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Elsewhere and Elsewhen
Other Stuff About Me
I've mentioned that I maintain multiple sites and Weblogs. I also have multiple computers. Some are still in operation, some
can be restored and others are lost causes, either through failure or because I've replaced them with something new.
My newest and most heavily used machine is my Mac Mini, where I do my writing and anything that concerns
money. Its name is Minnie.
Its evil twin, the machine it will gradually replace, is a Compaq Presario running Windows XP. It truly sucks. It doesn't
have enough memory to run well under the best of circumstances and it is constantly the victim of the latest spyware, virus
or other malware, with that last category including many of the programs I've attempted to run on it. It's undergoing an identity
crisis but I call it compaqxp at the moment.
The third machine is a little harder to describe. I had it built so I could quickly and easily swap its two hard drives. I
named it variable. I have a disk for Windows XP, but it's where I run various distributions of Linux.
I want to build a hardware firewall / server, probably based on the Ubuntu Gutsy Gopher distribution of Linux. There are two
candidates for the job. One is a machine I had built for my wife using a Shuttle box. My daughter took it over but uses it
only for accessing information she has saved on 3.5" floppies, doing everything else on the Mac laptop I gave her. The other
is the machine the Shuttle replaced that I had built in a compact box, again for my wife. It's about the oldest functional
machine left and lacks many features found on newer machines, besides being hard to get into. The Shuttle, despite its small
size, has plenty of space inside for me to get inside and replace things like its hard drive.
The remaining machines are dinosaurs that should be torn apart and disposed of. I need to pull the hard drives so I can sanitize
them by destroying any information they contain with a shred program. Then I should pull the boards and power supplies from
the cases and dispose of everything separately. I have several monitors to get rid of, too, now that I'm setting everything
up to run from a single keyboard, mouse and monitor using a four-way KVM (Keyboard / Video / Monitor) switch.
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