Sometimes, People are Awesome

This is going to be a quick, little follow-up to Bigger Box or Bigger Fleet.

I want to give a shout-out to the person reading this, you know who you are...

This wonderful person, who we will call awesomePerson, read my post, found it insightful, gave me some great feedback, and swayed me to spend some money on something I probably shouldn't have...

First of all, in BBBF (Bigger Box or Bigger Fleet), I mentioned that I currently have a FingerBot whose entire responsibility is turning on my home desktop when I am not home, or feeling lazy.

awesomePerson flamed me a little bit for this choice, and suggested that I instead just use my PC's native WOL (wake-on-LAN) functionality that I did not know even existed until they pointed it out.

I didn't mention this in the original post, but I had a Raspberry Pi Zero just sitting around with no purpose until this point.

I found a purpose for it, because I needed a device that is on my home network that I can send a packet from to wake my desktop.

And now, for this new setup, the new laptop, Pi, and desktop are all on the same Tailscale network. From my terminal inside the laptop, one shell alias kicks off a script that SSHs into the Pi, tells the Pi to send a wake packet to my desktop, and lets my motherboard's native WOL support handle the rest:

This is SO much better than the previous setup. It has no dependencies on a physical FingerBot and actually uses something native to my motherboard, go figure.

But the fun does not stop there. We actually spoke further about the topic at hand, that being BB or BF, and I think this person rightfully convinced me in the direction of BB, because I now own a refurbished (only way to buy a MacBook nowadays) M5 MacBook Pro, and I absolutely LOVE this thing. I cannot stop ricing, I cannot stop pushing limits, and I don't think I'll ever get bored.

The best part: macOS is incredible and has its LOVELY bells and whistles - this is sarcasm - but the pure power of this machine, and the way it just flies doing literally anything, is incredible to me after owning an 8 GB RAM Lenovo for 6 years.

I definitely think my setup has improved since my conversation with awesomePerson, and I seriously cannot grasp that just a single conversation can change the direction of my life and wallet in an instant.

Also, I am keeping the setup for my MacOS rice in my dotfiles repo. That is where I will keep updating everything as this journey continues and I find even more ways to make a machine I already love feel like mine.

So, to every single one of you who reads my posts, you are all more than appreciated. For those of you who have thoughts on my writing, experiences, or work, please feel free to reach out and share your thoughts - I promise I am always wanting to nerd out. <3