It’s not really a big deal, but I am currently writing this using a linux kernel I compiled from source, which certainly feels like an accomplishment. The Arch Wiki has made the process fairly easy to follow. I just took the stock Arch Linux configuration without changes for now.
The most important part of this is of course that I have the option to do that, to take the source code of this incredible project and build my own kernel binary.
Defrag all night and wake up to the sound of the hard drive failing.
Now that’s horror.
You have backups. Right. Right??
A friend of mine is a musician. About a decade or two ago I went over to his house and he said that he had to get a new fan to fix his computer. I asked him what was going on, so he turned it on and I heard that tick-tick-tick of the read head. I had to let him know it was his hard drive. He had a lot backed up, but not everything, and not the stuff he’d been working on the past couple weeks. Just a bummer. But he did set up a backup program after that.