Meet my laptop!
"Wait that's not a laptop, that's just a banana!"
Look again, friend. Behind that razor-thin banana lays my ultra-slim 2008 Dell Latitude E6400.
this is supposed to be a call-back to the ipad air 2 "pencil" ad where they show off how thin the new ipad is by completely obscuring it behind a pencil.
Handed down to me from my mother, I've had this laptop since I was around 12 years old. I played minecraft on it, I learned coding on it, and I watched YouTube on it. It was my childhood computer (and remains to be my primary laptop). I jokingly refer to it as "The Powerhouse".
Ever since I built my first desktop tower I've only gone back to it when I need to take a computer with me. It's duel core processor along with only 4gb of ddr2 memory is fairly limiting.
The start of my CD collection
I promise this ties back in!
At my place of work (a UPS store) we have speakers mounted on the ceiling. Unfortunately, they aren't hooked up to anything and we end up playing music off of a crappy alexa instead. Recently I discovered that we have a 5 disc cd changer/radio/amp combo just lying around. I also found the wires for the speakers hanging out the ceiling nearby. It seemed all I had to do to get it working was hook the wires up! I hooked it up, and the radio was working, but I didn't have any disks to use.
So I purchased a spool of cheap inkjet printable disks (thank you for still selling those, microcenter), burned some music on them, and printed my own graphics on them!
The left disk is for after close only and contains more socially "objectionable" music. The right disk is for playing during normal operating hours and has all radio safe music.
Unfortunately, it turned out something about the cd player was broken so it didn't end up working out. At least I got some fun discs out of it (not that I have a cd player to play them on...)
My return to the laptop
Recently I decided to get my laptop set up again, that way it would be ready to go if I wanted to take it somewhere with me. After I got it set up, I sat on my bed and used it for a few hours working on my website.
The keyboard on the laptop is among one of my favorites, and it runs my code editor just fine (surprisingly a jetbrains ide is not too heavy for it). It's shockingly still perfectly fine for coding and other common tasks. Sitting somewhere else other then my desk while using a computer felt really nice. I started to rediscover how great my old laptop was!
It turns out The Powerhouse is pretty sweet
One major drawback of using the laptop however is the battery life isn't all that long. We're talking somewhere between 40mins - 90mins from a full charge. To get just a little more out of the battery life I started using the wifi kill switch to disable the wireless networking whenever I didn't need it. Eventually it started to feel kind of fun to disable the wifi to see how far I can get without an internet connection. Now, whenever I use my laptop I keep the switch off about 95% of the time.
Circling back to those CDs
One day when I was writing some code on my laptop, I wanted to listen to some music. My phone was charging in another room, so I thought: "Hey, why not just play the music out of my laptop? Wait a second, I have those CDs lying around... why don't I just pop one of those in?".
Now, almost every other day I have at least an hour or two where I work on my laptop while listening to music from one of my CDs. I'm not sure what it is, but there's something about it I enjoy much more than sitting at my desk.
My new cd
Immutable media isn't really that common anymore, which sort of makes CD-R disks interesting to me. I decided that every once in a while when I have a new distinct set of music I listen to, I'll document it by making into a CD. I'll also design a cover for said CD that in some way represents what I like around that time.
Here's my first installment to the series:
made up of 3 images of myself, as well as images of Hilda, Tulip, Marcy, Luz, and a goose
I really like putting together these playlists and designing a fun cover for them. I'm so happy I have a printer that allows me to do this. I hope I keep up doing this in the future, and in a few years time I can have a booklet of my music taste and design taste at different points in time. Maybe I'll look back at this first one and think I was really silly/cringe a little for making such a design and playlist lol. Or maybe I'll look back and think "that's the seed I planted that grew into what I am now!". Who knows!
Conclusions
- Making stuff is fun!
- Old tech is usually still perfectly serviceable! (As long as you don't have unrealistic expectations for it. Use it the same/in a similar way you did when you got it.)
- Using the internet and using a computer has increasingly become synonymous, but I'm discovering it really doesn't have to be! Just using a computer and using the internet on a computer are two totally different experiences.
- Documenting a piece of yourself for the future will probably pay off, and is fun!
That's all for now! I hope you enjoyed hearing about my new setup :)