Putting my laptop to work

Many years ago, my dad bought a Raspberry Pi. A Raspberry Pi can be many things: it can be your computer, it can be a server, it can store your files, it can listen to your kids. This particular model was a Raspberry Pi Model 3, with 1 GB of RAM and a 3-core CPU. I wound up connecting it to my 3D printer and using it to remotely monitor my prints using the (excellent) open-source software OctoPrint, which worked very well. Eventually, however, I went off to university to start an engineering degree, and so I had to dismantle and pack away my beloved 3D printer and the Raspberry Pi. I brought it with me, though, expecting that I would be able to find some good use for it.

Three years later, I’ve found myself on a remote island, with lots and lots of free time on my hands. (It turns out that after work ends, you still have to find something to do!) So I dusted off the raspberry pi, I plugged in a handy little USB SSD that I had lying around, and I set about trying to load up some photo management software, so that I could share all the pictures I was taking on the island with my family and friends.

It sucked.

Even without the fancy AI gewgaws and gizmos that, say, keep track of all the faces that have been seen in your photos, the little raspberry pi could barely keep up with running a single Docker container. It wasn’t aided by the fact that it sits in a poorly-ventilated little case with no heatsinks, and so its little chip just boils away. It would also keep dropping its internet connection, which isn’t great when SSH (aka the internet) is the only way to log in. The first time I ran the software and realized that the poor, ancient pi was bogging down, the only way that I could save it to undo my mistake was to unplug it and manually adjust the settings directly on its little removable storage block.

Slow hardware is honestly the bane of my existence. I’m a frugal (read: extremely cheap) student, but after two days of tearing my hair out trying to log into the damn box over wifi, I was ready to throw in the towel and buy some kind of cheap little mini computer from eBay, load Linux on that, and be done with it. Then it suddenly hit me–I’ve already gone on eBay and bought some kind of cheap little mini computer and loaded Linux on it!

Last summer, in an utterly hedonic splurge, I spent ₤70 (that’s around 5 million pesos) on a little Thinkpad X270 with 8 gigs of RAM, planning to play around with Linux. I spent a jolly couple of weeks loading Arch onto it, configuring it all just right, and getting my hands dirty with some real low-level DIY computing goodness. (That is to say, I figured out how to connect to Wi-Fi and it only took me 4 hours!)

So I already had a spare computer around, and it was a heck of a lot more capable than the raspberry pi. Besides having 8 times as much RAM, it has a much faster processor, a GPU, and most importantly of all, a keyboard and a screen so that, instead of fruitlessly trying to connect again and again to some remote, headless piece of garbage, I can at least directly access my piece of garbage, with or without wifi. Heaven.

So I scrapped the Raspberry, unplugged it from the wall, and installed the photo software that I wanted to use on my little X270. It’s plugging away, indexing all of my collected junk from the past couple of years, and then it’ll all be nice and accessible on the internet. Unfortunately, it does kind of take away a little bit from one of the reasons that I wanted to do this in the first place, which was so that I could access all the photos from the little computer without needing to fill up its storage syncing them all between the big computer and the little computer, but it’s good enough for the main purpose, which was simply to have something so that I could share photos to my friends. I can just leave the little computer running, and then when someone wants to see all my photos of cows for whatever reason, they can go ahead and log in there and look at cattle to their hearts content.

Concluding thoughts

2024 is a year of technological marvels. As has been the case every year prior, computers are smaller, faster, and cheaper than ever before. Although it makes me a little sad that my 8-year-old single board computer is too pathetic to run a single highly-intensive modern web application, it makes me happy again that my 7-year-old used junker of a laptop is far overequipped for the task.

I think that the next step is going to be to try to run all of this off of one of my many broken phones. Anybody got a spare rootkit?