Geekspeak of Jorune

Once upon a time a Kaypro //, and later 10, was all I needed.

It is official. I will be leaving Macintosh with the zapping of my Mac mini in Hurricane Florence's last hurrah. We have very unstable power in this area of North Carolina. Brownouts happen sometimes, surgery during some storms. But spikes are way beyond even the best surge protectors ability to insulate from the massive sudden increase of voltage.

I have a very good burger protector with batter backup, but the spike has gotten through to kill my last three machines.

What is convenient is the April 2017 spike destroyed the hard disk on my iMac. I was able to to replace it with a MacMini through a friend who rose from the past to help. The Mini was brought down last week with the spike, but that spike destroyed the CPU. I was able to cobble together a working system with the disk-fried CPU and an external 10.12 SOX FireWire backup disk rom back when that computer was working, and I had a new 10.13 system on an external USB 3.0 disk. 

I have a catalog account where prices are higher but they extend credit to me, so I will get a Windows 10 laptop (HP Pavillion) with 8Gigs and an 500Gig internal, where I will immediately co-install a Linux system. I've been giving myself some time to learn Linux but time has come to get serious. 

I need to transfer all of my Adobe CC files (InDesign, Photoshop and PremierPro) to things that will run on open source products. I am shifting away from being a publisher for anything but my own writing (non-Jorune) so the layout and pdf-online concerns are not as great.

In a pinch I will be able to boot from the iMac with the external drive and use old legal CS6 Adobe products, but I would have to be pushed for that. Open source has some good PDF manipulation tools, so those may be sufficient. 

Interesting that all this comes as I've made the decision to closeup Jorune shop - maybe not forever, but I'm down to a couple of projects to be done, and was moving into a new phase of pushing my writing anyway. My physical problems with neuropathy and vision make my creative time much more limited. So open source seems to be the way to go.

But the ride is never boring.