Lore: It Started With a Craptop
You got your start on a 2008 netbook with an intel Atom too, right?
This isn’t my laptop, this is a photo from a different, very good, blog post
It was amazing! The internet, email, instant messaging, so much to explore. But it also kind of sucked. It ran windows XP, couldn’t buffer a youtube video, and had enough malware it could be studied in an infosec class.
Eventually the malware made it so unusable I handed it to my uncle, who at the time was the techy among us, to try and deal with it. He partitioned the drive, installed a cracked version of windows on the new partition and gave it back.
It ran like that for maybe a week. I don’t remember doing anything dubious on it, with my new understanding that websites that looked like alot gave you viruses. I remember playing a few offline games and maybe some word processing, and that was it. It sat unused for a while.
When I came back to it, it made a screeching noise when it turned on. From that tinny little speaker that makes noise when something is so wrong the OS isn't even involved yet. Despite that, it booted. But a new login had been added. The profile picture was a chess piece, and the username was “your turn”. I logged in and poked around. Software would close itself after opening, and there were some new processes running that I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t kill them.
So, like any other 15 year old I googled “how to get rid of virus permanently”. I ended up learning there was this thing, like windows, but totally free. I learned that I could wipe the whole drive, and all viruses along with it. I learned I could do it with a program called Dariks Boot And Nuke.
A few careful hours later I had a working laptop again, this time with Ubuntu on it.
It was almost useless to me at the time. The games I liked didn’t run on Linux (who knew!). But it ignited this new fire in me. More things seemed possible all of a sudden, I wasn’t sure what the possibilities were but I was sure that if I could go from bricked netbook to working netbook for free there were other such treats waiting for me on forum pages and blog posts. Software, games, computer stuff in general all clicked from an implicit assumption that some company might one day make what I want to purchase, to something I might be able to do myself for free.
From there I explored. I tried Linux Mint, I learned about WINE and ran those little windows games I was missing, I googled and read and watched videos.
That christmas I asked my parents for this hot new little SOC computer called a raspberry pi. They pitched in alongside my grandfather to get me one, and the possibilities expanded further. I got my hands dirty on the command-line, learned to run tiny web servers, and discovered game emulation. It wasn’t long before convinced my parents I needed an RPI model A, because the big one wouldn’t fit in my designed case. Oh and I definitely needed this all for a school project, of course.
From there I was hooked, running pirate radio stations from a raspberry pi hidden in a corner of my high-school, buying used netbooks thinking I could breath new life into them, even helping a friend host little websites on a VPS.
I needed more power; a real computer, with a real processor. I was entering college soon so I had the ammunition I needed in “I need it for school”.
And so I got a used Alienware M17x-R2 from a local pawn shop. That’ll get its own lore post.
