Hello Frickin’ World!!!!

I am writing this from the £70 2012 ThinkPad that arrived in the post yesterday, from the garden at my mum’s house. It’s incredibly windy but nice and warm. I have just spent 6 hours furiously typing commands into the terminal, pleading with Gemini 2.5 to save me, and jumping with joy whenever evil bugs finally got resolved.

ThinkPad 1

Man, this was so fun!! So the point of all this is that I really enjoy writing, and I find writing in public (working with the garage door open, as Andy Matuschak would say) is a really potent way both to arrive at personal insights and to increase my legibility/surface area.

I have a Substack with like 40 subscribers, and the problem is, I really don’t want to bother them. I know it’s dumb because they chose to subscribe, but I personally really dislike having newsletters hit my inbox (I switched to the Feedly RSS reader recently and it’s such a better experience).

I was going to do a challenge of “write a blog post a day”, but I found the idea of spamming people’s email inbox that much very aversive. So, 15 hours later, here I am, stealth-posting blog posts on this website instead, hehe.

The quest for the perfect* writing setup

(*or at least, a half-decent one)

Typewriters

Around 6 months ago, I bought a typewriter. Ok fine you got me, I actually bought two. Oh god what is wrong with me.

My thought process went like this - “I want to buy a typewriter, but I don’t want to buy a janky one from ebay where it turns out I need to oil it and maybe some bits are broken and I have to buy a new ink ribbon but maybe you can’t buy new ones anymore because who buys typewriters any more – ok I’ll buy a restored one from a proper typewriter retailer”.

So I found a realy lovely one from a store called Charlie Foxtrot, and sure £230 is a little steep, but for the joy of a machine that just does writing and that’s it, it’ll be totally worth it. I was in my “I’m gonna try to be an artist” phase, so £230 seemed like a totally fine investment.

It’s a lovely machine and I still have it, but it mildly broke when I unscrewed the wrong thing, and I had to send it back for repairs, and in the meantime I bought a £70 replacement one from eBay to tide me over, as I didn’t want to be typewriter-less for 2 weeks.

So now I have 2, and they’re great, but there are various issues. One is obvious, but – as someone who has recently gotten back into Obsidian, and touch typing, and VIM, typewriters are very slow to type on. You have to type slowly otherwise one of the metal arm thingies will hit the other one and it’ll jam.

Typewriter And obviously you also have to load them with paper, and now you have some paper which has been typewritten on, which is cool, and really awesome for sending letters, but not super practical other than that.

Anyway, so these things have been gathering dust, I’m sorry to say. And the £230 one has broken again, and the guy won’t repair it a second time, so I need to figure that out.

Vim!!!!

I got nerd-sniped into learning Vim and it was painful but now it has clicked and I love it. I won’t go into what it is other than to say it’s a way to edit text much faster using terse commands. It’s very 80s-feeling, old-school vibes, I really like it.

ThinkPad + Linux (I use Arch, btw)

I saw a YouTube video about how someone restored an old laptop and turned it into a Linux machine and how much it helped their productivity. Ever keen to learn new tools and ever allured by the promise of a new gadget, I bought a £70 ThinkPad from 2012, which I’m typing on right now. It arrived yesterday with Windows 10 on it, and me and Gemini 2.5 worked diligently for around 2 hours to completely remove Windows and install Arch Linux.

Arch Linux is notorious for being difficult – it’s really not, it’s just entirely command-line based, at least at first. ThinkPad 2 I’ve never used Linux before (apart from some Raspberry Pi tinkering back in the pre-AI days when these things were way harder). It’s clear to me now that the beauty of Linux is in its radical simplicity.

On this old-ass laptop, which again cost me £70 (!!!), all I have is the following:

  • Neovim, a Vim text editor tool for writing
  • A file manager, so I can create new blog posts for my website
  • Git, so I can publish changes to my website
  • A thing that lets me see my battery %
  • End of list

Like, truly, I cannot browse the internet with this laptop. I can’t do anything other than write, and publish. This is INSANE!

Now, it’s not like I really have a problem with procrastination or distraction. I get a lot done day to day, I’ve been a nerd about this stuff for a while.

But, even on my Macbook with Freedom installed so I can’t e.g. go on youtube + twitter + reddit apart from during a 30 minute block every day, there’s a sense of it being my everything machine. Like sure, I could open up Vim and write something, but I could also check my emails, reply to messages, talk to AI, poke around in my Obsidian vault, review my Anki flashcards, etc etc. It’s this infinite portal - I don’t look at it and think “ah yes, time to do that one clearly defined task”, I think “time to do everything all at once”.

That’s the beauty of having a typewriter, and why I think pretty everyone should have a £70 typewriter. It’s really really lovely to carry it into a room where you don’t normally work, put some paper in it, and just sit there. Maybe you’ll be moved to write a letter to a friend, or maybe do some journaling, or write some shitty poetry. But it’s just you and this single-use, very satisfyingly analogue machine, literally hammering ink onto a page.

But NOW! Now I have a shitty old laptop, which I can look at and think “ah yes, there’s the writing tool, which is also 3 git commands away from publishing what I write to my website, in a stealthy way that won’t bother anyone, but will add to my body of work and one day be pored over by geniusologists trying to figure out how I got so damn cool.

What if this is what I give people for their birthdays from now on, lmao

The clear downside of this is - you need to spend maybe 2-5 hours setting up your Arch laptop, and you’ll need to learn some command line commands so you can like, turn it off and stuff (literally, I realised today that I needed to type some commands to tell the laptop that it should go into sleep mode when I close the lid. It’s that stripped back, out of the box).

But yeah, I can’t help but think that a few of my friends, especially ones with blogs, might really like a dedicated writing machine. I could probably find more thinkpads for like £50 on eBay. Because Arch Linux is incredibly light weight, you don’t need any specs really (it’s mad that this 12 year old dude actually has a 500GB hard drive and 6GB of RAM. Like, that’s pretty solid??)

So maybe I’ll start making ArchBoxes as a lil side hobby so I can give them to friends with a post-it note of commands to type in. It really does feel awesome to not even be able to browse the web.

The end

So yeah, there we go. A 30 minute stream of consciousness ramble amount my lovely lovely shitty laptop. p(I’m still writing on this regularly in 1 month)? p(This ends up abandoned like my typewriters)? I don’t know, the fact that I can publish this to my website is very compelling. Speaking of which, let’s try it out now. Time for some:

git add .
git commit -m 'Publishing my first post from the ThinkPad!'
git push

And that should do the trick. Pray for me!

Best, Alex (feels fun to act like I’m writing to someone)