{"id":136,"date":"2017-07-27T19:32:22","date_gmt":"2017-07-27T23:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/?p=136"},"modified":"2017-07-27T19:32:22","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T23:32:22","slug":"i-broke-a-laptop-to-write-this-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":"I Broke a Laptop to Write This Post."},"content":{"rendered":"

Two years ago, I bought myself a laptop with a discrete graphics card–a dedicated graphics chip which enabled me to play the games I wanted to on my computer. It was my first experiment with real PC gaming. I’ve always been an Xbox person.<\/p>\n

It works great, and I love the convenience and flexibility of playing games on my laptop. Unfortunately, it works so well that I rarely want to use my laptop for anything else, which I view as a waste of its power and capabilities. All my plans for productivity seem to disappear when I open Steam and pick out something to play.<\/p>\n

But I’ve wanted to get back into blogging for some time now. I also want to be super-productive at work this year. So here’s what I just did:<\/p>\n

In my office is the computer I’m currently using: A cheap Sony laptop that’s now more than seven years old. It can’t play games, it weighs a ton, the battery only lasts an hour, the hard drive is slow, the processor is weak, and it has half the memory. Dusting off my old college skills, I installed Linux on a chunk of the hard drive. I’m pretty much all Windows, all day, but I know enough about Linux to be very dangerous. All I have installed on it is a browser and an office suite.<\/p>\n

It all came about when someone mentioned The Paradox of Choice<\/a>, a great book which I’m overdue to reread. The bottom line is that, sometimes, having lots of choices causes a paralyzing overload. Sometimes, less is more.<\/p>\n

So I’m here on my “sabotaged” laptop which will pretty much only do this right now, and I have to say, it feels pretty good! I’m looking forward to hopefully making this a continuous part of my growth plan for this year.<\/p>\n

Now, I think I’ve earned some Xbox time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two years ago, I bought myself a laptop with a discrete graphics card–a dedicated graphics chip which enabled me to play the games I wanted to on my computer. It was my first experiment with real PC gaming. I’ve always been an Xbox person. It works great, and I love the convenience and flexibility of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[33,30,29,31,32,28],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-books","tag-dgpu","tag-gaming","tag-graphics","tag-motivation","tag-xbox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}