Team Murder

No Brain No Headache

Month: December 2020

A Couple Weeks With The System76 Lemur

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On December 24, 2020

In Linux

I recently bought the new System 76 Lemur mostly because I think the S76 folks are good stuff, they’re based in Denver, and because getting reasonable battery life on a Linux laptop has been a 10+ year dream of mine. So far, my experience has been great other than the NVMe drive being in the wrong slot which, you know, first iteration of new hardware that only requires me to unscrew a bunch of screws to fix. In any case, I’ve been living in Linux a bunch more these days since sexy new hardware despite having a case that attracts fingerprints like no other chassis I’ve ever seen. Battery life is stellar; I’ve been running this on battery for almost three hours and done things like installing updates, fired up TorGuard VPN a couple of times for completely above the board and legally legitimate reasons obviously, and bench marked my hard drive performance (to determine that my hyper fast drive was only doing data transfer at super fast speeds thus cursing me to open the goddamned case to reslot something which I think is a logical extension of the IT curse of needing to open every piece of hardware for some reason or another and therefore prolonging the existence of ice cube trays to keep all of those goddamned screws together and in the correct order) and still have 10 hours of battery remaining. I really like that which is heightened by the fact that the power adapter is only a couple feet long and keeps me from ever wanting to use this machine on AC power. Anyway, it’s a good piece of hardware that works extremely well with Linux and was only marginally soiled by having the machine take over a month to ship and the hard drive installed in the wrong slot. I can mostly live with that given my current state of venting is refreshing, purgative, and that I basically disassemble improperly assembled laptops for a living anyway.

In any case, the new machine is a ton of fun to use and I’m actually just using Pop OS instead of immediately scraping the drive and installing an Arch derivative. So far I’ve been pleased with this distribution and happy just having everything work out of the box. Is this a review? I have no idea if I’ve done enough here to earn that that designation but I am enjoying working on this machine. I hop boxes like crazy but I think I’m going to use this one for a while if only because I can run it on battery forever which is a fairly new experience.

Good To Know I Suppose

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On December 18, 2020

In Google

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After all of the outages, I guess it’s a good idea to send out endless notifications about how nothing is broken now, right? I’ve seen like 15 of these in the last hour.

My Burning Need for Standards for Graphics in Lists

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On December 18, 2020

In This Sucks

I have a super important national standard to propose: Let’s standardize whether large images come before or after items in a list. I cannot be the only person occasionally baffled after reading several paragraphs of a story below a particularly enticing image only to realize that it has absolutely nothing to do with the picture. I guess there’s an element of mystique that comes along with it when you’re trying to divine what this stock photo of Winston Churchill has to do with XML but I could honestly live without that most of the time.

Maybe I just need to spend more of time reading things on my phone screen and less looking at them on 36″ monitors?

My Good Intentions Are Worth Less Than The Website They’re Printed On

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On December 16, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, Oh God, Politics, This Sucks

I’m starting to think that the perceived ending of the pandemic might actually be effecting my overall mental health more even more than the apocalyptic uncertainty at the beginning of it all. My motivation to do anything even as strenuous as starting a new series on a streaming service has completely fallen off. I’m sure there will be ton of academic work done on the impact of Covid-19 on our collective sanity but it’s hitting me harder than at any point that I remember so far.

The feeling of a continual and torturous walk on a malfunctioning hotel treadmill is the only approximation I can come up with. Maybe that burn is striking in conjunction with our national post-election malaise where something that should have been resolved in a few days keeps dragging on and on until we’re completely burned off all of the outrage built up over the past year. Maybe we’re just tired of better being slightly over the horizon and tantalizingly out of reach. Oh yeah, and then there was the whole series of police murdering people of color to add to the misery as well in addition to the number of people who can’t feed their families because a catastrophic number of businesses have either gone under or struggle to stay open in a time period where a lot of foot traffic is a truly terrible idea. I guess the things I’ve written about above are things I need to think a lot more frequently and seriously about since comparatively I’m only suffering existentially and the Black Lives Matter sign on our lawn doesn’t actually do much of anything.

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