Your 12-year-old laptop doesn't need replacing. Linux needs tuning.
Linux ships with memory management defaults designed for systems with plenty of RAM. Give it a machine with 3.3 GB and a few modern apps competing for that space, and those defaults are too conservative to prevent freezes.
This is my 2013 MacBook Air – Intel Core i5 Haswell at 1.4 GHz, 3.3 GB RAM, new SSD, new battery, running Ubuntu 26.04. It was locking up about once a session. I was close to buying a replacement. Instead I spent an afternoon on three config changes.
The machine now runs without incident. This is what I changed.
The actual problem
Behind the scenes: RSS, deployment, and crawl hygiene
Over the past few days I've been doing behind-the-scenes work on this site – stuff that doesn't change how anything looks but makes it work properly as a thing that exists on the internet.
RSS feeds. The most user-facing change: the site now has RSS feeds. There's a main feed at /rss.xml covering all posts, plus individual feeds for each tag page, so you can subscribe to just hiking or just software projects. I added this via the @astrojs/rss package, which was straightforward once I had the Ghost content API wired up.
An hour, a Claude sub-agent, and a weird world
My Rabbit R1 now plays Grateful Dead shows on demand. I built it in an hour last night using a Claude sub-agent and SpecKit. It is completely useless. It might also be a small window into where software is heading.
Here's what I mean.
On Tuesday I wrote about open source software changing in front of us. The argument was pretty simple: when a language model can help you spin up a custom version of almost any tool for your specific needs, the traditional reason to open source something gets murkier. Why share your code when everyone can just build their own?
New blog stack: what worked, what didn't
I shut down my VPS. After years of paying to run WordPress on a server I managed myself, Partially Peaceful now runs as a static site on Cloudflare Pages. Here's what I built and what I'd do differently.
The stack
Ghost handles writing and publishing. It runs in a Docker container on a private machine – reachable only over Tailscale, my personal VPN mesh. No public Ghost URL exists. I post from my phone the same way I always did; the Ghost mobile interface is solid.
