My Computing Journey

My Computing Journey – Part 5 – PCs of My Own

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I’m nearing the end of this little series, mainly because everything afterward is already pretty much documented here on this blog in some way. It almost feels like jumping over 25 years of computer use after baby-stepping in jumps of 4-5 years, but well, I’ve been blogging for a long long time.

Note: This picture I found seems to be an AMD model, but mine looked the same.

The next machine, or machines really, are possibly the most important in my computing journey history. In 1998, give or take, I graduated High School and went off to college. Around this time period, because I would need it for college, my parents bought me my first PC. More accurately, the first PC that was “mine alone”. At the time, I want to say it was quite the beefy piece of hardware, and I am pretty sure it cost something like $1800 dollars or so, with the monitor. The machine was an IBM Aptiva, 450mhz 486pc. I may have added it but it even had a discrete graphics card in it. Just after I graduated High School, my parents moved back to Illinois and I moved in with my aunt and uncle for around 6 months while I went to IUPUI (for Engineering). I spent a lot of time on this PC in my free time. Especially as a lot of my friends had moved away to college as well. Eventually, I moved back in with my parents and went to a local Community College there before going back to University.

Probably my primary hobby on this PC was browsing Usenet, which I was super into at the time. I also was exploring a lot of other computer hobbies that would turn into moreover time. My Uncle’s PC had a TV Tuner card in it (I eventually got my own), which I would use to take screenshots of games and TV. I started getting more complex with my web design on GeoCities and such as well.

I also started increasingly upgrading parts in my PC. This is where the “machines” part of this post comes in. At some point in the early 2000s, I had a box of parts and realized that if I bought a case, for the new parts, I could reassemble the old PC again. Fun Fact! I still use that same case today. I bought it, specifically because it was ” boring beige box” and because it “held a lot of hard drives”, because even back then, I knew I was going to be a huge data hoarder. You can see it here, in this older but newish photo.

This led to my first experience using Linux and running a web server. My first Linux distribution was Redhat Linux 5. I know this because I have a book on how to use Redhat Linux 5. I started using IRC a lot during this era and tested the waters a bit by running a server so my friends and I could upload images to share.

The PC I built to replace it, was the first PC I ever built. I forget the exact specs but I know it was an AMD Athlon and I believe at least for a while a Rage 128 Pro graphics card. I used that machine through most of college, for gaming, and CAD work. Also, a lot of Usenet and IRC, as well as some web and C/C++ coding.

I mentioned afterward things got a bit crazier. A few years after leaving college and looking for a job, I ended up starting my sort of, accidental career choice of Broadcast Engineering (my major was in Mechanical), working at a local TV station. Part of this work was also taking care of IT for the office, it was pretty much just my boss and I, and the station was independently owned and operated, for the most part. There was a larger group who owned maybe a dozen stations, but they were pretty much hands-off. One perk of this job was that I ended up with a lot of older and scrapped PC hardware to tinker with. So like I said, things got kind of funky. I also went through probably half a dozen laptops, the first of which was a dinosaur of a device that I think ran Windows 98. (This was during the Windows XP era).

Another fun side effect of this job is that I’ve installed Windows, especially Windows XP, so many times, I could literally do it with my eyes closed probably. Pretty much the go-to method for dealing with major PC issues was to back up files and blow out the machine. You would be surprised just how easily your average user at the time could completely fuck up a PC.

Eventually, after getting married, we had a pre-built Windows Vista PC for a bit, with a few upgrades. I built a fresh PC somewhere in that time period and ended up actually buying some more useful laptops. That isn’t even going into laptops my wife and kids have gone through.

These days I run this as my main Gaming PC, half a dozen Raspberry PIs doing various things, a second desktop loaded with hard drives, a NAS for storage, and I rent cloud space for a web server. It’s all just sort of, built up and exploded over time.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap-Up (09.03.2023 to 09.09.2023)

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This week will be a bit music-heavy, not so much about anything specific, but about what I have been doing in general. It honestly could almost be its own, separate post and topic, instead of a weekly wrap post.
Anyway.

Roughly, 4 months or so ago, Target Circle had a 3 months free offer for Apple Music and Apple TV. I have no interest in Apple TV’s content, sorry Ted Lasso. I did take the offer, so I could watch Tetris, then immediately set it to cancel. The Apple Music I did want to try out.

I don’t make it any sort of secret that I prefer buying music, but I am increasingly kind of wishing I had a paid streaming option, somewhat primarily so I can sample artists a bit easier. Also, sometimes I just want to listen to some particular song or artist and it is otherwise inconvenient to do. Amazon really fucking screwed me up with they broke Amazon Music. I will never forgive them. I owned a lot of my music through Amazon, and could just “pick up and listen” easily in their app. But the app started CONSTANTLY begging you to subscribe to the premium option, and then the last straw was that it no longer does anything but shuffle, even if you own it unless you subscribe.

Bull.

Shit.

So anyway, in the past, I have had a 6-month trial of Spotify, and I had a 3-month trial on Tidal, and I have some YouTube playlists but Vanced Player finally broke broke. The easy and obvious choice is Spotify. Everyone uses Spotify, it’s the defacto choice. I wasn’t super keen on Spotify because one, they don’t include HiFi Audio. Tidal charges extra (by a lot) so Tidal was out for this reason as well. Tidal in general is very expensive compared to everyone else. Secondly, Spotify pays artists pretty low compared to others. I like supporting artists.

I had decided Apple Music may be a good choice, this trial was a chance to try it out. And I subscribed for a month at the paid tier. What I wanted though, was to do the Family Plan. For like, $6 more, I could eliminate the headache of conflicting with my wife listening at home on the Echo while I was at work. For $6 more, I could let my kids have music as well, so they don’t have to rely on random services or YouTube.

Except it turns out, that Apple, does not have a web-based account management system for Apple Music. To manage family sharing, you MUST use an iPhone or a Mac. I don’t have either one of these. I am actually vaguely considering getting a Mac for my next laptop, but currently, I don’t have either. So that’s completely not happening.

So for now, I have canceled that Apple Music subscription, and I have decided to just go with Spotify. I probably don’t need the HiFi audio anyway, since most of this listening is done with Bluetooth to my earbuds or my car anyway, and I still pay artists directly buying music anyway.

The pain now is, Spotify gave me a 3-month discount deal, for a single plan. So my family may be slightly screwed out of that for a bit. I honestly don’t think they even care about the overall prospect of a music service anyway.

One thing though, which brings this a bit into “What I did this week”, is to consolidate all of my music across these services into Spotify. It didn’t take too long, because I have never used any of them for a super long term. I used a tool called Soundiiz, which came up as recommended for most of it. The free plan is a bit limited though, so some had to be done manually. I was going to just cough up the $3 for a month of their paid tier so it would be instant, but it’s only $3 if you “pay annually”, and it’s $4.50 otherwise. That extra $1.50 wasn’t the killer for me, it was the bull shit annoying “marketing deception”. I HATE that crap. If it had been upfront with “4.50/month” or “$36/year”, I would probably have just paid for a month.

The core transfer was mostly playlists, and only two were larger than the 200 song limit. So I just transferred them in multiple chunks and then merged them back into the Spotify App. For liked Artists, I just set up side-by-side windows and manually searched on Spotify.  This also played nicely into another music project I had started on Apple Music to build a “Huge playlist of music I like that I can just play on shuffle”.  You can find it here or below, and my profile is here.

Activity Log

I mentioned last week getting a bit of a bonus at work.  That came through so I was a bit less restricted on a few things, in one case, with Humble Bundle, where I went for the following.

  • Masterful 3D Platfomrs – Primarily because I wanted A Hat in Time, but also because I enjoy these sorts of games, especially after playing through Yooka Laylee recently.
  • Tales from Wales Interactive – It’s cheap and I’ve been kind of wanting to try some of these FMV-style games, especially as I do like playing through CYOA Interactive Fiction text-style games.
  • DinoFever – Bought almost exclusively for the Turok games, because at the moment I have been playing Quake II Remastered and I’m on a bit of an “old school FPS Kick”. Everything else looked pretty interesting as well, and it’s cheap.
  • Dungeon Crawl Classics MEGA Bundle – I have this crazy fantasy that one day I will be able to play tabletop games. Please don’t judge me.

Books

  • Max and the Multiverse: A Sci-Fi Comedy Novel by Zachry Wheeler – It was free, sounded interesting
  • An Enemy Reborn (Realms of Chaos) by Michael A. Stackpole, William F. Wu – I swear I have heard of this author before, and it sounded interesting. It looks like he has done some Star Wars books.
  • The Hedge Knight (A Game of Thrones) by George RR Martin – Game of Thrones is still cool right? WHERE IS WINDS OF WINTER GEORGE???
  • 15-Minute Spanish: Learn in Just 12 Weeks (DK 15-Minute Langauge Learning) – I am not quitting Duolingo, but I really feel like my Spanish learning is stalling a bit so I want to supplement it a bit again. I’m actually explicitly blaming Duo for this because they have changed the learning tree like 4 or 5 times now and every time it feels like they push my progress way back. I mean, the goal is to learn the language, not finish some arbitrary tree, but it’s really really discouraging.
  • Woke Up Like This: A Novel by Amy Lea, Mindy Kaling – Every month Amazon Prime includes a selection of free books. I almost never read them and half the time I don’t redeem them, but I have been trying to pick out one just because it’s there.
Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap-Up (08.27.2023 to 09.02.2023)

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Ok, I wrote this later and back-dated it, because I was going to not, but I need to not get back into the trap of “not”.

Look at me, slacking already, no posts since the end of Blaugust. Not even the Friday music album post, PS, I have missed several of those.

I am at the time of the year when I realize I have a ton of vacation days left to use up, so I took Friday off. I may take a lot of Fridays off. I have enough days to take one off each week for the rest of the year, and some of those weeks already have holidays in them. We don’t really take trips or go anywhere so I generally just, don’t take days off. Plus a few years ago I was really saving them because my wife had had a stroke and some heart issues came from that, so she was supposed to maybe have heart surgery. I kept saving for that, so I got extra bad about not taking a vacation. The doctor decided not to do the surgery, for now, because it would be too risky, but I am still bad about not taking vacation and we still don’t really travel.

It worked out, she had a garage sale, so I could help with that some.

Saturday the weather was decent enough that I could comfortably run the power washer my parents let us borrow to strip the back concrete off. It’s been a few years, it’s filthy, and it needs doing occasionally. It took something like 4 hours of pretty continuous spraying. Tina did the garage sale again while I was out back.

Which reminds me of something else. So occasionally we get these Iced Strawberry Lemonades from Sonic, especially since they are half-price in the mid-afternoon. I decided to mix it up and get a Limeade. I am pretty sure I don’t really like lime, I am pretty down on super bitter things like lime and vinegar. The drink was… Ok, except it was a bit bubbly I think, which I was not expecting. It also, had bits of stuff in it, which is really gross for a drink. I assumed bits of lime, it was actually bits of strawberry. I tried to transfer things to a glass but well, I wanted the ice, so I could not simply, strain the strawberry out.

The reminder part is, that part of my motivation was to see how I would like the lime because I have this lime tree that I bought a while back on super clearance. It has not produced any fruit but I transferred it to a larger, nicer, pot. But like, I have no idea what I am going to do with the limes. The stores don’t seem to be able to give them away either, I have noticed they sell for super cheap, so it’s not like I could sell them or give them away.

Anyway, I also have a Lemon tree, which will be useful, because I like lemons, for the most part.

I didn’t get anything new this week, I slacked and missed Band Camp Friday, but I was broke anyway because I pre-ordered some vinyl. I may have mentioned that last week. CHVRCHES has a 10th-anniversary Bones release. There was a really lovely looking special edition of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) I went for (because 1989 is the best Taylor Swift album) and I came across a super nice looking 10th-anniversary edition of the Tron Legacy Soundtrack. That Tron album is probably my favorite soundtrack and it’s also probably a top ten album.

Not that spending a lot is a goal, but I have been increasing cash-strapped for a while now on my “personal spending”. Like years, awhile. It probably does not seem like it to some folks, I do spend a fair amount, but I also heavily deal shop. I have a set budget though, out of each paycheck, that goes into a separate account for my personal spending. This also includes buying gas for my car and any time I want to eat lunch out, which isn’t super often. I cut it back a few years ago though from what it had been, and in the past few years, everything became 25-50% more expensive.

Also, shipping for vinyl is always killer. It requires a large box which is pricey to ship.

Anyway, our contract was up this year at work so when it was renewed we got a bit of a bump as usual, and I am getting on-call pay starting soon. My wife already said I can have the on-call pay for my budget, which will probably amount to an extra $250/ month after taxes etc.

Which will be nice. Primarily because I actually would like to subscribe and support more. Like I recently subscribed to TWIT premium. I want to pick up Thurrott Premium. But there are other things like Patreons and such that I kind of want to sub to, even briefly, to support some things I enjoy, and having that bump will probably help put me over the edge to do some of that.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Blaugust 2023 Wrap-Up – What I Learned

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The last theme week for Blaugust is “Lessons Learned”. I can’t say I learned anything new, I’ve been blogging for a while, literally decades, and I’m already aware of well, all of that which comes along with it. As, kind of depressing as they are. But let’s pretend it’s all fresh and new.

Daily Updates

As much as I like the idea of updating daily, I am not cut out for it, not anymore. Maybe never, though this isn’t the first time I put effort into daily blogging. I like to think I have plenty of idea of things to write about, but I also don’t really have the time to write about all of them, and over time, I start to feel repetitive. Maybe a little repetition isn’t a bad thing. In theory, new people come to read the blog and most aren’t going to be reading through the archive.

I just kind of hate feeling repetitive. It doesn’t really matter though, with “lesson 2”.

No One Cares

They really don’t. I don’t really care that they don’t, really. I accepted years ago that I do this, write these dumb pointless posts, for my own outlet. I kind of hopped things would at least bump a little when I started posting daily, but it didn’t. That or WordPress stats are busted as fuck. The total views and visits for this month, are pretty much, to slightly lower, than the views and visits last month. Maybe a bit lower.

Last month, when I wasn’t posting daily and actively sharing some posts out into the world.

I really don’t care about how many people read this blog, but it’s kind of really disheartening. For the month, it’s around 100, people. Total. For the year it’s around 1500 so far. Let’s contrast this a bit, with something that’s not really a 1:1 comparison, but kind of in the same vein. I posted a short video from the Alanis Morissette show on TikTok a few days ago. Within 24 hours, it had essentially more views than my blog has gotten, all year.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It’s really really just like, you know, why bother?

Wrap-Up

Anyway, on that downer note, here are my posts from the month:

Honorable Mention to 10 syndicated movie posts from Letterboxd and 18 automated link digest posts.

I also did all of the little made-up achievements so that means “Going Platnum”.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Gmail’s Cloud Storage Problem

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Google needs to re-separate its main and drive storage again. This isn’t a problem that affects me, not directly. I imagine it affects a lot of other people though, whether they realize it or not. I also worry that it’s entirely intentional on Google’s part, in order to sell more cloud space to users. I should add, I don’t have a problem with Google selling cloud storage. I don’t have a problem with people using Google as their chosen cloud whatever. Personally, I use Google as little as possible, they are essentially a spyware/adware company as far as I am concerned.

I do take issue with what they have done to their Cloud Storage. Back in 2020, Google ended it’s unlimited photo storage option. Anything you had up there previously could stay, but essentially, starting from the end, anything up to I want to say 15GB, was limited, unless you paid for more. Like I said, I don’t really care about Google wanting to make money on its photo storage, they kind of need some alternative income streams to hoovering up everyone’s private data and selling it to advertisers (no wait, I mean selling their monopolistic ad service to advertisers, they just keep the data in a way that’s easily split down to a micro granular level).

My problem is, that they still share this total limit across drive and Gmail. My problem is, that by default, Android phones push all your photos and videos up to Google Photos, and even if you turn this off, they constantly nag you to turn it back on unless you use an alternative Photos app. If you are someone who takes a lot of random photos and videos, like half the people in the world these days, this limited storage fills up quick.

This means they can, of course, nag you some more, to pay for an upgrade.

This also means, your Gmail, stops working.

I’m actually going to use my own kids for this example, and why this is so broken for “normal-ass non-technical people”. And no matter how often I advise them otherwise, they never seem to get it, like “normal-ass non-technical people.” (FWIW, my kids are all young adults over 20)

Partly my daughter’s solution was to just, make a second Gmail account. Which sort of works. But like recently, I wanted to set her up on a shared to-do list, primarily for groceries we need in the house. I sent an invite link to the email on her Microsoft account, which is her old Gmail address. But she never got it. Her Google account is full. It can’t receive any more emails, it’s been like this, probably for years now.

They see “your Gmail is full” and the first thought is, “I need to delete some emails.” This might work, briefly, assuming your phone doesn’t have a queue of photos and videos backed up waiting for space on the Cloud. The reality is, for like 99% of people, you could delete all your emails, and it still won’t clear up as much space as deleting one video off of Photos.

This is partly my point here, for anyone having this issue, at the bare minimum, get your videos off of Google Photos. Download them if you need to, but store them somewhere else. If you want to use Google for backups, feel free to pay for it, but if not, don’t start on the emails, or even the photos, start on the videos. Here’s a comparison from something recent to me, I went to that Alanis Morissette concert, and I took roughly 50 photos and 3 videos. Those three videos, take up the same amount of space as those 50 photos. around 200Mb for each set, photos, and videos. For comparison, the average email is kilobytes in size. Let’s be REALLY FUCKING GENEROUS and say each email is 100Kb in size, though it’s going to be closer to 10Kb or 1Kb. In 200Mb, you could fit 2,000 emails at 100Kb each.

The real solution is that Google needs to re-split the storage for emails. It used to be separated, which was fine when you could store unlimited photos. It’s a huge problem now that it’s not. too many people rely on email for important things, reminders, bills, keeping in touch with people, and accepting ToDo List invites.

It’s too important to get cut off because people don’t understand size relationships across file types, or how to use alternative storage solutions for large files. It’s essentially holding your email for ransom at the end of the day.

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