Make is one of my favourite tools, both professionally and personally. It allows for essentially interactive READMEs and project instructions; instructions are by default interactive with Makefile Targets, and as such are easy to use and make sure (ha!) that they still work over time. No more stale instructions wrote multiple versions of the project ago!
It also has the benefit of making CI/CD processes more tooling-agnostic, since you just need to figure out how to run make build or make test and not have to mess with a bunch of tool-vendor-specific things. Plus Make is a pretty common package on most every OS/distro, so you likely don’t even need to figure out how to install it wherever you are either. (This is another benefit of sticking with the “standard” tool Make vs say Just, one less thing to install).
hardware
- very portable, 13" or smaller
- older and reliable
- like a Thinkpad or Dell / HP business class ultraportable, although a 12" MacBook would be cool too as they’re small and light
- USB-C charging
- large battery
- SSD, likely a larger one for local storage and services
- comfortable keyboard for writing
- built like a tank but at the same time cheap enough that you don’t care too much about it’s appearance
- stickers
- at least a couple cores and 4GB RAM
- integrated graphics only, low res screen is fine
- good well supported wifi card and Ethernet jack (Intel)
software
OS
- LTS distro, likely Debian minimal with packages installed on top
- suspend properly supported
userspace
- very lightweight WM instead of full DE
- i3 or Sway
- powertop and similar power savings modes and daemons
- Docker for running local services, but disabled and stopped by default for battery savings
- disable all visual effects
- quick screen off and sleep times
software
- offline Wikipedia download with web UI
- office tools
- torrent client
- the usual vim and terminal tools
- mapping tools
- VPN clients
- VLC media player + ffmpeg
We’ve been watching a ton of Chopped lately. Now I’m no chef, but I think these themes could make for pretty good episodes, at least to change things up a bit:
- children’s birthday party (all dishes must be palatable to typical, picky kids)
- holiday-specific, but less obvious than Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc.
- Juneteenth
- Icelandic and/or Nordic
- more “zero waste”
- use an entire fish
- less traditional (French) dishes, most episodes end up with a fair amount of fancy-sounding French dishes or at least ideas/techniques
- “ban” making types of food that the chefs have a background in (EX: if the chef worked in a Mexican restaurant for years, they aren’t allowed to make Mexican or adjacent food)
- signature dish of each judge, but that judge can’t judge it