9 october 2026
Friday, October 9th, 2026
Hello friends, thank you for taking time out of your day to read my silly little journal entry. It really means a lot to me. I am so lucky to have found good people to call my Internet friends :) Kat, Mary, Coyote, and The Sea.
I've decided to do a bit of a computer audit, as unfortunately, I noticed my 2015 MacBook Pro start to bulge due to a swollen battery and had to discard it. </3 I did not have the necessary tools to remove the battery, and it requires rather skilful precision to remove properly without, you know, exploding.
It sucks because that was a good SSD and 8GB of RAM I had to discard along with it. Even though the CPU was showing its age, it was still a really excellent device, and was very capable as a homelab server.
But the good news is that I have a lot of computers. It's really absurd how many I have, when I think about. I am documenting them all to give myself a better picture of how to best put them to use.
The naming convenction for some devices was originally from what TLD I was using for each (eg. https://brennan.click, https://brennan.cafe) but I'm not using those at the moment, but I enjoyed the names so they stuck. Others are just named after what they are.
mac (Sea Change)
My main workhorse is the MacBook Air M4 I got a year and a half ago. I use it every day as my daily driver for development and writing. I briefly used it to run fanfiction.lol before transferring the site to Cafe. It's rather empty after getting wiped, and I had to begrudingly update to Golden Gate:
Field | Value
---------+-------------------------------------------------------
OS | macOS Golden Gate 27.0.1 (26A434) arm64
Host | MacBook Air (13-inch, M4, 2025) β Brennans-MacBook-Air
Kernel | Darwin 27.0.0
CPU | Apple M4 (10 cores, 4P+6E) @ 4.46 GHz
GPU | Apple M4 (8 cores) @ 1.47 GHz (integrated)
Memory | 16.00 GiB
Swap | 1.00 GiB
Disk | 228.27 GiB (apfs, ro) @ /
Display | Color LCD 2940Γ1912 @ 2x, 14" 60 Hz
Battery | 97%, discharging
Network | en0 @ 192.168.1.XX (DHCP)
User | brennan@Brennans-MacBook-Air
nitro
Next, I have my gaming PC which I bought during university because my friends from Write Club wanted to play Valorant and Dress to Impress. I haven't played any games on it for months now, as it is running full-time as the server for folk.zone, but I'm thinking of transferring that to another device since the more resource-intensive services are offline.
Field | Value
---------+-----------------------------------------------
OS | Ubuntu 26.04 (Resolute Raccoon) x86_64
Host | Nitro N50-640
Kernel | Linux 7.0.0-38-generic
CPU | i5-12400F (12 cores) @ 5.60 GHz
GPU | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Memory | 15.5 GiB
Swap | 4.00 GiB
Disk | 581.64 GiB (ext4) @ /
Disk | 237.20 GiB (fuseblk, ro) @ /mnt/acer
Disk | 931.50 GiB (fuseblk, ro) @ /mnt/main-storage
Disk | 360.00 GiB (fuseblk, ro) @ /mnt/second-storage
Disk | 237.87 GiB (fuseblk) @ /mnt/external-storage
Display | W2343 23" 1080p + HP E231 23" 1080p (ext)
Network | wlp0s20f3 @ 192.168.1.XX
casa
This was my workhorse prior to the theft purchase of my MacBook Air. It is a sturdy and diligent ThinkPad that I got for a bargain on eBay. This is the machine I'm thinking of transferring folk.zone on to, as it is rather capable but has been made redundant.
Field | Value
---------+-------------------------------------------
OS | Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS x86_64
Host | ThinkPad X270 (20HMS04S00)
Kernel | Linux 6.8.0-124-generic
CPU | Intel Core i5-7300U (4 cores) @ 3.50 GHz
GPU | Intel HD Graphics 620
Memory | 7.3 GiB
Disk | 238.5 GiB @ /
Display | 1366Γ768
Network | 192.168.1.XX
cafe
Next, I have the desktop tower that's running fanfiction.lol. As I mentioned in my posts on homelabbing, this was bought during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown as a cheap gaming PC and it was awful at that (it struggles to smoothly display the cursor moving) but it is excellent as a server. I had over a dozen Docker containers running at once without it breaking a sweat.
Field | Value
---------+------------------------------------------
OS | Ubuntu 26.04 (Resolute Raccoon) x86_64
Host | GA-78LMT-USB3
Kernel | Linux 7.0.0-15-generic
CPU | AMD FX-4130 (4 cores) @ 4.00 GHz
GPU | AMD Radeon 3000
Memory | 7.24 GiB
Swap | 512.00 MiB
Disk | 228.17 GiB (ext4) @ /
Display | VE228 1920Γ1080 22"
Network | wlxbc071d481e84 @ 192.168.1.XX
x200t
I bought this ThinkPad years ago off of Kijiji for $40 and it was easily the best purchase I've ever made. It's incredible how much use I can still get out of this laptop that was released in fucking 2008. That's legally an adult.
Anyways, I just installed AntiX Linux on it and absolutely love it. It idles at 300MB of RAM and comes with every package and quality-of-life feature I could ask for. It's not really powerful enough to be even a simple static site host, but it makes a fantastic writing machine.
Field | Value
---------+---------------------------------------------
OS | BunsenLabs GNU/Linux 12 (Boron) x86_64
Host | ThinkPad X200 Tablet (744988U)
Kernel | Linux 4.19.0-27-amd64
CPU | Intel Core 2 Duo L9400 (2 cores) @ 1.87 GHz
GPU | Intel Mobile 4 Series (GMA 4500MHD)
Memory | 3.75 GiB
Display | 1280Γ800 12.1" convertible (Wacom pen)
Network | DHCP
vivo
Next, I have a little laptop that I bought mostly to take notes in university. It was excellent for that. The battery life was amazing, I could use it ten hours straight without charging. It has the specs of a Chromebook but was running Windows, meaning I could put Linux on it easily!
I bought it for less than $200 a few years ago, and the listing price is now $400, which is absolutely bonkers for a shitty Intel Celeron with only 4GB of RAM (the same as the above laptop from 2008). I cannot believe how much genAI fucked over consumer computer products. This is primarily why I'm focused on making good use what I have already.
I'm planning to also put AntiX Linux on this as well.
Field | Value
---------+--------------------------------------------------
OS | Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (noble) x86_64 β Lubuntu/LXQt
Host | VivoBook_ASUSLaptop E210MAB_L210MA
Kernel | Linux 6.8.0-51-generic
CPU | Intel Celeron N4020 (2 cores) @ 2.80 GHz
GPU | Intel UHD Graphics 600
Memory | 3.65 GiB
Swap | 4.00 GiB
Disk | 233.38 GiB (ext4) @ /
Display | BOE0741 1366Γ768 11.6"
Battery | Working, 100%
Network | wlo1 @ 192.168.1.XX (DHCP)
User | kenneth@lubuntu
click
Finally, this was my MacBook Pro prior to having to be disposed. The battery capacity recorded is totally bullshit. I'm not sure if the seller scammed me on the battery or if he got scammed himself, because it totally died after only around 100 charges. I was fine keeping it plugged-in indefinitely, but a few days ago I started noticing the lid wasn't closing properly and that the trackpad was difficult to click down on. And then I noticed the bulge in the middle of the keyboard and was like "oh shit."
Field | Value
---------+------------------------------------------
OS | Ubuntu 26.04 (Resolute Raccoon) x86_64
Host | MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015)
Kernel | Linux 7.0.0-22-generic
CPU | Intel Core i5-5257U (4 cores) @ 3.10 GHz
GPU | Intel Iris Graphics 6100 @ 1.05 GHz
Memory | 7.66 GiB
Swap | 512.00 MiB
Disk | 110.38 GiB (ext4) @ /
Display | Color LCD 1680Γ1050 13"
Battery | 65.5% capacity, AC connected
Network | wlp3s0 @ 192.168.1.69
What Did We Learn?
Well, I think a lot of people would see this list and think I'm a hoarder of eletronics. This isn't even counting my tablets (both Apple and Android), my retro handheld PCB, my wearables, my eReader, etc. And I actually used to own even more! I donated a ThinkPad W520 which I absolutely loved awhile back.
Anyways, I don't have the money (or credit score) to freely buy stuff like I used to, and it's far more expensive now. The dead of my 2015 MBP made me realize any of my other devices could go unexpectedly, so I'm grateful for everything I have, and I want to make sure I use it all best I can for the IndieWeb commons.
I hope that was a fun tour of my computation!