My roommate received a new laptop and so donated her old one to me. I usually use my desktop as I'm pretty sedentary, but it's still fun to have something to mess with.

It's not a powerhouse but it runs MX Linux just fine (I was going to use antiX, but I realized that's a funky little distro that is more than I care to deal with the quirks, but since it's the basis of MX, I wanted to try that, because I like the antiX ideology).

Anyways, one of the problems is that right now I have a decent little setup on WSL2 using Ubuntu 24.02. But I want to migrate my stuff over. I think this is something I want to do anyways, but especially with EOL on Win10 coming next year it'd be good to get some practice in on transfering my system over.

I'm not sure if there's a nice easy way to "port" the WSL distro OUT of WSL into a regular full distro. I haven't found any easy info on that, but neither have I looked very hard.

So - while I have a linux distro to play with apart from my main PC, I figure I should work on getting it setup the way I like (in particular my nvim and tmux confs; I mostly don't have a lot of other things on the system that I use heavily/is that customized).

This means backing/transferring my dotfiles.

There are a variety of options for this, but the biggest options that I've seen are GNU Stow, chezmoi, and manual git management. I do see a couple other options; in particular one I hadn't seen before called mackup. However, I know nothing about that. chezmoi looks to be the easiest, hassle-free option so I think I'm gonna try that. It requires you to setup a git, and then just type simple commands like "chezmoi add {filename}" and then checkout the files on the new machine with "chezmoi init {github repo...}"

So that's the next project.

In other more personal news:

I still don't have a job. It sucks. I applied to be a cabbie, but haven't heard back, but they're a worker owned co-op, which means the people doing office work also do taxi driving, so I assume they may just be busy and take a little longer.

I think it would be a good job for me, because I'm kinda burnt out on technical support roles, and a lot of things I've applied for beyond general tech support tend to need specialized roles. Data Entry doesn't pay that much, and the data entry I've applied to have never contacted me - I half wonder if those jobs are just scams to get data for their own databases.

Oh, but yeah, this domain is up for renewal soon, and I should transfer it out to a different host, as right now I'm on Gandi, and like a lot of shitty domain registrars, they're jacking up their renewal prices. All these old good companies keep getting bought out by larger shittier corps that fuck everything up. From everything I've read it looks like porkbun is the place I'm gonna go to.

So anyways, I should transfer that before renewing, because I don't wanna have to pay that extra cost.

I could also use Cloudflare, since they seem to be pretty good about renewals being cheap. Though I do have concerns about the issues I've read about their own sort of lockin, but if it's just name hosting I don't think it should be a problem, it's more if you're using their hosting or DDOS protection IIRC. But yeah I think porkbun is the way to go for now. If worse comes to worse, and Cloudflare remains competitive/cheap, they should be around for a backup option, I hope.

Finally I have to get my Phoning It Industries updated. It's in shambles, and frankly I half wonder if that's part of the problem, I should really remove that from my resume, but... It has some experience re: coding and programming. On the other hand it looks like an abandoned hackneyed job, and who would hire someone with that?

Then again, there's too much competition in the tech scene, frankly. At least in the areas I'd be interested in, and I'm not competent enough of a programmer anwyays... I really am not into the idea of building computers or doing technical support/networking support that a lot of jobs are. I've had enough hell with that in Telecom. And I can't imagine any other type of system is any more sane.

Working at a giant corp really helped kill any shred of belief in competency in capitalism (or any system, really). Everyone is just running around like blind monkeys bashing keys and gluing and taping things together in the hopes it all works. And even when something starts nice and clean, over time, and as corps merge and "shed" "dead" weight, things get ever more convoluted, no matter how pristine and beautiful it looks at the start.

The problem is as these things get larger and larger and more and more is added, the workers are required to add ever more to their responsibilities without a proper attendant increase in wages/benefits. Or if they are, they work so hard until you break as a human, because Capital has no goal to protect the workers.

There are good managers, and even "beneficient" owners who do see that it's good to allow people time off and rest for their sanity, good benefits, etc... So I know some of my own dislike/distrust of large corps and tech is having worked for a pretty intensely disliked company in terms of the work involved (thanks for the Union getting good wages at least).

Well, this went on for more than just "dotfiles".