We had to change our Christmas plans in a hurry. We had intended to have a Christmas Day meal with some friends who live locally, with each of us cooking some of it. But then, on Christmas Eve, one of the couple who were hosting the meal fell ill. She spent most of the day in hospital, and even though she was able to go home by the evening, they had to cancel.

So we hosted it instead, for the remaining four of us, using some of the food that they had already prepared. It went well, and we had a good time, but it was a shame they couldn’t make it.

I resuscitated my old Chromebook. It was never a high end machine: I bought it brand new for £99.99 in 2016 because I was intrigued by the concept and I wanted to see how some of the websites I was working on would actually perform on a low end machine, and it only has 32 GB of eMMC storage and a pathetic 2 GB of RAM. Despite that, it actually worked pretty well for what it was.

Once it was out of support, I wanted to unlock it so that I could install other software on it. To do that, you have to remove a screw that joins two contacts on the motherboard. It’s not that hard to take it apart to get to the screw, but what none of the instructions mention is that you can only remove the shell while the screen is at a very specific angle, and if you try to adjust the angle after you’ve loosened the screws the leverage will just snap the threaded inserts that hold the hinges right out of the case, and that can’t be repaired with glue. I put it in its box and left it in the loft, where it reminded me of my error every time I saw it.

But then, while looking for parts to repair my ThinkPad a few weeks ago, I discovered that I could get replacement shell parts for the Chromebook. They arrived on Monday and I quickly rebuilt the device and installed Debian. It runs surprisingly well on its feeble Celeron N3060 CPU and limited RAM (with a little help from zramswap) – up until you try to visit a couple of late-stage websites, whereupon it soon runs out of memory. (I say “late-stage” rather than “modern” because the latter seems to imply some kind of progress, when it’s really a kind of decadence, a pervasive and contagious rot that makes everything worse faster than the march of technology can catch up.)

This does seem to imply that we could eliminate a whole lot of e-waste if programmers would stop trying to show off and just made simple, lightweight websites. Maybe we should be ostracising CV-oriented developers who choose heavy JavaScript frameworks just to put words on a page, in order that they can burnish their résumés to help them move on to another even more overpaid job making everything worse.

One area where the Chromebook really shines is in its autonomy. It uses very little power (the TDP is just 6 W), so the battery life is phenomenal. Under Debian, it still runs for about 10 hours on a charge even now that it’s eight years old. That’s useful on its own, even if you can’t use the entire 2024 web.

I was sad to hear that Noah Gibbs died last week. I knew him a little from conferences: we both spoke at Brighton Ruby a few years ago and were sitting together at the speakers’ dinner, and I had a chat with him at the end of Haggis Ruby a couple of months ago. He was a lovely, gentle, and wise man.

I’ve bought train tickets and booked a hotel for FOSDEM in Brussels at the start of February. I hope I’ll be feeling better this year, and I’m looking forward to seeing a few people I know there. Maybe you, dear reader, are one of them.

The hotel I’ve booked is in Avenue Louise, so it’s not too far to walk either to the centre or to ULB. As I know from previous years, relying on public transport to get to or from the conference can be difficult, as the weekend service pattern never copes with the (entirely predictable yet never planned for) demand. It’s also a location that I used to know very well: only 500 m up the road from where I worked twenty years ago. It’s probably changed a bit.

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