I’m going on a trip. It’s neither vacation nor work. I may drop off-line.
I don’t (didn’t?) own a laptop. I also keep my cell phone as restricted as I can. (I’m not going to let that little mind spike and spy device worm too deeply into my world.)
I have an iPad. It works but iPads aren’t really “compose a post” devices. I’ve tried Bluetooth keyboards and stuff, they work in theory but less so in practice. The truth is that iPads (I’m including all tablets in this theory, Android too) are built for consuming but not producing. There are folks out there who insist they’ve used them for everything: they’ve written novels on them, they run a server farm from the little touch screen, and they supposedly they manage a corporate budget on some spreadsheet adjacent app or whatever too. Such users are probably an outlier; or exaggerating. Also my iPad is old and the screen is cracked. It still works fine as an entertainment toy; cracked screen or not.
I was going to buy a laptop before this trip. I didn’t. I thought about it but just couldn’t burn the cash. Every time I thought about buying a laptop I thought about NOT spending the money. NOT spending money is one of my favorite activities. I chose to kick the can down the road a bit longer. I shall also daydream about all the stuff that costs the same as a laptop but is so much more fun to have.
My “solution” was to scrounge a weird alternative option and see if I can “make do”. I found a very old, very obsolete, tiny, not very powerful MacBook Air. It’s got a screen the size of a pop-tart. Ok fine it’s two pop tarts. I didn’t know they came this small! There’s not much memory, the storage is small, and the battery is possibly aged. It was probably gutless when it was new and that was many years ago. It was on its way to an e-waste facility. I grabbed it and scampered away with it.
It’s far fro perfect. I was hoping the hardware would be upgradeable. It’s not. They say the RAM is soldered in. I think swapping the battery is an issue too. Shame because it only runs an hour or so on DC. For now the AC power cable works so I’ll get by. Maybe limited RAM is also “good enough”?
Realistically, it was trash. But I needed something and I like to “build”. It would be a shame to miss this chance to try turning nothing into something. Another word for “cheapskate” is “guy who really does recycle”.
The machine was slower than molasses on its native OS. Apple hasn’t supported the OS for ages and I can see why. So I made a bootable thumbdrive with MX Linux. It booted fine. I told the interface to “go for it”. The button didn’t say “unleash whatever nerd powers of Linux are at hand” but that’s what I should say. There are clever people out there and they know what’s inside a Mac better than I. They did well! I’m impressed. The install was fast-ish and the light simple version of Linux it seems stable. I’ve done Linux/Win dual boots before but this worked better. I’ve never done a full OS nuke of an Apple product. It shockingly well. In fact, if this test run works out I might do it again. I’ll buy an obsolete but not quite so obsolete Mac on eBay or something specifically so I can “Linux it”. (I’m not the first guy to think of this idea. It’s a minor secondary market.)
The trip is a real world test. Is this little pop tart enough for blogging from hotels or whatnot? Even with Linux I have my doubts. The screen is small and the CPU is weak. I guess I’ll find out.
If I vanish for a couple weeks, it just means my experiment cratered. Or it could work fine. Wish me luck.
