July 09, 2019
I finally recycled my old HP Pavilion dm4 (model 3055dx I think) that I've had for seven years. The computer was first my mom's for our India summer trip, and then I used it for much of middle school. I opened the computer to test it out recently and the fan kept making a funny noise, so this was the right time to say goodbye.
This was my first Windows machine, the infamous computer that temporarily broke our iMac and where I learned most of the hardware-related things I know. It was a powerful machine when we bought it, with an i5 processor and 8 GB of RAM, and its specs were respectable even to this day (except that the processor is a 2nd-generation Intel chip). It also had a fingerprint reader and was all-around very good in meeting my needs. In addition, its hard drive(s) were partitioned and wiped several times (sometimes unintentionally).
Before giving away the computer, I pulled out the battery, unscrewed some of the other panels, and removed its current hard drive. I also managed to extract the wireless card, which I plan on keeping somewhere inside of my desk. I was unable to take the RAM out because the last few screws on the casing were hidden, presumably underneath the keyboard.
We took the laptop to this cool neighborhood tech shop called Computer NERDZ for the recycling part. They have a free recycling program where they will deal with wiping the device and dropping it off at the recycling center. It isn't too far away and wiping the drive is (obviously) not that big a deal, but Computer NERDZ is 5 minutes from my house and it's a nice service to have so why not take advantage of it.
I also recycled my Dell Venue 8 Pro (5830). This was the device with a measly 32GB of hard drive space, so in trying to expand the available storage I ended up learning a lot about physical connections on the motherboard. The tablet also had a quirk where it wouldn't charge (micro-USB) if the middle two data pins were connected. This meant you had to either always use the stock charging equipment (not always possible), use a cable with a switch to disable the pins (I found one from China but it burned up so I stopped using it), or physically put a piece of paper inside the USB port to interfere with the pins. In addition to this weird USB hack, I found some really cool tutorials on various forums that involved doing things like opening the backplate and installing Fedlet (a tablet version of Fedora). These projects gave me a lot of fun things to learn about with a cheap tablet I wasn't afraid of damaging. Ultimately, though, I needed a real computer, so this tablet had been sitting in my closet for the past couple of years.
In other engineering news, this past week my dad and I put together a new 72-inch desk for the office. It wasn't super difficult, but it was a fun project and I enjoyed working on it. The furniture came in a large box, and I had a fun time opening up the box and lining up all of the parts on the floor. The assembly took around two hours in total and involved a little bit of lifting parts of the frame and a lot of searching the toolbox for the screw bit that would neatly fit in the screw head without stripping the screw.
The next two home improvement projects are going to be installing a smart light switch (thanks Ashwin mama) and routing ethernet cables through the attic so that I can have my own access point by my desk. I hope to have the first one done by the start of the school year. The second one keeps getting pushed back but I hope we can get that started as soon as possible.
I don't really love the concept of birthdays in general. This is probably because I'm not a fan of receiving praise or recognition for things I didn't do or didn't deserve to be recognized for. That is also probably why I get frustrated when someone I am arguing with decides they don't want to deal with me and gives the classic "I give up, you win." After all, the thrill is being forced to come up with arguments on the spot, not necessarily in just winning the debate as a whole (though winning is fun).
Anyway, back to birthdays. July 7th was my 17th birthday, and I really didn't want a huge celebration. We were already in Houston for the weekend, so on Sunday we came back home and had Thai food for dinner. Shalin was in town (he's staying with us for a few days before BMM) and Azoba wanted to treat me for my birthday, so we went to Mon Thai and ordered a bunch of dishes. I tried out their drunken noodles and coconut milk soup for the first time ever, and even though I'm not really a meticulous food critic, I thought it was very good.
Today (the 9th) we went "golfing" at Topgolf. We hit some balls not that far and ate lots of nachos. I've taken golf lessons before and liked it but not enough to continue, but this was fun after not doing it for a long time. I am now motivated to play more golf; at the very least I want to increase my driving distance. I'd like to start going to the driving range a few times per month, because I think golfing is a good skill to have in the long run, especially in the business world.