Today’s the day. After a miserable experience trying to handle an interview last night with an old Mac that is apparently drowning in molasses (huge lag issues, computer fans howling while I was running nothing but Zoom), I decided that today was the day I had to do something about it. My first thought was a clean wipe, erasing the drive and reinstalling the system and restoring from my backup, but that was going to take many hours and wasn’t a guarantee that the problems would be repaired. Then I took a hard look at my laptop: keys falling off, blotchy dead spots on the screen that only display green, dinged-up case, and a power cable that’s a frayed fire hazard. If I have to, I could make do with it for some undeterminable time longer before it died outright, but it’s frustratingly ugly and unreliable.

I could just buy a new Mac laptop, but I browsed the Apple store, and yikes, a Macbook Pro would set me back $2500-$3000. Nope. By the way, it’s the first of the month, so on top of paying my mortgage I have to send a good chunk of money to pay off lawyer fees. It’s good to have won that case, but the money I’ve sent off to our lawyer in the last 4 months could have bought me a new computer with all the bells and whistles I could dream of.^*

So…making do. My wife has an old Asus laptop we got several years ago for cheap, when her old Mac was fritzing out on her. Again, we tried to save money to get functional. It was a bad idea, because it was a Windows machine, she hated Windows (as should we all), and was so repulsed by the OS that she decided she could make do by using her phone for all of her online interactions. She’s like a teenager that way. The Asus was left to gather dust.

A short while back, as I saw the handwriting on the screen of my Mac, I dusted it off, puked on Windows, and then erased it and installed Linux. I’ve been puttering around with it since, installing software, taking it for a test drive, and have been impressed. It’s an older Windows machine, but it outperforms my antique Mac with a clean install of Pop_OS. I could get used to it. While the hardware is nothing special, I could upgrade it to something shiny and chrome for half the price of a Mac, if ever I manage to crawl out of my financial hole.

But now I’m ready to commit. Farewell, Mac, you’ve served me well for 36 years, but the time has come to jump ship. Now I just need to find replacements for a few tools. Tell me, O Linux Experts, what you recommend as replacements.

Keynote. This is the one that hurts the most. Keynote is kind of the pinnacle of Apple software design philosophy — clean, elegant, powerful. Comparing it to the Windows alternative, Power Point, is one of the key factors that quickly steered me away from considering anything Windows. The Windows design philosophy is to tack a hideous, giant toolbar on everything and fill it with little cryptic icons — see also Microsoft Word. I’m still trying to find Linux presentation software comparable to Keynote. This is important to me, since one of the things I often do is put together presentations.

iMovie. iMovie has limitations, but it is also clean and elegant — I don’t need super-powered video editing software. I might be willing to work with something high-powered, aware that there’d be a bit of a learning curve. I’ve been looking at…KDENlive, I think? But I haven’t buckled down to figure it out.

I gave up on Photoshop long ago when it went to a subscription model, so I’m used to klunky old GIMP. Linux has no shortage of good text editors. I’ve been using Pages, but I guess any cleaner alternative to Word would be good. I may just switch to Google docs — ditto for a spreadsheet, which I don’t use for anything fancier than a gradebook. There is an office suite that comes with Pop_OS, which I might just settle for, since there’s nothing exciting about any of those applications.

I’m guessing now that all the nerds on the internet are going to flood me with suggestions.

^*Richard Carrier is such an asshole.

I was in the lab feeding the spiders, and on the may out I decided I ought to check my mailbox — it’s been a month and a half! I discovered that a reader sent me a copy of his grandson’s favorite book, The Bugliest Bug, and mentioned that he “waits expectantly to see the photos ‘below the fold’ on [my] blog.” Whooops. I’ve been trying so hard to avoid scaring away readers with my spider pictures, I didn’t stop to think I might be depriving children of the information they need.

That settles it. The spiders are coming back. In moderation, of course, and always below the fold. I will not disappoint anyone’s grandchildren!

My next house has to have a Viking grave beneath the floorboards.

Hey, maybe my house already has one! Some people believe the Vikings were waltzing all around Minnesota, you know.

I wonder if Mary would object if I took a pickaxe to the basement floor…

The cat weathered my absence for a few days without a problem. She greeted us at the door with her “FEED ME!” yowl.

She’s also pleased that she now has two humans to annoy.

After our long, long drive yesterday, I thought this would be a good day to rest and recover. I forgot that I’d brought Mary home. She was out in the garage at 7:30 fueling and oiling the lawn mower, eager to get to work cutting grass. I was not. I have more sedate plans.

• I was up at 6 tinkering with computers. I’ve mentioned before that my Mac is on its last legs, with keys falling out and mysterious errors cropping up now and then, but the price of replacing it was prohibitive, especially since my disposable income, which wasn’t much to begin with, is flowing outwards to deal with legal debt. After a few days in my daughter’s Reality Distortion Field, in which she pointed out that I could get a high-end Linux machine for a thousand bucks less than my Mac upgrade, I decided to tinker. I installed the free Pop!_OS on an old Windows machine that I found intolerable — Windows is an ugly abomination — and brought it back to life. I’m going to work with it for a while to see if my old brain can readjust itself to use Unix instead of the MacOS, which I hate to say has become increasingly ugly over the years. I despise iTunes almost as much as I do Windows.

• I’m going to spend some time in the lab this morning giving loving attention to my spiders, who have been neglected now for almost a week. Baby want a snackums? I have some nice flies for you.

• I will obey my mistress after the spiders are made content. She has assigned me the task of cleaning out and sterilizing the car we spent 14 hours in yesterday. This may require fire.

• I’ve got this working Raspberry Pi with a NOIR camera that we had set up to take pictures, and I’ve got this spider cage here at home, and now I have to figure out how to mount the camera above it at a reasonable distance that encompasses the whole field of view with reasonable resolution. Alternatively, I may have to build a dedicated cage of smaller size that will compromised between freedom of movement for the spider and adequate field dimensions for this camera. I’m thinking ring stands, tripods, hot glue, and popsicle sticks, because I’m focused on cheap and easy.

• Mary has been looking at this bachelor pad I’ve been occupying with a glint in her eye. Who knows what she’ll order me to do next?

• I’ve got some weekend cooking to do. I’ve been frustrated by the lack of garam masala in Morris, so I’d ordered a bunch of it online. Yes, I have a 5 lb bag of garam masala now, in case anyone needs to borrow a cup of it. I hope Mary likes curry.

I’m back! We drove home from Colorado today, and now I’m all worn out.

You know, the grandparenting thing is great because you don’t have all the responsibilities of a parent, but the bad part is that it breaks your heart to leave, and Mom & Dad won’t let you smuggle the baby home in your luggage.