Personal thoughts and reflections

Karl Knechtel

$ stat / | grep Birth | cut -d ' ' -f 3
2022-01-24

Today (although this won't go live until the 25th in my time zone) is three years since the day I finally kicked Windows to the curb and installed Linux on my home desktop. I'd used Linux before, but all my life I'd had a habit of just using whatever OS was provided to me, without really giving it much thought.

In late 2021, Windows Update told me - entirely unprompted - that my system didn't meet minimum specs to run Windows 11. (Perhaps it would now - I understand that the declared requirements have been relaxed, even if nothing has been optimized or stripped down - but I don't care to check. I'm also told that people still on Windows 10 are under increasing pressure to switch, even though they're still comfortably in the majority - unless something has radically changed in the last few months.)

I found this impolite - as I hadn't asked, and didn't consider anything wrong or inadequate about my computer - and a bit absurd (whatever they're offering now that requires more computing power, I'm not interested; especially not if it's anything to do with Cortana). So I took that as my queue to switch. I bought a new SSD (figuring I would need the space anyway) and attempted to set up a dual boot - GRUB never worked properly for me, but I could still use the BIOS screen to boot Windows from the old SSD.

And I never looked back.

Today, I'd like to relate a few anecdotes about that experience.

`fixup! added list`
The rest of the TODOwl

Happy new year to all.

Today's post is about a folder on my desktop named dev. It's where I've kept (for many years, well into my Windows-using days, even into the era when I used SVN rather than Git) all my working copies for my own projects (and forks of others'), mostly Python code of course. (I'm not sure how I organized things at the time, but there are projects in there dating back to 2006.)

`# TODO: finish todo list`

This is a difficult post to write, largely because of the self-critique involved. Which is part of why I've been putting it off. For months, if I'm honest with myself.

But putting it off has only made it harder to write. I also seem to have reached a point where it psychologically feels impossible to publish anything else here first. So, I'm finally forcing myself to write it now - during the holiday season, to prove to myself that I can.

It's no secret that the history of this blog so far has been dominantly one of false starts. Please allow me a moment to explain how that came to be.

Where I've been

Tomorrow (in my timezone) is my birthday, so I wanted to get a post in while I'm still 42. I see it's been another 13 months since my previous posts - hopefully I can break that pattern this year. Fittingly, it feels like I've discovered some profound answers in the past year, and yet I'm still left with lots of research to do.

Ah yes, I'm back, by the way

Attentive readers of my previous post may have found the following bit odd:

I had originally planned to write about this for the module's 19th anniversary - as my second post on this blog - before I got distracted from the project.

given that it actually was my second post on this blog.