Feeding the Head Bones

I have odd head bones.

It's no fault of mine and I don't complain. In fact, I'm quite proud of my head bones. It is through the strangeness of my head bones' activity that I attribute most of the things that I do. My head bones act differently and feed off different things and from this oddity comes the things that I do.

My head bones like to learn. Like Johnny 5 from the Short Circuit movies it constantly needs input. Back in the day it fed off a diet of writing, filmmaking, music and sound production, learning as much as it could in these creative tasks. The head bones were happy - there was much to eat.

The problem with my head bones is that, once it's decided there's nothing else to learn, the head bones get bored. The head bones have a voracious appetite and constantly need to eat and when the head bones have nothing to eat, the head bones get sad. It works the other way as well - when I'm sad for others reasons, feeding the head bones makes me happy.

It is because of the appetite of these head bones that I built my own guitar, for example, as well as all the other stuff I find myself randomly doing at times. And it is because of the appetite of these insane head bones that I've found myself occupied with another activity this past month...

...there used to be only one computer in The Hub. Now there's four (with another three in various states of repair).

My main computer for the longest time was a pentium quad core with 4 gigs of RAM. This was the computer for which all my video editing for the past two years was done as well as the recording of my band's soon-to-be-released album, but recently I've felt like I've been pushing it a bit too much and some parts may need an upgrade.

Then, instead of an upgrade, I figured I might as well build another PC for editing and keep the quad for audio production. It made sense since I was torn between having a 64 bit machine which would be great for editing and a 32 bit machine which is better for audio since a lot of the sound cards and plug ins for audio don't have 64 bit support (yet).

After some research, I decided to build myself an i5 quad core with 8 gigs of RAM and 2 terabytes of hard drive - 500 gigs for windows, another 500 for design and photography and a terabyte for video editing running at 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate slightly overclocked (simply because I can) and it is gorgeous. Meanwhile, I set up the old quad core streamlining it for audio production running trusty Windows XP 32 bit.

After that, I started researching turning PC's into media centers. Eddy had an old PC he wasn't using so I asked if I could gut it and mess around with it but, unfortunately, it's specs were way too low to have it as a permanent entertainment center (256 MB of RAM, for starters).

I did, however, discover a very cool freeware called SesamTV which was pretty simple to install and use and decided to turn the audio PC into a media center as well since I mainly use the video editing computer than anything else. Not only that, I loaded it up with a bunch of emulators for old-school arcade games as well as Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive and also got myself an old-school arcade style joystick.

As for the old PC, I then tried fooling around with Linux, deciding on Ubuntu, but there wasn't enough RAM to make it usable. I then tried sticking the components into a much smaller casing of a very ancient PC but it wouldn't fit. What to do with this ancient machine?

Simple. Turn it into a torrent machine.

That settled, I was still very curious about Ubuntu and Linux in general. I'd always wanted to try it out and see what it was like. I decided to pull out my old laptop and try it out using the wubi software to install a dual boot without having to partition my windows.

After a lot of testing, I decided to keep trying out Ubuntu and keeping it on the laptop.

One problem, though - the laptop was indeed old and needed some fixing. The plug jack was loose which meant I had to use the bulky laptop dock to plug it into a socket and batteries weren't an option since it was so old it would only last less than half an hour. The DVD-R drive was also shot to hell. I decided to go to Low Yat and find out how much it would cost to fix all these parts and maybe add some RAM.

After checking out the costs, it made more sense to just buy a netbook and decided on the Asus Eee PC 1201T.

About two years ago I bought one of the first generations of Eee PC netbooks and, after a while, sold it. I like the idea of a compact laptop but one of the things I really didn't like was the keyboard - tiny, unresponsive and not enough clickety-clack.

I like clickety-clack.

I sold off the Eee PC to Davina (who promptly over-heated it to death, from what I gather) and later bought an Acer with a dedicated graphics card and decent RAM and processor so that I could edit on the go.

The problem with that? It was big. And it came pre-loaded with Windows Vista which sucked balls. I sold it off to Colonel Kurtz and remained without a laptop, occasionally pulling out the old trusty Toshiba I'd written countless screenplays on whenever I wanted to work on the sofa instead of a desk.

That's when it really hit me - I enjoyed writing on a laptop. I liked my big and powerful quad core monsters for video and sound editing but when it came to writing out ideas I liked being mobile. All my past screenplays and television scripts were written on a laptop. It was just more comfortable and conducive to writing.

The 1201T is a little different from usual netbooks - it's kinda like a hybrid of a regular laptop and a netbook - 12.1" screen, AMD processor with 2 gigs of RAM and an ATI graphics card. It was a choice between this or a Thinkpad but the keyboard on the Asus was a lot more comfortable.

With a lot more clickety-clack.

The only thing that annoyed me about it was the fact that it comes pre-loaded with Windows 7 starter. Now, I love Windows 7 but the Starter version is beyond retarded - you can't even change the desktop background without hacking into the Windows which, according to Microsoft, kills the warranty. Besides, I was going to install Ubuntu anyway.

And after a few days using it on this laptop, I've fallen in love with the OS. I'm already looking up audio production software for Linux which I plan to test out that are apparently pretty decent and if someone comes up with a video editing software on Linux that stands up to Sony Vegas Windows can say goodbye.

Even now my head bones are still swirling - Ubuntu is keeping it fed quite a bit, researching other things to twiddle with on this lovely free OS as well as learning the code whilst I type this on the new laptop, uploading the latest corporate video I edited on the i5 and watching The Big Bang Theory on the other PC, switching between episodes with the wireless keyboard. I'm already thinking of other things I can do with the old Toshiba laptop as well as an older Compaq laptop I've got hidden away somewhere (which actually works fine except for the fact that the screen is cracked and the keyboard's missing a few keys thanks to my brother's curiosity when he was two years old) and I'm even thinking of turning the old torrent PC into an old arcade machine instead.

I have happy head bones now, and they're geeking out. I sure hope it lasts a while because it was a choice between either fiddling with the innards and OS's of computers or picking up painting again.

And that's just messy.

(P.S. If anybody out there has any ancient PC's they're thinking of throwing in the garbage, gimme a buzz.)