I Love Computers

I’m coming off an 11-day break for the winter holidays. I came into the holidays this year really run down and needing a break. But weirdly, one of the things I did to recharge from my job working with computers all day was … tinkering with and maintaining various computers in my house. I have 3 different generations of MacBooks in my house but I spent most of my time on my favorite machine, a 9 year old ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Ubuntu.

I worked on everything from updating software, installing new utilities, tweaking custom GUI aesthetics, fixing nagging warning messages, and fiddling with configuration files. It was a nice change of pace from my work life where I have to prioritize efficiency over say, getting a mouse pointer size just right.

It was also a nice reminder that ever since I was a kid I have loved computers for their own sake. Not just for building useful stuff, I just enjoy the act of working on them, even in the absence of a project. There’s something very rewarding to me about taking a system that’s nearly a decade old and getting it to be almost as nice to work on as the MacBook M1 Pro I use for work.

Happy new year and I hope we all get to do more of the things that make us happy in 2023.

To start of the year with some festive energy please enjoy Masayoshi Takanaka’s samba cover of the Star Wars theme. It’s completely irreverent, wildly fun, and so much better than it has any right to be.

This work by Alex C. Viana is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4