New year, new goals…and it feels great. Doing intermittent fasting again (which doesn\’t always feel great, but feels great), and getting back in the habit of exercise and education.

One big thing I\’m trying really hard to do is making flashcards a regular (and updated) part of my life. I requested a writing tablet for work to help facilitate that. I really hope it works. I\’m also learning LaTex. So far, so good.

This is one of the first Bach songs I reeeeeally liked. BWV 906. But I felt almost guilty about it. It wasn\’t a fugue, and I was studying for the LSAT and wanted to improve my brain, and fugues by Bach were supposed to do that.

I just found it again today and…it\’s good, but not really in the league as my current All Time Favorite song: BWV 542. The Great, fugue in G minor.

Trying to get LaTex going on Anki with MiKTex, I kept having errors. After trying a bunch of stuff the internet suggested I hit on this: select \”Always install missing packages on-the-fly.\” That was it.

Then the first time I tried to use an Anki card that included LaTex it took a long time for it to load, presumably because it was downloading a required file, but it did eventually load.

I\’m considering degoogling my life. It seems like a decent definition. But I guess it really has more to do with personalizing my life. It\’s all Snowden\’s fault.

Well, sort of. Snowden, to me, is an enigma. I can\’t really figure him out. On the one hand, he seems legitimately interested in not having the Government screw over the world (I nearly wrote \”us,\” meaning, I think, the US population, but it\’s more like everyone).

But if you go down this path of conspiracy, it becomes wheels within wheels. Who do you trust? Anybody? Nobody? It\’s maddening. If you believe what Snowden\’s pushing, we\’re in real trouble. But I do pretty much believe it. It makes sense.

But where does that leave me? I\’m an engineer for a large EE company. I get paid to do engineering work. I have \”big brother\” on my phone all the time. I don\’t really like that. My wife took her bra off last night in our bathroom, in a completely asexual way, but I noticed that at least one of our phones was potentially \”available,\” and the thought of some jerk in a cubicle seeing that is infuriating.

Anyway, for any of you NSA pukes watching, I have no desire to screw over the US. I\’m a law-abiding citizen (mostly–I eat and drink [non-alcoholic] drinks while driving in WA, which might be illegal). I love my country for the foundation for which it was built and the freedoms I still have.

I want to be more \”undercover,\” but I don\’t know how that\’s realistically possible at this point. I want to do so for the sole reason that it\’s none of their business what I\’m doing. I don\’t like the idea of some ass-hat (pardon the French) being able to enable my webcam at his leisure and voyeurise my wife (or me). I don\’t like the thought that anything I type in my browser, even if deleted, is potentially recorded and stored. It\’s disgusting. It\’s alien to the way our country is supposed to behave.

Got me a new computer today. Booya. Well, new to me. A Thinkpad x250. So far, me likey a lot. It\’s kind of like my Chromebook, but with a way bigger SSD and access to Windows. I feel like I\’m home. Happy sigh.

Next up is to try to get a decent version of Linux on it. I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows right away, since, well, that\’s what I do. So I made a partition for it then. Now to figure out what to choose. I\’m sure I\’ll choose a *buntu. Well, maybe. Maybe I\’ll try out Debian for reals. I don\’t know. Probably I\’ll stick with a flavor of Ubuntu. Maybe Ubuntu Proper since this is probably a fast enough laptop to handle that.

Anyway, I wanted to try out the keyboard and so far I\’d say it\’s pretty good. Maybe a little stiffer than I\’d prefer, but definitely not bad. I can type decently fast, it works, and I don\’t see any obvious flaws.

Touchpad is great. I fixed the Trackpoint issues that always seem to be present with Windows 10 quickly, so that\’s good.

Edited to add: You must select \”Use as middle click\” in the mouse settings for the settings above to work correctly. Otherwise, apparently the button does nothing.

All in all, so far, I like it a lot!

I\’ve tried a good bit to find a good fit for my Samsung Chromebook 3. I mean, ChromeOS is great and all, but, well, I want a real OS. I really like this little portable, and wanted to make a Linux possible.

I\’d been trying \”half measures,\” like chrx.org, Gallium, etc. They all had downsides. Gallium would have the mouse randomly stop working, for instance. Plus I\’d read somewhere that Gallium\’s life might be shortlived. So I decided to go with Xubuntu proper. Enter angelic choir.

It\’s been great so far. The only issue I\’ve encountered is that the palm detection wasn\’t enabled by default, so it\’d jump around while typing, but enabling that was pretty easy. I think it still needs a little tweaking, but it\’s still way better than default.

I guess I haven\’t tried out Bluetooth. Hang on, I\’ve got my earbuds….

That was fairly easy. Had to change it from \”headset\” to \”audio sync,\” but that seemed to take care of the initial goofiness it presented.

Otherwise, no real issues. Mouse seems responsive, the wifi worked out of the box, no blinking with the screen.

I\’m pleased. Very pleased.

So, I\’ve got a bunch of old computers and I\’m trying to figure out the best way to make them work for me. This has been…interesting.

My opinion of Linux has largely been colored by using it and finding that it doesn\’t work well. Basic, basic stuff like the touchpad working reliably has been an issue. No offense to all the Linux nerds out there.

Windows 10 on my Chromebook R11 has been great so far. In Linux\’s defense, onboard audio works on the R11 in Linux and doesn\’t on Windows. But things like the touch pad work. The install was easy. It\’s just been…not difficult. And audio does work with Bluetooth, which is good enough for me as a student who usually does audio through headphones anyway.

Maybe someday I\’ll become a Linux guy, but for now, Windows again is working.

I need a plan. Things are flying around at a million miles an hour and I don\’t know where I\’m going.

Things in mind:

1. I need to finish the class I\’m in. Only a few weeks left and I need to finish strong. Average in the class is high right now, but that could change with one bombed test.
2. I need to figure out my flashcard situation. LaTex, hand drawn? What.
3. I need to figure out my laptop situation. What I\’m doing now is pretty irritating. I\’m swapping between Chromebooks, a new-to-me Thinkpad, and using the Thinkpad as a desktop when I do use it. It\’s maddening and confusing. I need to settle on something that works. Problems:
   1. The Thinkpad has a really terrible touch pad. I know that sounds trivial, but it seriously interrupts my workflow. It\’s tiny, unresponsive, and just horrible.
   2. The Chromebooks work better generally, but the one I like the best has a tiny SSD (16gb), so installing full Linux on it is bad. And full Linux has its own issues on it. The touchpad (notice a theme?) is glitchy in Linux.
   3. The best workflow has been on the Thinkpad with a second monitor, full mouse and keyboard. But that\’s not very portable. I don\’t want to be tied to my desktop space.
4. I need to figure out what to do educationally. The intro computer program I\’ve taken has gone fine, but it\’s been really easy over all, and yet still somewhat taxing time-wise. I have a lot of commitments (wife, kids, kids programs, etc.). But I\’ve liked taking a class, even if it\’s really been too easy in some respects.

The \”Linux apps on Chromebook\” option ended up working quite well–after I worked through a few issues.

The main issue was the IDE I happened to choose (CodeLite) has some sort of issue where it gets locked to an older version in apt. I then updated the repositories with the wrong address (Ubuntu instead of Debian) and it wouldn\’t find the newer versions of the program as a result. After I got that figured out, CodeLite 13 looks like it\’s going to work very well for the intro to C++ class I\’m taking.

Edited to add: Something went wrong with CodeLite 13. No clue what happened, but compiling and executing programs just stopped working entirely. After trouble-shooting for a while and getting nowhere, I needed to get on with my class, so I tried out Code::Blocks, and so far it\’s been fine. I\’m hoping it continues to work….

OK, this is a work in progress. Or rather a goal.

I\’m taking a C++ class online through ASU. I bought an oldish Thinkpad to do the work on it, but I find it really irritating to use. The h key isn\’t reliable and the touchpad is terrible. Like, I hate it.

On the other hand, I love my Chromebook. It\’s nothing special: A Samsung Chromebook 3 with 4gb of ram, and 16gb of disk space. Its touchpad works well, the battery life is good, and the h key works reliably.

Everything I do for the class can be easily done with the Chromebook–except for writing and testing C++ code. But this seems like a trivial thing for something built on Linux to do. So I\’m going to be trying to figure out how to get it done and documenting it here.

My goal is to have this \”finished\” by Sunday night.

Potential paths:
1. Linux apps are supported, so I might find one that works for that. CodeLite has been tried so far and doesn\’t compile programs correctly since make apparently isn\’t supported. I might try troubleshooting this.
2. Crouton. I\’m fairly sure this would work, but it\’s kind of a heavy way to do it. I\’d rather something lighter.
3. Play store app. This might be the best option.

That\’s what\’s up.