Welcome Melody
May. 7th, 2020 01:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressI am writing these words on a little black thinkpad I have decided to call Melody Clementine Verandern. She runs linux! Which took me _fucking forever_ and required _four other people_ to actually make happen.
(I will try hard to write up an actual explanation and put it on the internet, mostly out of potential use for other people, but long-story-short, there was one little thing to change that no one ever mentioned to change and on Austin's advice to change we tried it and bam! Yayyyyy I hate computers and I do not understand why I have decided to do this to myself.)
Anyways, I name electronics after fictional women I like, and I name computers with German words, so that's where it came from. Melody is Mell Kelly's given name, Clementine is from the best books I read as a substitute, and Verandern is the German word for "change".
(Okay Kat, but Clementine is even more disasterADHD than you are and Mell is literally insane? Yes, this is going to be a very exciting computer. I am looking forward to mixing Clementine's introspection and awareness of herself, and Mell's easygoing nature and get-shit-done attitude. I regret absolutely nothing here).
The next few days are going to be Very Exciting as I do things like...gosh, literally everything. It's been something like eight months since I last had a working laptop of my very own, and this is a new hardware (why are the fn and ctrl keys wrong? why can't I pinchzoom the touchpad?) and a _brand_ new OS (I know absolutely nothing about linux) and there's a LOT to do. Hopefully this will be a fun way to keep myself busy, and not an agonizing slog.
Here's a todo list:
*I'm putting this first because a lot of the later things depend on it - I need to figure out how to make my backup drive from the previous computer talk to this one. Previous computer was a mac, and the beautiful automatic time machine backups worked *great*! I can plug the drive into Ezri's mac and see all my shit. If I plug the drive into this machine, so far I get a complete lack of folders where there should be a lot of folders. Research will occur!
*Once I can speak backup I'M GONNA HAVE ACCESS TO ALL MY MUSIC AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Absolutely that gets that many exclamation points, fight me. It's been ages, I have had to survive with solely what is currently stored on my phone. Of course now I have to choose some sort of music library software and learn how that works, yayyy oh gods. All I know is that iTunes has gone downhill with every version since aught-five, and fuck cloud-based storage solutions, I want to actually own my music.
*Back up my phone? Yeah, there's a lot of things I'm willing to do with the work computer, but this is not one of them. My fellytone does not get plugged into the work lappy, which means...yeah. Eight months, huh.
*Start fuxing with photos. I have a huge photo library and tons of time on my hands because ~pandemic~. Maybe I can work to combine these two things and start posting more photos or whatever.
*Download GAMES! Steam is an absolute must, as is whatever will get me access to Heroes of Might and Magic 3. (I own a copy from GoG, I just need to figure out the install instructions). For extreme bonus points (lol, not happening), figuring out how to get a copy of Gahan Wilson's Ultimate Haunted House would be _very_ cool of me.
*A whole lot of configuring work to make the keyoard do my fucking bidding. This absolutely must be possible, that's the whole damn point of linux. How do I have multiple workspaces? How do I quickly hotkey into them? How do I switch between programs and between tabs? ALL OF THIS IS SOLVABLE.
(ETA: I have since at least figured out how to switch between workspaces. it's a start!)
*"All of this is solvable" is hopefully going to be my motto going forward. But I'm also still leaving space for the idea that I do this for a month, say "that was a great adventure" and install back to windows. I'm not daft, I know that I am not actually a computer person, and that at my core I just want a box to do the things I ask it to. I also have literally no idea what anything means in terminal, and that's gonna be a pretty steep learning curve. Hopefully I am more looking forward to it than fearing it.
Gosh, I can actually start saving my words on the regular again.
...I can start a BehindtheWalls file again. That's...that's been a while.
So the moral of this story is...I'm happy. I'm going to have an adventure. There is going to be a _lot_ of screaming in my future. Advice is very _very_ welcome, including just straight up recommended reading suggestions --xubuntu 20.04, which I've already discovered looks different from regular ubuntu.
Have a good day, my lovelies.
~Sor
MOOP!
(I will try hard to write up an actual explanation and put it on the internet, mostly out of potential use for other people, but long-story-short, there was one little thing to change that no one ever mentioned to change and on Austin's advice to change we tried it and bam! Yayyyyy I hate computers and I do not understand why I have decided to do this to myself.)
Anyways, I name electronics after fictional women I like, and I name computers with German words, so that's where it came from. Melody is Mell Kelly's given name, Clementine is from the best books I read as a substitute, and Verandern is the German word for "change".
(Okay Kat, but Clementine is even more disasterADHD than you are and Mell is literally insane? Yes, this is going to be a very exciting computer. I am looking forward to mixing Clementine's introspection and awareness of herself, and Mell's easygoing nature and get-shit-done attitude. I regret absolutely nothing here).
The next few days are going to be Very Exciting as I do things like...gosh, literally everything. It's been something like eight months since I last had a working laptop of my very own, and this is a new hardware (why are the fn and ctrl keys wrong? why can't I pinchzoom the touchpad?) and a _brand_ new OS (I know absolutely nothing about linux) and there's a LOT to do. Hopefully this will be a fun way to keep myself busy, and not an agonizing slog.
Here's a todo list:
*I'm putting this first because a lot of the later things depend on it - I need to figure out how to make my backup drive from the previous computer talk to this one. Previous computer was a mac, and the beautiful automatic time machine backups worked *great*! I can plug the drive into Ezri's mac and see all my shit. If I plug the drive into this machine, so far I get a complete lack of folders where there should be a lot of folders. Research will occur!
*Once I can speak backup I'M GONNA HAVE ACCESS TO ALL MY MUSIC AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Absolutely that gets that many exclamation points, fight me. It's been ages, I have had to survive with solely what is currently stored on my phone. Of course now I have to choose some sort of music library software and learn how that works, yayyy oh gods. All I know is that iTunes has gone downhill with every version since aught-five, and fuck cloud-based storage solutions, I want to actually own my music.
*Back up my phone? Yeah, there's a lot of things I'm willing to do with the work computer, but this is not one of them. My fellytone does not get plugged into the work lappy, which means...yeah. Eight months, huh.
*Start fuxing with photos. I have a huge photo library and tons of time on my hands because ~pandemic~. Maybe I can work to combine these two things and start posting more photos or whatever.
*Download GAMES! Steam is an absolute must, as is whatever will get me access to Heroes of Might and Magic 3. (I own a copy from GoG, I just need to figure out the install instructions). For extreme bonus points (lol, not happening), figuring out how to get a copy of Gahan Wilson's Ultimate Haunted House would be _very_ cool of me.
*A whole lot of configuring work to make the keyoard do my fucking bidding. This absolutely must be possible, that's the whole damn point of linux. How do I have multiple workspaces? How do I quickly hotkey into them? How do I switch between programs and between tabs? ALL OF THIS IS SOLVABLE.
(ETA: I have since at least figured out how to switch between workspaces. it's a start!)
*"All of this is solvable" is hopefully going to be my motto going forward. But I'm also still leaving space for the idea that I do this for a month, say "that was a great adventure" and install back to windows. I'm not daft, I know that I am not actually a computer person, and that at my core I just want a box to do the things I ask it to. I also have literally no idea what anything means in terminal, and that's gonna be a pretty steep learning curve. Hopefully I am more looking forward to it than fearing it.
Gosh, I can actually start saving my words on the regular again.
...I can start a BehindtheWalls file again. That's...that's been a while.
So the moral of this story is...I'm happy. I'm going to have an adventure. There is going to be a _lot_ of screaming in my future. Advice is very _very_ welcome, including just straight up recommended reading suggestions --xubuntu 20.04, which I've already discovered looks different from regular ubuntu.
Have a good day, my lovelies.
~Sor
MOOP!
no subject
on 2020-05-07 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2020-05-13 12:26 am (UTC)Having Austin over my shoulder to help me click buttons and research was extremely critical. As it turns out, there's one tiny thing in the install menu that never got adjusted and if you just change that one damn menu...everything is brilliant! I really need to write up a proper explanation before I forget it, I will _absolutely_ get in touch with you when I do!
no subject
on 2020-05-12 11:02 pm (UTC)I also have an entirely uncodified habit of naming electronics after fictional women, ha, though both my Pennsic computer and my work laptop break that pattern1.
My laptop, who is having all SORTS of adventures and handling some of them better than others, is September. My desktop, who Thomas built for me as a birthday present, is Atalanta because she runs fast.
1: My work laptop doesn't have a name, even though all electronics run better when they are named because then they are Real, because work laptop doesn't...feel like it's mine to name and get attached to quite that deeply. My Pennsic laptop, purchased on the serious cheap so I can do heraldry at Pennsic and not be sad if it gets ruined by Pennsic, is Davies, after Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, a renowned heraldic writer of the early 20th century. Bonus pun there because "liška" means "fox" in Czech, so you could say this computer is Fox's Davies.
no subject
on 2020-05-13 12:30 am (UTC)My previous laptop was Keladry, my warhourse of an external hard drive is Kerowyn. My phone is Ida (previously I had Nyota, who made a perfect communications officer). My ipad is long since broken (it was an old machine when my parents handed it down to me, and that was like five years ago)but when she still worked, she was Pippilotta.
(My two-laptops ago was Vera, which was a shortening of a German word, and before that was my high school desktop, Dmitri Alexander II. I can _sorta_ date the habit using that, but "sometime since 2008" is not actually very useful)
~Sor