My 2008 iMac is back in my possession after ten years of living at my sister-in-law’s house. I gave it to her in 2016 to use as a family computer where it lived in the living room and used for light web browsing. But for most of the last five years, it’s been in the basement. I was over at their house the other day and I spotted it. I asked if they were still using it (they very obviously were not, but it’s polite to ask anyway) and now I have it back.

Right now it doesn’t boot at all. That’s kind of a good place to be for me. I can tear into it in a way that I’d be too scared to otherwise. As my dad says, “It’s no love lost” if something goes wrong. I’ve already yanked off the glass front panel, which I’ve known is the way to get into these iMacs, but always seemed risky and dangerous.

If I can get this iMac working again, and that’s a big if, I’ll have to figure out what it’s still good for. My top pick is a computer for my kid. That’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and, while I’m considering using a Surface Pro that I have sitting around, I think a desktop computer is a healthy option for a child. I’d like a computer with a fixed location rather than something that can be carried around the house, at least while early habits around computers are still forming.

Another option is to turn it into a TV or entertainment center. Half the reason I got the iMac instead of an upgraded Mac mini (what I had at the time) or a MacBook (what everybody else had) is that the screen and built-in speakers made it great for watching movies and listening to music. Also Macs at the time had an infrared remote (which I’ve lost) that controlled Front Row, a 10-foot user interface in Mac OS X for viewing on the couch (or, God help, futon). It was a perfect machine when I had a big MP3 library and Netflix’s 3-disc-at-a-time plan. I could re-create some of that by installing Kodi/LibreELEC.

It’s too underpowered to be competitive as a generic Linux/Debian environment for me. There’s no reason I’d ever choose it over another device for that purpose. But maybe I could use it as a terminal-only writer deck. Foregoing any graphic user interface is the best way to breathe life into old hardware. Most of the RAM and CPU usage comes from just displaying things on screen. Without a graphical interface, entire categories of resource-hungry applications just aren’t viable like web browsing or watching videos. And multi-tasking becomes a less intuitive, if not completely impractical, thing to do. Going terminal-only is always an option, though it’s a change that comes with very steep trade-offs. I don’t look forward to explaining to my spouse that this bulky computer taking up precious space can’t do any of the things that we understand a computer to do.

Anyway, I’ll need to get this thing cleaned up and diagnose the boot issue before I can do anything. If nothing else, it’s interesting to think about uses for older Intel-based Apple computers.

I’ve followed Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain since the height of the pandemic, even before it was aqcuired by The Atlantic. I’ve nodded along for years as Warzel wrote about internet bullshit, but lately the newsletter has gotten weird even for me.

Charlie Warzel, The Feeling of Control Slipping Away:

Culturally, the flood of slop, AI influencers, fake accounts, and AI tools is blurring the lines of an already post-truth age.

I can’t make sense of that!

Is an “AI influencer” an influencer whose area of influence is “AI”? Are they an approximation of a human influencer created using generative tools? Flood of slop, fake accounts. Where? Which AI tools?

I give myself some credit here. If Galaxy Brain is now unrelatable, that’s because I’ve insulated myself from internet bullshit. But I did it, in part, because of the influence of reading Galaxy Brain. I feel I owe something to Charlie Warzel. It’s concerning that his brain might be getting eaten by the subject he studies. So please send somebody to check on him. I’d hate to lose a good one to internet madness.

Hi, Jeff here. I want to let you know that this website is still alive. I’ve been writing a lot, but it’s not clear when that writing will ever land. So I wanted to publish a proof-of-life.

I’m almost two years in to this website and I haven’t figured out what I want it to be. I know what I want it to be about, but the frequency, length, and type of posts is still up in the air.

Every page of Confabulator features links to three top-level categories of posts. Internet Media, Future Garbage, and Digital Ownership. These are like the Confabulator canon. They’re the big ideas that I’m chewing on all the time, the things I’m trying to collect my thoughts about. They’re why I have this website and why I’m excited about it. I expect that as my thinking progresses, I will change and make changes in my life, at least changes that matter to me.

When I started out a couple years ago, I imagined that every post would add to a foundation of ideas and they’d build on each other as I went. But adding to the canon of ideas is slow. It’s taken me around five or six years to arrive where I am now. Given that, it’s unreasonable to expect that I’ll have major breakthroughs that require a blog post several times a year.

For Confabulator to be the kind of website that I would follow, it needs a more predictable cadence, but I’m not in the business of creating content. I follow people on the internet who put out a brand new podcasts or YouTube videos every single week. I have great respect and admiration for their abilities. That’s not how I am.

My little tinkering projects (like my old Android phone media player) lend themselves to being content, but only briefly. A goal of these projects is to escape the tech upgrade hamster wheel. I expect to use them for years or until they break. If I’m successful, there won’t be many updates to give about them.

Still, I’d like to publish more. I think I’d benefit from having shorter status-style posts in between the bigger posts. Publishing more often would at least help my writing, even if it doesn’t advance the other goals of the website.

Anyway, I’m still figuring out what I want this website to be. This time of year is usually a time for reflection anyway. It’s mid-year and the weather is nice in Chicago, so I’m outside on my bicycle more, soaking up the sun and being a weird tourist in the area.

I’ll leave you with this. I’m thinking a lot about the future as both a narrative of progress and the promise of tomorrow. The future that we live in is a complete mess. It’s easy to call it a dystopia. A little too easy. I can’t shake the feeling that dystopian and apocalyptic thinking are part of a broader con-job. Not to dismiss the very real and bad things that happen, but I’m skeptical about this specific kind of despair.

More to come. Thank you for reading!