+++++
12/23/2021
  +++++
 
This is a tale of serendipity.  Before I get too far into the 
tale, I want to make sure I am not accused of burying the 
lead: my wife is expecting our first child.  Because of that, 
I have begun the process of moving all of objects out of room 
(and either trashing out, reorganizing or finding new homes 
for them) in order to turn it into a nursery.

I came across a chunky HP computer. Frankly, I needed a break 
and so I was looking for a way to procastinate a bit, so I 
said to myself "well, we're probably throwing this out 
anyway, so let me see if I can get Linux on it."  And so it 
was done.  Also praises be Linux Mint for easy installation.  
As the kind of work I had been doing was physically and 
mentally exhausting both, I took an extra long time on the 
tinkering process, so much so that I started feeling guilty.  
I realized that I had a solution that I was looking for a 
problem to solve, one of my great critiques of the madness 
passing for innovation, let alone an economy.

The worst of the feeling came when I sent over a collection 
of books I had ripped from Project Gutenberg.  It only took a 
second, as text files are light, and it would be enough 
content to last me years of reading, but that only made it 
worse.  Why was I trying to pretend I'd be using the computer 
for years?  It was just something I was going to trash out to 
make room formy new life.  This appeared to be just dumb 
mission creep.

But then I realized the computer had a CD drive.  Well, there 
it was, a use!  We had old CDs and DVDs and it'd be nice to 
have a player if and when ours goes out.  I grabbed a CD and 
tested it out.  It brought Rhythmbox up as the player.  I saw 
from this that I could extract the CD.  Nice, I would like 
back-ups.  This got me to wondering how much memory the old 
clunker had.  I looked it up to find there were over 400 
gigabytes -- holy crap! Clearly this machine was from before 
the time it was thought everyone should put all their stuff 
up in the cloud.  Not only can this device store all of the 
public domain books I could ever read (any flash stick can), 
but now it will store more music than I could ever listen to.

This computer that I thought I was going to get rid of is now 
getting VIP treatment, the most likely to have my mechanical 
keyboard plugged into it. I am going to keep the cord to 
power it in the garage, taped down to one spot, but then keep 
the device itself inside so it isn't exposed to temperature 
extremes. I take it out and explore the Internet Archive, 
finding what from the history of blues and jazz I can 
download and add to my collection.

All in all a good hobby.

Update. This also became the computer I used for Tiny Core 
Linux. 

--

This work is hereby in the public domain.
Do what you want with it.