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.
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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Thunderbolt connection to the Mini; Mini-DP to HDMI adapter for the main display |
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| Looks quite nice perched on the desk too |
Are you going to install Debian on your new Macbook Air, or stick with OSX?
ReplyDeleteSticking 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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