I must not fear my Outlook inbox.

The inbox is the mind-killer.

The inbox is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my inbox.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

"i use linux as my operating system," i state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. he swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision.
"actually," he says with a grin, "linux is just the kernel. you use GNU+linux."
i don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "i use alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. it's linux, but it's not GNU+linux."

the smile quickly drops from the man's face. his body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth as he drop to the floor with a sickly thud. as he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!"
coolly, i reply "if windows was compiled with gcc, would that make it GNU?" i interrupt his response with "and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. even if you were correct, you won't be for long."

with a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. he lies on the floor, cold and limp. i've womansplained him to death.

After some time I’ve found a way to upcycle Chromebooks to run the latest version of Ubuntu and boot to an external USB drive while maintaining the ChromeOS. The WiFi chips in these models also can create their own wifi networks so they can be short range routers.
What does this actually mean? Instead of requiring new hardware like a raspberry pi, we can take old Chromebooks that schools get rid of in the thousands and actually reuse them to create portable micro servers. Pack them full of offline books, maps, wikis, etc.
There is a major upside compared to using an old Chromebook over a raspberry pi, mainly that it's actually cheaper and can be free depending on how you source your chromebooks. I got 10 at $30 each which is cheaper than a pi or a pi alternative.

The battery life is also insane. I used it for close to 12 hours and it didn't even hit 50% battery loss. They also take very little time to charge so I'm interested to see how much power they might take up while attached to the off grid solar array.

So the plan is to make the docs and work some more on making these into portable offgrid information stations and packing them with info. https://anarchosolarpunk.substack.com/p/offgridserveruses
#solarpunk #permacomputing