Jeff Clough - Blog - January 2025

Forward marching

I'm getting closer to wiping Windows off my other laptop, which means I'm also getting closer to leaving the dodgy laptop behind. It came fresh from the factory with some kind of hardware issue (video card flakiness), and it's just grown worse over time (random Bluetooth, USB, and wi-fi disconnects).

I should have immediately called Dell when I first noticed the problem, but since that would require talking to people, I never did. Now it's years out of warranty, so...yeah.

The only things I have to do to prepare for this move are to cancel my subscription to Office 365 (or whatever they're calling it these days) and back up the Linux machine I'm working on now to ensure I can copy those files over. I already did a back up of the files on the Windows machine, and haven't touched it since, so I'm good there.

I'm not doing the actual wipe of Windows and install of Linux until Tuesday, though.

See, I've been here before. Many, many times I have grow so sick and disgusted by Windows that I've said "Never Again!" and blew the system away in favor of a FOSS operating system. Usually Linux, but I've done FreeBSD back in the day.

Then, days, weeks, or even month later, I regretted this decision and went back to Windows.

This time, I've never been more sure that I'm just done with Microsoft. If I'm honest with myself, though, I've said that before as well.

All of which is a long way to say that I gave myself a two-week "cooling off" period that I intend to stick with. As frustrated and angry as I am with Windows, I'm just leaving the system in the corner until the clock runs out.

So far, I've stuck with the plan. But also in the interest of honesty, I'm pretty much just one more news story away from nuking the machine immediately.

Endless crap

I woke up inexplicably grumpy this morning. Then I got a headache. Then my computer did the thing where it loses its mind and forgets it has USB and Bluetooth. This machine had some kind of hardware issue when I first bought it, but executive dysfunction kept me from calling and complaining when it was still under warranty.

Anyway, I had to reboot while I was in the middle of working on something, and then I had to do a Zoom meeting and Zoom is really flaky under this Linux install. It keeps throwing up errors which say it's crashed, but then it never actually crashes---it just stops letting me right-click on things.

I really hate having to deal with this shit. Migrating to FOSS always feels like a never-ending stream of minor annoyances, interruptions, and delays. And I'm only putting myself through this because the alternative (corporate-controlled, proprietary spyware like Windows) comes with trade-offs I can no longer accept.

At least I'm still having fun putting this new site together, and getting the rust out of my front-end skills.

First!

It's a start.

I actually started working on the "new" version of this site back in November, but I have the attention span of a caffeinated squirrel.