I may have to rename my little 2GB Ram Chromebook, with its full-blown LM 20.2 Cinnamon edition, as the little engine that could! While my intent was just to have a quiet place to run FocusWriter with Filezilla, I now have my website running locally. My main laptop could go completely belly up and I would not miss a beat. My Inkscape usage would tell a different story, however!

I also installed Gnucash because my current structure is from 2020 and sorely needs some optimization/simplification. It's really all about having the info at my fingertips to make decisions. In the past, I thought of it more as a historical thing, to see how I screwed up and make things better. Now, it's about having info to shape the future.

My OS reports that of the 15 GB of HD space available; I've got 3.6 GB remaining. Contrast this with my phone's total of 512 GB (and it's 8 GB RAM). And which device does more work / more output? That's the thing: it's never been about the hardware or the software, it's about the driver—err, drive into the night, not the software for the steering wheel!

Though I suspect this speaks to how much I under-utilize my phone! While through Dex, I can run a "desktop" via a monitor/TV, I hope there will come a day (it's beyond technical) when I can wipe the thing and just have it run as a suped-up mini PC. At $35, my Raspberry Pi running Retropie outclasses (in spirit) this $1000 thing that costs more than my Nitro 5 laptop.

Salt

Make no mistake about it: I am a big fan of salt. Back when this weightloss run was vegan-powered with my technical approach through a paid membership with Cronometer.com, I restricted my salt down to 200 mg a day because...well, I guess the thinking of that sort of diet is that if you enjoy it the least, it's GOT to be the healthier option, right? By contrast, in recent weeks, I'd toss back a couple of pinches of kosher salt as soon as I wake up or just whenever the mood struck.

Sidebar: Further (as by a country mile-wide further) by contrast, a couple of nights ago, I ate a package of bacon and saved the bacon grease for my ground beef the next day. I did the same last night for today. I just needed fat and haven't had bacon since moving to Memphis, something that was once a daily part of my regimen, just not at that AWESOME quantity. Afterward, I felt rejuvenated. And I don't care HOW much flaxseed I used to wolf down each day, I never came away from THAT satisfied.

At this point in my life, I really don't know how much salt I want. Lately, I've been makin' it RAIN salt, but I get a sense that life has been over-seasoned. And while I considered just to run a system to stop adding salt—I have no qualms with its implementation—perhaps the better course of action is to salt-to-taste or salt-to-DESIRE. Early on, I recognized that a carnivore diet's strength is about reading yourself instead of reading up something typed up with a system font—well, after I was established anyway.

Of course, sure, at the outset of any diet, what we really want is a doughnut. Today? I've got the (shakin'), the (shakin') for bacon. / All your bacon are belong to us!

Or, is it salt? That's the tricky thing about salt, however. My sense of appetite can be toned down from it. And perhaps the biggest threat of bacon, 'cause I've got to SHOVE THAT IN MY MOUTH.

At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding, right? If running meat audibles didn't work...well, mmm, gimme that (sigh) Spinach. Oh, I rode WAY too much in 2018 and 2019 Spinach rides; that whole line just spins out-of-control right into a ditch! Every time. As far as these supercars and others like it, you'll find me driving behind the rumbling-with-power, affordable wheel of a 2021 Beef Liver. Anybody check out the 2022 Beef Bone Broth? Is the Beef Oxtail still out of reach?

Late last night, I worked on a project that ultimately failed at extending the value of my second Chromebook. While its specs are higher than what I wrote last, namely +2GB RAM with a larger display, it just doesn't have the same feel as my smaller machine. The display is not as sharp and it just feels...well, the Chromebook equivalent of a Wonderbread bag—hey, I don't come up with the analogies, I just write about whatever pops up in my head! I installed LM 20.2 Cinnamon on it as well, though I gave serious thought about plopping System76's Pop OS on it.

Perhaps, it wouldn't be fair to say that I failed inasmuch I cut my time losses. See, I wanted to install the Logos Bible suite. You may recall my Logos purchase years ago. I wrote a post with passion, incidentally entitled the year ol' Martin Luther hammered on those church doors: 1517. The post gives me pause as I reflect and wonder how I've let that fiery passion for eternity slip. I like to leave words behind as reminders for Future Me.

Logos isn't available natively on Linux. There's a lot of old .NET gunking up the platform. That said, after testing it successfully in a virtual machine, I used the docs from Wine HQ and got it running through the Wasta-Linux option. I didn't know anything about Wasta-Linux, but I was delighted to see that it comes out Ethiopia for with their focus on teaching literacy and translation in NE Africa, tt is a distro headed up by Christians www.wastalinux.org/home/why-linux/.

The other day, I ran across an "anti-fascist" distro. I mean, why not? We already have a search engine that touts its deep-rooted liberal bias every chance it gets, might as well have operating systems peddle their own agenda....sheesh. Do you mind if I just hook up a printer real quick without a discussion on the 2nd amendment? May I search for my buddy's Transformers fan page and not be hassled by the propaganda panhandler? Sorry, pal.

Back on point, yes, I could run Logos in a VM. Could I run it on a Chromebook? Technically yes, but technically no. After a LONG installation of the environment, Logos installed and wanted to install a minimal library. A "minimal" library that was to be about 8 GB. sigh Yeah, I was down to 2.9 GB and that was after removing my Internet browser, LibreOffice and anything I could rip off to make it lighter. Perhaps if I stuck with it, I could have got it working or used a USB drive as a home drive—there's all sorts of possibilities to try. Linux really beats out Windows when it comes to all the goofy things you can do with it—hence why it's in everything in one form or another. I could easily argue that people interact more with Linux than they do with Microsoft and Mac stuff COMBINED. Easy debate. Thank you Internet and all of your Things...I think.

In the end, running Logos on my old Chromebooks is a nonstarter. It's not a showstopper, overall, as Logos has an online workaround, but I always bristle at limited setups that try to emulate the real thing as opposed to a limited setup that does it's own thing. It's like how periodicals used to push its online presence to look like its print version when those two things are entirely different.

Of course, the question I ought to ask if is I really should run with Logos in the first place, but that's a debate still in my head that no doubt will eventually spill out onto here.

I bring all of this up for kicking off on December 1, I'm going to do a 900-day Bible adventure across the wilderness of the NT. No, that wasn't a typo: 900 days. While I may have referenced it before, the idea has been in my head for a bit and I want to align with the first of each month as I tie it together with my other objectives. I basically have a passage of scripture that I read each day, then I'll repeat that passage each day thereafter for the rest of the month. Divvy up the NT equally by 30 and that's about it. Months ago, I forked the idea from John MacArthur from one of his early messages from the 70s I guess? I may even line up commentaries for each section I read). I'll be dropping the schedule on here shortly, but it kicks of in December with 1 John 1 through Revelation 4.

I write this post from my repurposed ASUS CB3-131 Chromebook with its lovable, hardy case—even its keyboard is a delight—running the same OS as my main box: Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon. While priced today on eBay for $47, this Chromebook rolled off the assembly line on March 15, 2016. Again, it's bewildering to me that Google chooses to no longer send security patches to still-relevant machines. It's not like these boxes are paper towels to be thrown away!

Compared to when I built my machine from parts picked up at a computer expo at the Agricenter: an AMD 350 MHz, with 2 GB hard drive running Windows 98, I would have ABSOLUTELY SALIVATED to have run across these specs back in 1998:

• CPU: 2.16 GHz Intel Celeron
• RAM: 2 GB
• HD: ‎16 GB SSD

Now, that 1998 machine had a Voodoo II 3D-only card that I picked up for $300 ($513 in 2021). I also primered and painted its case with colors that were VERY RECEPTIVE to black light! I loved that thing!

All of that aside, what Google cast away has inspired me. I'm running FocusWriter and dropped in Filezilla to update my site. I may eventually just put in Jekyll to run a local copy of my website. Not just fully patched, but this little Chromebook also has FAR more capabilities than when it bounced down the line new!

And while I could install Brave (or Chrome—just out of spite), both browsers go a tad above the CRAZY-GO-NUTS threshold as it relates to RAM—SERIOUSLY, do I really need to pull 1.5 GB of RAM to make a quick run through the Net? At 2 GB, the only way I could run my OS is to go back in time....I remember back when I needed 128 MB for Windows 2000 and 256 MB for Windows XP—I could lament on this, but I'll table that discussion for now.

This isn't my browsing box, so I ran down a copy of Seamonkey as it seems to be one of the lighter browsers out there sans the text browsers out there (I do have my limitations). I just need something to quickly grab info. There's also a nostalgic feel that makes it charming.

And while I tried several lightweight distros before returning to my default, none of them felt right. It's really all about the interface to me, like, does the track pad move naturally? The Linux Mint team has spent some time polishing its flagship and its attention shows.

Water Drop?

For the rest of this year and throughout 2022, I have set a daily target to drink 4 liters of water per day—ideally carbonated water! Since becoming a coffee-drinking carnivore, water consumption just has not been a focus. I can do better.