08
May 09
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11:09 PM
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A few years ago I was on my way to work, sleepily. As I left that morning, I
noticed an older laptop computer sitting near the dumpster. I immediately
recycled it and later learned that the hard drive was destroyed and it had no
network card. Now that's a nice easy fix for a free Dell Inspiron 2500. What
would I do with this fellow? Well as you can see from earlier posts, I like to
repurpose my older rigs. It's easy to find things for them to do, an not every
task needs massive CPU cycles to function in an excellent manner. I popped a
120 GB hard drive in it, thinking that maybe it would find a place as network
storage. (This was before I discovered FreeNAS). It functioned for about a
year as a Synchronet BBS. Eventually, This laptop became a Dual boot system
between Windows XP and Ubuntu. I mainly use the Ubuntu side, but it's nice to
have options. I was reading the comp.sys.apple posts today and saw a post from
PZ that lead his blog displaying the 6502 code from the Terminator
movie in great resolution. I immediately realized that these images would
make a great desktop, but here comes the remix: If you grab some Apple II
System Fonts and install them under Ubuntu, install conky and modify a
simple conky config file, you can get the conky system monitor updates to
match the style of 6502 assembly language output. I use this computer everyday
as my comms box for Skype, chat, and e-mail and the like that so I reduce the
load on my main machine. I bounce back and forth between the Unbuntu machine,
the XP machine and the eeePC with a nice program called Synergy that
allows me to use my mouse and keyboard on all 3 machines seamlessly. Yeah, I
use that old laptop everyday as a poor mans's duo core and I *still* can't
believe that someone tried to trash my version of The Terminator.
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