rozodru

there are a couple youtube channels I recently discovered that do just that. take REALLY old computers and parts and try to make them semi-viable for modern computing. and I’m talking stuff that is easily nearly 30+ years old.

BoomerTec and Action Retro. BoomerTec I really like as he’ll just pick up random old PCs and explain all the parts inside and even give a history on them. His vids are like really awesome relaxing sunday morning watches. He even finds FOSS stuff that will still work on really old pcs. because of his channel I even discovered forks of firefox that are still actively developed for 32bit or community builds of Windows XP that are still updated today. For example his recent vid he bought a PC from 1998 off Ebay and got Firefox, Photoshop, and OpenOffice working on it. even games.

Action Retro pretty much does the same thing but with a focus on Linux. He’s done videos of taking like old Compaqs from the 90s and getting linux running on them. Really impressive stuff.

Veronica Explains is also good for this. Her video of taking old chromebooks and getting linux working on them is very detailed and thorough. Extremely easy to follow even for first timers. Also what I like about Veronica Explains is her videos remind me of old TechTV Screen Savers and Call for Help.

this is like text book definition of Anthropic. they ONCE had a great LLM, it was reliable, great solutions, Claude Code was pretty good.

now? it’s all garbage. all of it. Sonnet 4.6 hasn’t improved a damn thing. If you use Code you’re literally shooting yourself in the foot now.

All it knows how to do now is hallucinate. that’s it. They should pivot Claude to being a creative writing LLM because man it’s FANTASTIC at making stuff up and making it sound believable.

They should have died the hero.

sounds like me this past week when my external SSD decided to finally crap out on me. running around the house plugging it into multiple devices to make sure it was dead.

yup, buy old rigs/laptops “for parts”. This is what I’ve been doing.

Also go to thrift stores and look for old DVRs. you can take the HDs out of those and they’re usually in the 1tb range.

Mainly i’ve been buying old laptops purely for the ram and ssds.

The ability to have virtual desktops only on the primary screen

sigh. I guess. I think I just need to settle on the fact KDE is never going to allow dedicated virtual desktops per monitor. I really want to use Plasma but this is a deal breaker for me.