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  • Top 5 of 2025
  • Turn & Burn…

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  • December 2025
  • February 2025

December 2025

  • Top 5 of 2025

    Being part of a new family means being part of new traditions. This year, I was invited by my Uncle Dan to participate in his tradition of making an end-of-year top 5 list - on any topic - to share with the family. This was refreshing to hear. I've become burnt out by the automated "Year in Review" tracks littering my social feed, with their sugar rush visuals reminding us which content it wanted us to have this year...even if it includes the month I binged Enya's Greatest Hits while studying... A human touch to the event is a welcome change. Plus, I'll take any excuse to talk about my favorite music - so here are the top 5 albums I listened to this year! BlackCat's Top 5 Albums of 2025 "Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You" by Ethel Cain (2025) utilizes slow sub-60 BPM melodies and long atmospheric tracks in a haunting concept album of love, struggle, and identity in the Dust Bowl era. I keep coming back to this album month after month. If I could recommend one…

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February 2025

  • Turn & Burn…

    After several years on helpdesk, a technician is bound to start turning over old gear. Sometimes, it’s a decade-old workstation with obsolete hardware (like the 2010 ThinkPad T510 that Punkfairie turned into a Windows XP nostalgiatory). Sometimes it’s a perfectly good thin client system, complete with x64 processor and NVME hard disk, that has been written off as garbage. Every now and then, you even get a near-mint last-gen laptop with modern parts that someone decided was easier to keep in a drawer than use for their job. What else to do with these dozens of operable computers besides refurbish and redistribute them to extend life and slow the gears of production? At my current workplace, I have access to 3 main types of machines: thin client desktops; thin client laptops; and full system laptops. Thin Client Desktops Thin client desktops are the hardest to find use-cases for. Lately, I’ve been working with Lenovo m625’s with 2-core AMD A4-9120e processors and 8GB RAM. They have the…

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