New toys just in time for the weekend

The timing all lined up courier-wise and I wound up with a few new toys to play with over the weekend - a shiny new laptop and yet more storage.






That's some nicely arranged cabling right there
 
 I'd been promising myself a new laptop for a few years now - I'd been nursing along an old eMachines running Debian with a moving platter disk and a failing battery. Rather than spend money applying lipstick to a pig (as it were), I opted to just go for something new. Plus, the old one was heavy enough to cause shoulder pain after carrying it around for a short period, whereas the MacBook Air is light enough to barely notice.

Setup and ready to go

To carry everything around I grabbed a nice STM Sequel shoulder bag - compartments for everything and beautifully put together. There's a padded compartment for a laptop, another for a tablet, a spot for a phone, a pocket for cables and then another pocket for whatever else. 




I picked up the Lacie d2 due to it being one of the few Thunderbolt drives I could find that had a second port for daisy chaining.

As the Mac Mini I use as my day-to-day desktop has just the single Thunderbolt port, which was used for the primary display (with the in-built HDMI used for the secondary and a USB-to-HDMI for the tertiary), I wanted something that would happily sit in the middle. In addition, I already had a bunch of things hanging off USB3 so I didn't want to dilute that further.

The main reason for adding more local storage rather than network in this case was to store Virtual Machines - I had a bunch of test VMs that were taking up an increasing amount of room and it was a real pain moving some off to make way for others, then reversing the process later.


Thunderbolt connection to the Mini; Mini-DP to HDMI adapter for the main display

Looks quite nice perched on the desk too

Comments

  1. Are you going to install Debian on your new Macbook Air, or stick with OSX?

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    Replies
    1. Sticking with OSX - I've developed a bit of a fondness for MacOS over the last year or two; once I've added MacPorts [ https://www.macports.org/ ] and iterm2 [ https://iterm2.com/ ], it becomes a really nice BSD setup with a lovely GUI. MacPorts especially helps: adding useful tools with a simple `sudo port install `

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