things I've liked recently.
With the news and job loss, life's been feeling overwhelming, and I'm starting to get tired of my apartment, and I'm realizing I might be a bit too much of a homebody to justify the Jersey City cost of living. Vermont is not a cheap state on a national scale, but it's a lot cheaper for me. So, I'm hoping to land a remote role or a Burlington area role to try to get a more balanced life.
Vermont is insanely pretty. The name means Green Mountain, it's called the Green Mountain State, and all you can see while driving is green mountains. The air is sweeter, everything's alive, and I got to eat a maple creamee. I drove all over trying to get a feel for neighborhoods of all kinds of densities.
Before heading home, I stopped by the King Arthur Baking Company. It's a lovely cafe and baking store. Unfortunately, I already buy their stuff online and at the store, so even though I felt so happy to be there and loved what they sell, I didn't actually WANT to get a souvenir. But then I saw a minifridge filled with sourdough starter cups, one thing lead to another, and I filled out the adoption paperwork
This was impulsive! I've made sourdough before, both from other people's starters and from scratch, and I found the process frustrating. My starters never got very strong, and in the apartment I was in at the time, they'd pick up a mold. The loaves that did come out were so mild, I barely got the point.
King Arthur's starter is vigorous and forgiving, and they included a very reassuring booklet. Per their description, it's hard to fully kill a starter unless it gets infected.
I made a few okay loaves with recipes from that book and they were good but not remarkable compared to a regular no-knead bread. When I was about to try putting it in the fridge for suspended animation, I tried their miche recipe.
I'd never even heard of this kind of bread, but it's made by fermenting whole wheat flour in a levain the night before.A levain is also called a sponge. It's a bit of leavener, flour, and water left to ferment and develop mature flavors before adding it to the rest of the ingredients for the final dough It didn't just smell sour, it picked up a remarkably funky odor. I didn't realize whole wheat and sourdough had such an interaction. I carried on, and tried some annoying bread nerd stuff like folding and using a towel as a brotform the first time.
The final loaf was huge and brown and crusty. It's tart but not tart alone, with a rich funk combining with the earthy whole wheat to taste almost beefy? I'm thrilled I found something so tasty I can make in bulk for myself without spending much money.
No longer was I baking to justify having a sourdough starter, my starter was now a valuable and essential part of the household like my robot vacuum.
I recently saw a blogpost from Veronica Explains on building a text-only writerdeck out of a slightly-old laptop. Her setup is just a console-only debian install with neovim and tmux, and syncthing so she doesn't need to copy her writing by hand.
The idea really appealed to me the more I thought about it. Writerdecks are beautiful hobbyist creations, portable machines for editing text and not much else. Most of them tend to be linux SoCs hooked up to mechanical keyboards and a tiny monochrome screen. And sadly, they're expensive because there's no real economy of scale.
These used to exist when "word processor" referred to hardware and not software. Most of the times I see an old word processor, unless it has a printer built in, I don't clock it as anything but a laptop.
Old laptops don't get as much love as other vintage tech, because laptops decay in all kinds of ways. Many of them weren't built well to begin with, and old screens and touchpads are bad. However, business laptops have very good keyboards and replaceable parts. Text looks perfectly legible on any backlit screen if it's big enough.
I ended up finding a sub $100 Dell Latitude E6400 ATG, because I thought libreboot would be fun.Libreboot isn't worth installing for most people but if you have the urge, Dell Latitudes of this vintage are the easiest This machine is ancient and dog slow. It has a Core 2 Duo, I think before 2010! But that's good, because it can pretty much just run emacs (my longform writing app for some reason) and a terminal, and I bounce between them using i3 without much else.
It's also heavy! 6 lbs, gaming laptop thick, designed for semi-rough environments. I'm not sure where it came from but I'm assuming it was on the Deepwater Horizon and the seller carefully washed it clean with Dawn dish soap.
I intend to write more about this as a separate post. To build such a pared down but useful machine, I used nixos and think I might be able to distribute a repo of my own based on the images.
As silly as it is, the secret is just not having a browser. It makes the computer a good place for work and not just a bigger phone that asks you to do 2fa on your phone. If I need power, I borrow it from a newer machine.
Another cool thing about the bigger, older laptop is that it has big speakers with room to breathe. I figured I should find a cli/tui music player to take advantage. MPD is a service that watches a music directory and lets you add tracks to a playlist and modify that playlist with a few commands. Even on this ancient machine, this feels so much more responsive than streaming, or even using iTunes back in this machine's era. I like it so much, I think I might try popping a microcontrollers in an old alarm clock as a better class of smart speaker.