Stuff

Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog
The late George Carlin once did a comedy routine about “stuff” and I sympathize with him entirely, but while his concept was that he had all his “stuff” in houses, in suitcases and in bureau drawers, I have most of my interesting “stuff” on disk drives.....
Over six years ago I purchased a new IBM Thinkpad X31 laptop notebook. I intended on having it a long time, so I outfitted it with the maximum amount of memory that I could get (2 Gbytes), along with the largest disk, which at that time was 80 Gigabytes, and an extended warranty covering five years.
About three years ago I started feeling a bit pinched for disk space, so I upgraded to a 160 Gbyte disk and thought that would hold me for a while. About the same time I bought a new still camera that took 10 Mpixel images, which with jpeg compression averaged out to 4.5 Mbytes each. I take a lot of pictures and tend to keep the last year's worth of pictures on my notebook to use in articles, etc.
Last year the notebook finally needed servicing, so I took advantage of my five-year warranty and had it fixed. Not only did IBM fix it in less than three days (including shipping in both directions), but they upgraded all the firmware and give me a new keyboard, since the old key caps had become so worn that they could not be read. Note that worn key caps can be viewed as a security feature against thieves who are not touch typists, but it was nice to have a pristine keyboard again. At the same time I upgraded to a 320 Gbyte disk.
Last year I started making videos. Most of my videos are only two or three minutes long, but video being fairly “storage intensive”, the spare disk space started “shrinking” again, and adding a renewed interest in comparing distributions (therefore needing VM space and iso space), the disk space shrank even faster.
Over the past couple of days the 14 Gbytes that I left in my working pool of space was reduced to less than 1 Gbyte by some short-term storage needs, and I started getting messages from the system that I “only” had 1 Gbyte or less disk space left.
I paused to reflect on this fact, and thought about how the first disk I ever had in my workstation was 5 megabytes that held my entire OS, while a 10 Mbyte disk that I obtained later held not only all the OS but all my user files too.
I hoard things....I know that. I have every email message sent to me in the past five years on my notebook (minus some pretty bad SPAM....I sometimes keep the more interesting SPAM), and lots of other “stuff” that I probably should go through and eliminate some day. On the other hand, sometimes the “stuff” comes in handy and sometimes I enjoy coming across those by-gone pieces of data when I am looking for other things.
But it does sometimes create sad amusement to realize that just my portable notebook has many, many times more disk storage than the entire data center of Aetna Life and Casualty had in 1978 which held all of the records of the company and their customers, and I still keep running out of room for just my “stuff”.
Comments
comments powered by DisqusSubscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.
-
So Long, ArcoLinux
The ArcoLinux distribution is the latest Linux distribution to shut down.
-
What Open Source Pros Look for in a Job Role
Learn what professionals in technical and non-technical roles say is most important when seeking a new position.
-
Asahi Linux Runs into Issues with M4 Support
Due to Apple Silicon changes, the Asahi Linux project is at odds with adding support for the M4 chips.
-
Plasma 6.3.4 Now Available
Although not a major release, Plasma 6.3.4 does fix some bugs and offer a subtle change for the Plasma sidebar.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 First Release Candidate Now Available
Linux Torvalds has announced that the release candidate for the final release of the Linux 6.15 series is now available.
-
Akamai Will Host kernel.org
The organization dedicated to cloud-based solutions has agreed to host kernel.org to deliver long-term stability for the development team.
Where I put *my* stuff?
I've got about 1.1Tb of space total attached to that puter and several hundred gig free. My archiving has slowed a bit too. However and in the mean time, i've had to change filesystems from ext3 to xfs because booting and fsck time was too long with ext3. Only the boot partition is ext3 now but that'll change at the next Slackware install.