A few people already noticed that lately I’ve been even harder to track down than usual, mostly because I’ve been swamped with work (Gentoo-related development, application development on Windows, and support on Windows computers — the latter are not very enjoyable work, but it pays off), but lately a new extra time consumption entered my life: I’ve decided to move out of where I’ve been living for the past twenty-five years.
One could say I’m still living with my mother, but the reality is that for the past two years, my mother lived with me, but the situation is growing difficult to cope with and I am thus looking to get an apartment of my own, so I can work and live by my standards. While I have considered that before, this is the first time I’m actually looking up announces on the paper to see how much I’d have to pay and how much space I would need.
As I said before, I have tons of stuff here that should be disposed of, as I’d like to travel light, out of here. This is why I originally bought the Reader and why I was looking for use for old floppy disk drives in the past few years. The results are mixed: the Reader has been a big success, even though not a complete one; the floppy disks kept wasting space in one of the boxes which I would then be required to bring with me.
At this point I decided to start cleaning up stuff and simply disposing of anything that cannot be employed further; the local public-private company that handles waste disposal does recover electronic waste at home (or rather at a workplace, since I’m self-employed that’s what I asked for), for a relatively small fee (€120 for two cubic metres of electronic waste). All the hardware that was already unusable, broken, and so on is now in two big bags that on Thursday will be brought at the recycling facility. Hopefully I can later deduce part of the paid fee on my taxes.
I’m still having problems trying to reduce the bulk of books though: while Sony’s decision to support ePub on the Reader made it much more useful – allowing me to buy all kind of novels and non-fiction as ebooks, both in English and, since last October, Italian – it still is unusable for some titles (those using DTBook, and those – such as O’Reilly’s – that are designed for devices with bigger screens. Given that most of the devices I saw around here look even tinier, I guess what might be a good choice for me in the future (were I to give this device to my mother, which I was considering), would be the Asus Eee Reader (DR-900), which seems to have a bigger screen, and one capable to display a full page of an O’Reilly PDF book at a readable size.
Also, I’m trying to see which (working) electronics to sell/give away, to reduce the amount of stuff I use daily. The first to go is likely to be the AppleTV — I’ve been using almost exclusively XBMC on it, accessing video files stored on Yamato via network; this requires a fast network (cable, not wireless), and the AppleTV cannot really shut down properly or at least suspend (not when running XBMC at least). What I’m currently planning is to use the box I’m currently using as frontend (a mini-ITX nVidia ION system), and instead use the iMac, with Linux on it, as frontend for Yamato. For the storage, I’ll move the videos on external storage, and connect it as eSATA to the box, so that it does not require network connection and can be properly turned off when unused.
At any rate, if you don’t see me very active in the next few weeks, you have an idea of why this is happening.