RasterWeb!
About two years ago my friend Maks gave me a beautiful cutting board that he made. And then last year he asked me a bunch of questions about opening at Etsy shop to sell the cutting boards he was making. He did open a shop but there’s nothing available right now.
I did manage to buy two boards from him last summer when he was back in Milwaukee, which Dana gave to friends as gifts.
Anyway, I took a bunch of photos of them because they were so nice looking! And here are the photos.
Last year someone gave me a mint (LOL) condition MacBook Pro. It was a 2010 model just like my old 2012 that I got in 2014 and again in 2019 and used until 2022 when I sold it to someone who needed an older MacBook and I got a 2018 MacBook Pro that I didn’t really like and didn’t use much and then gave to Dana when her employer destroyed all the Macs…
So I’ve been without a “good” laptop for a little under a year. I would borrow my old one that Dana has every now and then but I wanted to stop doing that but also didn’t want to buy a new laptop… So I’ve got this 2010 MacBook Pro, which is a model I used for years and really liked! The issue is that it only runs older versions of macOS. When I was sick for two weeks in December I really wished I had a laptop, so I used it, but I could not installed some of the software I used, or at least not recent versions… like OpenSCAD.
So I said to myself “Self, this is an old laptop that can only run an old version of Mac OS X and old applications… time to install Linux!”
Now, I’ve installed Linux a zillion times, including on a number of old Windows laptops. But this was different. First, it was on hardware that I was used to and I actually really liked! This made a huge difference. I like the keyboard, I like the form factor… I like the hardware.
Seriously, I can’t believe how much more I like Linux when it is not running on a crappy old Windows laptop someone gave me. I have run Linux on old Mac laptops before, but they were old, old, heavy, clunky, and old. This MacBook (or “MintBook” as I call it) isn’t exactly lightweight or modern, but hey, it works well and I am used to it. That goes a long way.
I started writing a post about Mint Linux so I should probably get on with it…
As someone who has used macOS (or Mac OS X) and before that System 9, 8, 7, 6… I guess I’m a “Mac Guy”, but I’ve also been using Linux (mostly on servers, oh and *BSD before that) but I’ve never been a Windows person. I did get my first Linux laptop (and my first “new” Linux computer) back in 2007.
So right now this is my primary laptop and I only have laptops running Linux. I’ve been pretty happy with Mint so far and learning all the new stuff in desktop Linux since I last used it on a regular basis. I quickly learned that SNAP is garbage and Flatpack is better.
My biggest complaint so far is the lack of resolution, which is 1280×800. This is terrible. When I ran macOS at least there was QuickRes which made the computer much more usable. Is there something like that for Mint Linux? I would love a bit more screen space!
My other complaint is about the keys and how sometimes you use control, other times it’s option/alt and then sometimes it’s command but control and option/alt are sometimes interchanged and maybe you need to press control-shift-v to paste something!? It’s a little bit madness and my muscles are not used to it yet.
When I first set it up I had to use a USB WiFi dongle to get online but I eventually got the built-in WiFi working just fine. (Whew!)
I haven’t really been using this laptop every day… It’s been a little busy the last few weeks and most of my work has been at a desktop with multiple monitors running macOS. I do try to use the MintBook when it’s the closest computer to me, so if I’m in the living room or dining room, away from the office, it’s the computer I’ll reach for.
I’m still working towards replicating as much of my normal (macOS) computing experience on the MintBook. That together with a renewed interest in getting away from the Apple ecosystem (and the US Big Tech ecosystem in general) is an experiment I’ll be working on as time allows.
Let me know what you like (or don’t like) about Mint, or what distro you are using nowadays!
It’s 2025, the world is in chaos, systems are failing, news organizations are struggling, and the people are suffering.
There is so much bullshit out there, much of it from AI, but hey, I want to be fair to those people I know who keep telling me “Dude, it’s not AI, it’s the people!” because yeah, it is the people using AI… And why are they using AI? Because they want or need money. Any why do they want or need money? It might be because we live in a Capitalist Hellscape.
So now, more than ever, if you have the means, if you have a little bit of spare time, if you are willing to share you experience… Do it. Please. Do it. Be a human voice.
I know, you’re worried “But Pete, I am not an expert, I don’t have any expertise to share!” And I’ll remind you of what I said nearly 20 years ago…
You are the expert at your own experience.
This was my pitch for getting people involved in the first BarCampMilwaukee. I remember someone saying “Well, I’ve installed Linux and I use it, but I’m no expert.”
My response: You are the expert at your own experience. No one knows more about your own experience than you do. You’ve installed Linux? Congrats! You know more about it than someone who has never installed Linux.
One thing I learned about teaching is that you just need to know more about a subject than the person you are teaching. That’s it. If I know more about making pizza than you do, I can share that information with you. That information is going to be based on my own experience.
I am not a professional pizzaiolo, and there are thousands or millions of people who are better than I am at making pizzas, but if you know me, and you trust me, then perhaps you would read my Pizza Advice and find it somewhat useful. If I got something wrong, tell me. I want to learn.
Now, back to the AI slop mentioned above. I’ve been publishing/writing for four decades. I didn’t do it for money or fame, I did it to say something, to be heard, to connect with people, and I am not chasing dollars by writing this. Again, I have some privilege. I can host my own web site, I can spend 20 minutes a day not working for money to take a break and write this.
So get that blog going. Dust off the old one, start a new one… Post on the free and open Internet. Fuck Twitter/X, Fuck Facebook, Fuck those Fuckers who will lord over your content, hide it, delete it, and try to erase you.
And if I’ve done anything today, I’ve shown that it’s okay to go on a rant every now and then…
I’ve been meaning to play around with setting up NAS (Network Attached Storage) device for a while now, and I’ve got a lot of old Raspberry Pi computers around so… I got openmediavault running on a Raspberry Pi and connected an old USB hard drive to it. It worked pretty well! I was mostly testing things and didn’t really have this plan to move all of my files to it, which is good because I killed it. I mean, it died. The hard drive, not the Pi.
I had to connect the drive to the Pi using a USB hub so the drive would get enough power. I honestly grabbed some old random hard drive enclosure not realizing at the time the drive inside was at least a decade old. A friend of mine gave me a pile of drives a few years back that were retired from a recording studio. Anyway, the drive died, I got some good lessons in drive repair on Linux, and I moved on.
While the Raspberry Pi seemed to do quite well running openmediavault I also had an old Dell OptiPlex lying around so I decided to use a “real” computer so I could explore things like running containers and more heavy load stuff on the NAS.
Overall I’ve been mostly pleased with things. It’s been quite an improvement since I last ran a NAS on an NSLU2 long, long, ago.
Right now I’ve got a recent SSD drive that is not total garbage as the primary drive, and another old “junk” drive as a backup drive. I used the openmediavault rsync tasks feature to setup a nightly backup to the junk drive. I am sure that junk drive will die at some point but I’ve got a lead on some larger replacement drives from a friend. (Also on the cheap, because that’s obviously how I roll things.)
I’ve got a friend who is a huge fan of Synology and I do admit their stuff is really nice, especially the management interface. If I had unlimited funds I’d probably run out and buy a Synology device (or two) and call it a day… But then again there is a certain appeal to rolling your own solution and learning a lot in the process.
When I first launched Gallery 69 (a Free Little Art Gallery) I had this plan to add a light inside and have it solar powered. That never happened, but Dana offered me a set of battery powered holiday lights when winter came and I put it on the outside of the gallery so you could see it after 3:45pm when it started to get dark outside.
I would swap out a set of AA batteries every week or two depending on how long they would last and how often I would remember. I decided to revive the solar idea to power the lights. Here’s where I will add the disclaimer that I am terrible with calculating power requirements. Terrible. Too much maths for me. Anyway…
I had this Solar Panel from Brown Dog Gadgets which I wasn’t sure would work, but I had it so I figured I would start with that. I got these CN3065 Solar Charger Boards for cheap not expecting much. I also had my eye on an Adafruit solar charging board but they were out of stock, which seems to happen a lot with Adafruit. I grabbed a bunch of JST connectors as well.
For the battery I tore apart an old USB power bank. It was probably 10+ years old but it seemed to still work so hey, I’m cheap. (Don’t worry, I still have at least a dozen working power banks.) I did do a bit of testing to see how long it go before the voltage dropped too low. That testing is part of another project still in the works. Anyway…
Remember when I was making Rugged Box Silicone Gasket Seals? Well, I printed a rugged box with a hole in the top, hot glued the solar panel to it, ran the wires through the hole, and then sealed the hole and wires with hot glue. (Somehow I have no photo of that.)
Okay, I needed to power the lights, which worked with 3 AA batteries, so I used these Customizable Dummy Battery(s). Originally I was going to print three, wire them up, and use that… Along the way I only used one to make contact with the negative connector then used alligator clips for the rest of the connections. This is one of those “I’ll test this” sort of things that is now somehow permanent.
Yeah, so somehow I threw all that together and it works. It’s messy, but it works. At first I thought it was not working. I’d turn it on, check it the next day and it would be “dead” but it would turn on again. Then at some point Dana gave me the box the lights came in and I realized it lights up for 8 hours and then turns off for 16 hours. So it was working just fine. After that I left it alone to do its thing. I did make sure I turned it on at 3:30pm in December so it would be running when it got dark out. They should stay lit until 11:30pm.
When I wrote “A solar project that actually works…” above it was mostly a joke. I thought it didn’t work, but it did work. Meanwhile I struggled with another solar project at the same time, which I now also have working. I didn’t want to say “My First Solar Project” because as a kid I connected a solar panel to a small fan I got from American Science and Surplus and was amazed it worked. (That was probably around 1981 or so…)
So yeah, I did this back in December but wanted to wait a bit to make sure it would keep working… and since it’s been two months I think it’s good. The panel gets some really nice direct sunlight in the afternoon and even with a bunch of cloudy gray days it’s kept running quite well.