11 April 2024 - Sorting Out My Old Stuff

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 Hello everyone,


I started off the day by returning the laptop I spent most of yesterday fixing to the charity I had taken it from. I plugged it in at their premises, checked that it booted up and allowed the emails to be opened. It did, but as expected it was slow and sluggish. I recommended the Charity Manager see how they get on with it, and if it is not usable then it is time for a new laptop.


Returning home I was confronted by the possessions I had retrieved from my mothers home as they piled up in my only-recently-tidied office waiting to be sorted out. I couldn’t cope with the mess and felt an urge to sort it all out.


So that is exactly what I did.


I spent a good couple of hours setting up my two laptops - one will be used for entertainment, such as playing music, movies and games, while the other one I will keep for work. I need my work laptop to have very few distractions as I really do need to be getting on with things.


I also took the opportunity to personalise both my laptops with a custom background. As much as I do like the default blue background in Windows 11, you simply cannot argue against a bit of personalisation. I settled on a Final Fantasy themed wallpaper. That will do me just nicely. Every time i open either laptop it will make me smile.


Switching to the entertainment laptop, I downloaded VLC Player and Handbrake, and set about converting any DVDs I wanted to keep into digital copies. We live in a world where I can stream and view movies anytime (thanks Netflix and Prime), so this isn’t going to take very long. And the beauty of having two laptops meant I could still be getting on with work while the entertainment laptop converted discs.


I took the opportunity to mess around with my GoPro camera, positioning it at very locations in the room I intended to do some filming in, changing the camera until I was happy with the view, and getting myself comfortable talking to a camera. I soon realised I need to project my voice, and that I look bizarre on camera!


Now I need to learn my script. I will work on that tomorrow.


The rest of the day continued with me sorting out more ‘stuff’. I used my entertainment laptop to listen to some music in the background while I went through more possessions. I had no idea I had so many books! It seems every time I want to focus on learning a specific skill, cooking as an example, I either buy lots of books to teach myself or I receive them from family members as gifts.


I now understand these books have served their purpose and need to be moved on to someone else who can use them. After a couple more hours of sorting I had a new pile of ‘stuff’ to put on eBay and let some other people enjoy them. I’ll dedicate some time tomorrow to listing a few of these things for sale.


The curse of sorting through multimedia is that it can distract you far too much. Sadly I fell into that trap yesterday. I had a DVD for Mr Robot - Series 1, and it made me want to watch it as I hadn’t seen the other series. It didn’t take much persuading, after spending hours sorting through my items, to kick back and watch a few episodes. In the UK we have a free streaming platform called ITVX. I found all the series for Mr Robot on there, and began watching them.


Curse these horrible distractions. It is an exceptional TV show though.
Location: Hartlepool, UK

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