My laptop broke recently. It’s a pain for several reasons. Joseph lent me a laptop which has an excellent collection of stickers on it. It is, furthermore, a high specification laptop with a fast processor and plenty of RAM. It runs GNOME. However, it does not have a working battery: the battery does not store power. Prior to this, I was using another laptop which was made in 2007. It also hasn’t got any battery. I would like to try and find an analogy between this trio of computers and SI#23. To some extent because working with a collection of Linux machines has shaped my experience of the trimester technologically.

The Hard drive as seam/quilt

Over the past month I have written documents on several different computers, all of which are Linux systems running Debian or Debian derivatives. I need to find a way to consolidate my workflow because my files are all over the place. I have various pieces of writing from different weeks on different machines. The hard drive is a place where quilt and seam can exchange places. Insofar that the hard drive can contain backups from multiple computers, it resembles a quilt: a patchwork of computers or, perhaps more accurately, files. On the other hand, it is a seam because, insofar that each computer is considered a patch, the hard drive goes between them. Hard drives, in all probability, can be exploited in ways which reflect their being both potentially quilt and seam.

Internet over Ethernet

There were files on one laptop that I had written and I wanted to backup these files. I eventually did so However, I did not have deja-dup installed on this machine. Furthermore, I had never connected it to the local area network. I was faced with a choice, I could either use an X-windowing system on that laptop to graphically configure the wifi details. Or, I could use an ethernet connection. I decided I would prefer the latter. However, I did not connect the device to a router via ethernet in order to gain internet access. Instead the process involved proxy arping an ethernet port and a wireless network adaptor on a raspberry pi. I connected the computer to the pi via ethernet and gained internet access that way. I thought about applying this idea of managing devices connected via Ethernet in a different context.