Vaccines, man
September 9th 2024
=====================

I'm mostly feeling better from the vaccine-sick but my sleep schedule
is all off again, which stinks because I felt like I had just gotten
to have a consistent amount of sleep for the first time in years and
now here I am waking up at 4am again. I know I can get back there but
lord is it annoying.

Anyway I'm writing this on the pocket reform again, and every day I'm
making it more the everyday machine I want it to be. I just need to
run some kind of tiny vm so I can test out my x86-64 programming for
the systems programming class and I think I can do basically
everything I need for all my teaching from this little thing. Oh,
right, so y'know how you need to name every linux system well I'm
calling this one pod042 because I can't help but go with the automata
reference.

I should write an actual review of this machine once I have everything
the way I want. I'll admit that I'm really happy with the idea of
being able to eventually replace basically every part without having
to junk the whole thing.

I *hate* having to throw things away and not just because I have bad
scruples obsessions about waste. I legitmately think it's horrible
just how much we have to throw in the garbage every week and I know
that we throw away a lot less than the average group of three adults:
we have neighbors throwing away multiple big garbage bags a week and
we're only putting out one every few weeks and even that feels like
too much.

And I really hate that my last full laptop before the current one I'm
using lasted less than two years before it started literally falling
apart with failing keys, dead ports, and Mysterious Intermittent
Issues. It was clearly meant to be junk you churned through. So I'm
hoping that this little machine, at the very least, will be sticking
with me for a long time.

The pocket reform as received is pretty underpowered but I'm not
having the issues some folks were having with wi-fi issues and
overheating. Everything is running great, actually, and even the issue
I was having with it seeming like the batteries were being weird is
going to be resolved by letting it drain to nothing just once. I
personally find that spooky but everyone says that's what to do!

Oh, and actually the SBCL issue was resolved in the goofiest way: the
debian packaged version of sbcl was much much newer than their
prebuilt binary so I just installed that. I've gotten so use to the
packaged version being strictly older that it didn't even occur to me
that in this case it'd be like ten+ years newer!

I still can't get the development release of gforth built, though,
which is fine but slightly tilting.

So, yeah, it's almost 6am now and I'm drinking a cup of lapsang
souchong and hoping I either wake up or get sleepy. Caffeine often
makes me sleepy if I'm tired enough.