I write this post from my repurposed ASUS CB3-131 Chromebook with its lovable, hardy case—even its keyboard is a delight—running the same OS as my main box: Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon. While priced today on eBay for $47, this Chromebook rolled off the assembly line on March 15, 2016. Again, it's bewildering to me that Google chooses to no longer send security patches to still-relevant machines. It's not like these boxes are paper towels to be thrown away!

Compared to when I built my machine from parts picked up at a computer expo at the Agricenter: an AMD 350 MHz, with 2 GB hard drive running Windows 98, I would have ABSOLUTELY SALIVATED to have run across these specs back in 1998:

• CPU: 2.16 GHz Intel Celeron
• RAM: 2 GB
• HD: ‎16 GB SSD

Now, that 1998 machine had a Voodoo II 3D-only card that I picked up for $300 ($513 in 2021). I also primered and painted its case with colors that were VERY RECEPTIVE to black light! I loved that thing!

All of that aside, what Google cast away has inspired me. I'm running FocusWriter and dropped in Filezilla to update my site. I may eventually just put in Jekyll to run a local copy of my website. Not just fully patched, but this little Chromebook also has FAR more capabilities than when it bounced down the line new!

And while I could install Brave (or Chrome—just out of spite), both browsers go a tad above the CRAZY-GO-NUTS threshold as it relates to RAM—SERIOUSLY, do I really need to pull 1.5 GB of RAM to make a quick run through the Net? At 2 GB, the only way I could run my OS is to go back in time....I remember back when I needed 128 MB for Windows 2000 and 256 MB for Windows XP—I could lament on this, but I'll table that discussion for now.

This isn't my browsing box, so I ran down a copy of Seamonkey as it seems to be one of the lighter browsers out there sans the text browsers out there (I do have my limitations). I just need something to quickly grab info. There's also a nostalgic feel that makes it charming.

And while I tried several lightweight distros before returning to my default, none of them felt right. It's really all about the interface to me, like, does the track pad move naturally? The Linux Mint team has spent some time polishing its flagship and its attention shows.

Water Drop?

For the rest of this year and throughout 2022, I have set a daily target to drink 4 liters of water per day—ideally carbonated water! Since becoming a coffee-drinking carnivore, water consumption just has not been a focus. I can do better.