Happy Blaugmas Eve

I'm on my lunch break and I've decided to go back to my old "distraction-free writing" setup: FreeDOS booting from a USB thumb drive¹ on a thinkpad from 2006. I bought it years ago, back when "extra laptop" was something I could casually decide to spend money on. It was 50 bucks on ebay, and it was a good purchase. It's a Thinkpad X60, which is a heck of a machine. The keyboard is better than any laptop keyboad I've ever used, and it has a pleasing 4:3 display. Perfect thing for taking to a cafe or park and writing on the go.

Of course, since 2020, for reasons we all remember, I haven't had much occassion to go to public places and just sit around, so it hasn't gotten a lot of use recently. I've been reluctant to use it at work, because I feel like typing on a non-work-approved device will look suspicious, even though people are constantly on phones that present much more of a security risk than this machine possibly could. But small text on a black background = hacking in the public consciousness, so I was worried someone would think I'm up to something.

But I'm sick of writing on my phone, of using my phone for much of anything, so I'm going to at least see if anyone says anything. If anyone asks why I'm using the laptop, I'll say I'm on my lunch break, which I am. My original plan was to sneak off to the conference room, which is almost always completely empty, and spend my lunch break there. But recently, people have been using the conference room for actual conferences nearly every day. I guess it's conference season. So, I just set the laptop up on my desk and I'm seeing what I can get away with. Fuck it. If it's some sort of problem, someone will tell me. There's no reason for me to comply in advance.

I've already completed 24 Work Product Units for the day and it's only noon,³ so I'm well ahead of schedule and anything I do after this point is gravy. My average for the week isn't 25/day, because the first half of the week I had to spend a great deal of time asking for people to fix mistakes that they made before the WPU reached my desk; or, finally receiving corrections I asked for weeks ago and needing to deal with them now. It's okay though, whatever else I get done today should get me well over the average point.

I'm a little worried about #Blaugust, because I'm not in the habit of writing and I'm worried I won't be able to think of something to write about every day. To keep myself honest, I haven't done any pre-writing: Any entry tagged #Blaugust2025 will have been completely written in the month of August. I've got a couple ideas brewing in my head, but only a couple: after I write those posts I have no idea what I'll do for the rest of August. I'm trying to be more mindful of the media I consume and asking myself "do I have anything to say about this?" instead of just passively consuming, and it's somewhat working, but it's a muscle I need to build up again. I'm trying to make myself read more again, which is inherently a less passive form of media consumption, and that's helping too. The reason I'm writing this post now is because I want to try to keep my Blaugust posts in the realm of not-about-blogging; not because I think writing about blogging is inherently bad, but because I feel like it can be a cop-out for me personally, and I want to challenge myself to think outside the blogx.

Writing on this laptop is so good. Its keyboard is even better than the keyboard they gave me at work for my desktop computer at work, which is an awful chiclet-style thing. I don't know why those exist. Making a decent-feeling keyboard is so cheap and easy. It doesn't even have to be mechanical (and I certainly don't expect a mechanical keyboard in a laptop): a good-quality membrane keyboard with full-sized keys in a sensible layout gets you 99% of the way there. My spouse just bought a basic full-sized membrane keyboard for $15 and she loves it. I use a mechanical keyboard at home because I prefer the typing feel, but if it breaks and I can't afford to replace it, a cheap membrane keyboard would be totally fine. It's solved technology. But we can't have it because it has been decreed that laptops need to be half an inch thick or less and that's that.

Yeah, by modern standards, the X60 is a bit of a brick. It's about an inch thick at its chunkiest, and its weight is not unnoticeable. But besides the good keyboard, it also has three full-sized USB ports, dedicated headphone and microphone jacks, a firewire port, 56k modem and ethernet ports, a VGA port, a PCMCIA card slot, and an SD card reader.² All in a neat little slab that's 10" wide and 9" long⁴ with the extended battery pack. Not that I can use them with my current setup, but it also has bluetooth and wifi. If it could run modern software, and if it had an HDMI port instead of VGA, there's not much more I could want from a laptop. And it's nearly 20 years old!

My main desktop computer for the moment is also a Thinkpad, a newer model from 2015. It's almost as good, but the keyboard is chiclet-style, it only has 2 USB ports, and it has a 16:9 screen and a big touchpad, which pushes the keyboard further back and makes it less comfortable to type on. It would probably still be fine as a portable writing machine, but it stays wired in: needing to unplug the power, monitor, USB hub, keyboard and mouse every time I take it to work and plug it all back in when I get home would be a huge hassle, and the space it takes up in my backpack could be inconvenient if I need to get groceries or something. With this setup, I just need to carry a USB drive with me. I'll need to wait until I'm home to actually post it, but that's a sacrifice I'm more than willing to make. Look at how much I was able to write in just an hour! My hands aren't starting to cramp from awkward phone writing. This was a great idea. Nobody's said anything about me using the laptop at my desk. Maybe I was worrying about nothing. It wouldn't be the first time.

I look forward to continuing to use this setup to participate in Blaugust, and I look forward to seeing what the community comes up with. Bhagpuss at Inventory Full has helpfully posted a list of all the participants--or at least a list of everyone who's officially signed up--so do go check that out and see if any of them strike your fancy. It's a lot, so I probably won't be able to read every single Blaugust entry, but I plan to read as much as possible and interact when I can. To any other Blaugust participants checking out my blog, thanks for reading and good luck!