QC Chemist
Not a laptop, but I had an old motherboard from over 20 years ago not doing anything. Screwed it to a board on the wall of my shop. Added an old hard drive and some components out of the same old box it was in, and now have it running Mint. Found an old wifi card that works too, so I can look up parts and repair videos while I’m working on projects. Works great.
I’d probably sit and play Unreal, or maybe Riven if I was feeling more chill. Could easily burn through 12 hours like that. Just need to be able to take a case of Jolt, a few bags of chips, and some Skittles along and I’d be set.
For the love of god! My anus is bleeding! (-Yay! Hooray!-)
It’s a dual drive redundant setup. Unless something catastrophic happens, I doubt both drives will go out at the same time. I could do an offsite backup as well, but just haven’t.
Been using a Synology NAS for the past year for automatic photo backups. Take a photo, it gets copied to my drive at home so long as there’s internet access available. No issues so far. Turned off my backups to Google.
Bro Hymn by Pennywise is playing right now. Listening to the punk channel on XM.
I’ll have to look at Ublock. I used AdGuard for a while but can’t get it to function with a VPN (except for the one they offer, which was terrible).
I’d played Doom with people on networked computers in college, but that wasn’t really “internet”. But right at the end of the 90’s when we started getting online game servers was great. Being able to play Unreal or Battlefield 1942 with random people from anywhere was amazing, and very addicting. Servers would have like 8 or maybe 16 player slots. More than that and lag would make the games unplayable. You’d keep refreshing the server lists looking for an open slot with a low ping, and join in. Actual early internet wasn’t terribly exciting. Pretty much just text only, maybe some tiny graphics, since download speeds were unbearably slow.
Commodore basic on the PET computer, back around 1981-1983. My grade school had three of them in the library, and since my mom was a teacher, she would sign one out for summer break and bring it home if any were available.