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from a time I had somehow avoided living through
Sunday, February 8 2015
I didn't think my hangover from last night would be too bad, but it ended up being sort of debilitating. I lacked the energy to do much more than watch old episodes of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Last night Nancy had talked about it as though it was an obscure show that I probably had never seen from a time I had somehow avoided living through. She said, "There was this show called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy from the early Two Thousands, and it looks really dated now. They had these flip phones and all the computer screens are these big boxy things!" Tickled by fond memories of that fun show, I watched an episode on YouTube via a brand new Chromebook that was delivered on Friday. I'd grown tired of how slow my MSI Wind U123 had become trying to render modern web pages, so I'd treated myself to an upgrade. Amusingly, at $150, the new Chromebook cost about half what the MSI Wind had cost four and a half years ago. It has twice the RAM, 1/10th the hard drive space (though it's solid state), and it runs a little more than twice as fast. It's also about as thin as a MacBook Air.
The Chrome operating system is great for grannies, retards, and children, but for my uses, I need a proper desktop with FTP, ssh windows, text editors, and ability to be logged onto the web from several profiles simultaneously. To achieve all of this, I installed an evironment called Crouton that allows me to boot up Xbuntu right on top of the Chrome OS. I can switch between the two instantaneously with a key sequence. The desktop environment is called XFCE, a nice bare-bones GUI without all the distracting CPU-intensive visual candy but with features I require (particularly this one: being able to cut and paste paths from and into file system explorer windows). A stock XFCE installation lacks any sort of toolbar, so it's hard to know how to launch applications. Happily, it was an easy job to create a single Windows-like toolbar along the bottom with something similar to a Start menu, a launcher for Chromium (open source Google Chrome), a launcher for LibreOffice, a little box showing icons and numbers representing the current weather in my zipcode, and the time. I can customize it however I want to. The only downside to this setup is that if the Chromebook shuts down, there are a few things I have to type into a terminal in order to bring up my XFCE universe, a level of complexity that won't be appealing when Gretchen wants to use it. But I suppose she can just have a profile in the Chrome OS, which is a great OS if all you're doing is checking your email and network of Facebook frenemies.
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