Monthly Archives: January 2025

Somnolescent Record Club #1: Autolux’s Demos (2001-2002)

Posted on January 28, 2025 by mariteaux

I’ve written a lot about music. Like a lot. A lot a lot. Usually, when I talk about music, it’s with this air of formality, either giving my opinion or digging into the details and investigating—I’m autistic, this is what I do.

I do listen to music for fun sometimes, though. I put on songs because they’ve been stuck in my head all day. I have characters and ideas I associate with albums and songs and specific times of my life. Sometimes, even—I will throw on a record.

I’d like to start up a monthly all-vinyl blog ramble series called the Somnolescent Record Club. For once, we’re gonna believe all the myths, get into the groove (quite literally), enjoy the tactility of the big art and the wax platters, and I’ll talk about my listening setup and all the things that run through my head when I put on an album. Today’s record is the vinyl-exclusive gold-colored Demos (2001-2002) from the mighty Autolux, whose debut album these demos were for I lived in in high school.

Hopefully, this runs more casual than you might be used to from me—that’s my aim.

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writing about writing

Posted on January 10, 2025 by fiveducks

Hey! Two posts from me within a month of each other? Unheard of. Suppose I’ve got a writing itch and I’m all out of Gold Bond. Continue reading →

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ChromeOS To Go: Thoughts on ChromeOS Flex

Posted on January 7, 2025 by dotcomboom

You might have used a Chromebook, Google’s funky, moderately dystopian cloud-centered take on the netbook formula. If you owned one, you likely needed a lightweight, cheap little laptop (with pretty solid battery life) for school, light office work or entertainment. As most of these things are done reasonably enough in a plain old web browser, pitching a lightweight operating system specifically for that purpose isn’t too farfetched.

As the Gentoo-based operating system that runs the Chromebook, ChromeOS, is quite lightweight, it should be able to run well on anything that could run Chrome. It shouldn’t be too bad for an older computer, either: although aging, even a sufficiently specced 15 year old machine – 2010 as of writing – can totally run Chrome just fine.

There’s also a whole niche of Chromebook-inspired Windows laptops that came out in the mid-2010s, immediately stifled by stiff storage requirements and an operating system not designed for them. Out of the box, they’re effectively ewaste. But they have modern guts! They’re rocking UEFI, some Celeron with a generic Intel case badge, and typically fanless, with some amount of power efficiency! This makes them an excellent candidate for the ChromeOS experience.

I’ve used ChromeOS Flex on and off on secondary machines of mine, and I think it is pretty neat! I think it fits these cases pretty well, especially for users who aren’t as technologically savvy and just want to extend the life of their computer hardware. I’ll discuss this a little more later, but I think it’s worth some history first – because despite the somewhat recent arrival of ChromeOS Flex in 2022, this is not the the operating system’s first rodeo on non-Google licensed hardware.

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The New HTTP Order

Posted on January 1, 2025 by mariteaux

Happy new year to all our faithful blog readers! January is always the time for reflection and looking forward to the future, and while I do the personal talk on my personal site, I want to discuss the future of you connecting to this here site network here today. I’ve beaten this drum before, but I’m about ready to puncture a hole in it today, because I’m pretty sure there’s not going to be a drum to beat in the next few years.

I am seeing the death of the HTTP-only connection coming in the next year or two, and I am pissed. I will have to force HTTPS on somnolescent.net, something I have resisted at every turn so far, if we want to remain accessible to the wider Web. Think this is hyperbole? Here’s a nice throwback to ring in 2025—have a steaming hot marf rant to keep you warm in these winter months.

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