Category: Technology

Kids these days don’t always recognize quality, but they’re starting to find it, anyway.

PetaPixel ran a story last month about used camera prices going up. This wasn’t necessarily news to me, as someone who has, more than once, blogged on here about picking up thrift store cameras for classroom use.

At first I noticed it with the Canon Vixia models. Vixia as a line still exists, but they’re larger, more professional models only these days. The tinier ones, like the Canon VIXIA HF R400? I got so much work out of them with my students. For the price they had amazing lenses as well as 1/8″ jacks for audio in and out.

I did occasionally manage to snag one or two used models, but these days the working ones go for the same as what they cost brand new, if not more.

Same is true with compact cameras. Yeah, there’s a resurgence of new models out there, but the really popular ones are models that were discontinued years ago. Back in 2020 I was able to pick up a bunch of them for a song. Now? I don’t even place a bid – especially if they’re a color that isn’t silver or black.

I’m aware that most of the renewed demand is for the vintage aesthetic of old cameras. They aren’t just functional, using one itself is a fashion statement. (I’m not disagreeing, there’s a reason my favorite still camera right now is a Camp Snap Pro.)

But also, none of these older cameras have AI “features” while still having decent enough sensors and lenses to do what’s needed.

Heck, a lot of the older models will run off of AA batteries, taking one less proprietary part off of the “hope it exists in a few years” list.

The most popular camera in my room is not the best camera if you’re looking for megapixels, sensor size, or features. It’s the one that’s pink, that I got for @ $15 including shipping.

But I’d also argue it does a better job taking a photo than most phones my students bring to school. It’s dedicated towards that end, with none of the distractions baked into an always online device.

If I could still get that model for $15, I’d buy a class set.

(This is my twenty-ninth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

(TL;DR: College Surplus stores are neat!)

The Switch and Click YouTube channel recently published a video where they end with a decent desktop computer that doesn’t break the bank.

I like a lot (though not all) of what I see from that specific channel. They have some neat ideas and while they don’t explain every step they at least go over enough to let me know if I should research further to do a thing myself.

This time around, I’d not suggest the average person try what they did, because they aren’t average people.

Part of the premise of this particular video has them going to Facebook Marketplace to get parts to build a computer and/or a fully built computer that they can upgrade. This involved getting into the guts of the machine, diagnosing problems and bottlenecks, and making sure that the new parts are actual improvements.

For them, it seems trivial.

For me, who has built a few computers in my day, it would be a challenge.

For the average person who needs to go this route because they cannot afford a computer any other way, this is a lot of additional work with no guaranteed payoff, meaning that money could just go down the drain.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled when someone with an interest gets into computer building and maintenance. I think it’s a neat hobby that can with a little more work become a source of income.

I am the only person in my family who thinks this is neat, and one of them has an engineering degree. Do I think they could manage it? Yes! There’s enough instructions out there and my family members tend to have decent critical thinking skills.

… But that’s not how they want to spend their time, and for several of them they don’t have the time to spend doing this.

I’ve had the luxury of having enough income and leisure time to do what I’ve done. If someone doesn’t have both of those I will not fault them for going a different route.

So what options are left?

Sadly, not a ton of good ones. As much a fan as I am of thrift stores, it’s my experiences (some hard-earned) that keep me from getting a lemon. That took time. As much as I despise Meta, I’ve heard good things about deals found there, but that takes more time and can include more risks.

That leaves most thinking their only choices are the big online stores like Amazon, Woot (which is Amazon’s store for refurbished, open box, and clearance items), and NewEgg. I confess that back in the day before I kicked the habit of sending money for Bezos’ yacht, I got more than one decent machine from Woot – most of which are still working just fine today, including a couple that are over a decade old. If you’re low on cash and time, I wouldn’t blame you for using Woot even if I have enough privilege to avoid it.

But there’s another neat one: Surplus Stores.

There’s a few like this, I’m sure, but I found out these exist when a friend told me about her local university’s outlet for selling surplus and used items.

Can I get better deals from Goodwill’s online auctions? Absolutely, but that takes time and luck.

Compare that to MSU’s store, where I can just go to the Desktop category and buy a desktop.

It’s not perfect. You still need to read the descriptions to make sure you know what you’re getting. (That $20 computer with 16GB of RAM sounds great, but it’s that cheap because you need to install a hard drive and also the processor’s old enough and low power enough that the RAM won’t be the bottleneck for how fast it’s running.) But there’s no bidding wars and a lot of these should work out of the box for way less than what Switch & Click paid for their example computer in their video.

If it wasn’t for how much I’ve spent on back-to-school items already, I’d be inclined to get one or two of these myself.

You know…

Just in case I need them.

(This is my twenty-first post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Over on PetaPixel, Jaron Schneider just published a review of an external SSD. I don’t tend to read too many reviews of new gear mainly because I tend to buy it after it hasn’t been new for a year or more, but this did get me thinking how I store things.

Over the years I’ve gotten increasingly disillusioned with cloud storage services. It’s said that “The cloud is just someone else’s computer,” which is very much true unless you’re putting your own Network Accessible Storage out there on the internet. (I will not be going over how to do that, I’m happy with my NAS being Intranet only, thank you very much.)

So what happens when the cloud storage company decides to just delete your stuff? Yes, that’s happened. Recently, in fact.

(Saving you a click: Dropbox was likely using AI to scan accounts for illegal material and it allegedly incorrectly labeled an image of the user’s son riding a Roomba as something evil. No appeal, all content not backed up went poof.)

Meanwhile, I’m here telling my students to put all of their work in their school-issued Google Drives.

This year, I’m trying something different.

Well, mostly different. My district is heavily embedded in the Google ecosystem, if I try to throw that out the window too many things will break. I can still move a bit further away, though.

Teaching in a computer lab means we don’t have much of a supply list, but I’m adding a 16 GB or larger flash drive to it. That “or larger” is hopefully going to do some heavy lifting, but I think we can get by with 16 if we have to since we don’t do any 4k editing.

“But Aaron,” I ask myself, because I’m the only one here, “What about the families that can’t afford a flash drive with the current prices skyrocketing due to on-again-off-again tariffs and AI data centers hogging all available storage manufacturing?”

I’m glad I asked! In my regular trolling of Goodwill, I’ve amassed what’s effectively a class set of flash drives.

(My method for bringing costs down, if you’re interested in knowing, was to search for the word “lot” on ShopGoodwill.com. One thumb drive would be too expensive to ship, but every now and then someone tossed a dozen of them in a box to sell together for the exact same shipping cost.)

Ideally families will be getting their own, at larger sizes than 16GB, but if they can’t or don’t, I have some they can sign out in the same way a band student might get a school instrument.

(With the same punishment for losing/destroying it, because they’re not so cheap any more.)

These drives won’t be for everything; At that size, they can’t be. But they CAN be for current projects and commonly used files, at the very least. This will free up space on the lab computers (they’ve got 256GB each, not a lot by today’s standards) while also allowing me more flexibility with seating arrangements. I can move a student as needed and if their important work can’t move with them, they’ve been saving it in the wrong spot.

On top of that, they can take the flash drives home to get things done as well.

“But Aaron,” I hear me ask again, “Couldn’t they just back things up in Google Drive to manage the same thing?”

Well, yes, but that requires decent internet. My school has it, I can’t guarantee it for my students at home.

(If you listen to my students, internet outages are the primary reason assignments cannot be handed in after 11pm on the night they’re due. Or at least, that’s what the emails sent at 11:50pm tell me.)

My hope is this method will help them better understand file and folder structures, so they can move away from the “toss it all in Google Drive and find it later” strategy that has been hit or miss for some time now, especially with how raw photos and video files are not given rather descriptive names by their cameras.

And maybe, just maybe, I can get some of them to rely a little bit less on putting everything on someone else’s computer.

(Final note: It is not lost on me that my blog description now reads “Old man yells at cloud computing” and it still took 21 days into Blaugust for me to complain about cloud computing.)

(This is my eighteenth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

I don’t try to hide the fact that I use Linux as my OS of choice, but it’s not because I’m a rabid fan. It’s true what they say about it: “Linux would be the worst OS if it wasn’t for every other OS.”

So while I’m sitting back and relaxing using my ad-free, bloatware-free computing experience, I thought I’d list some things I dislike about the experience, limited to the traditional 5 but not necessarily placed in a particular order.

5: Hard-Coded Incompatibility

I figure I might as well start off with one of the major complaints about Linux: That so many things won’t work in it.

The truth is far less severe. Thanks to Wine and Valve’s work on Proton (which is Wine with more effort to get video games to run), if I can’t find a version of the software or a suitable replacement, I can usually still just run the Windows version on Linux.

Sure, Proton is meant for game compatibility, but I’ve gotten other software to run in it just fine. Even so, this usually isn’t much of an issue because there’s almost always something coded for Linux that is either a suitable replacement or, frequently, is the same software, made by the same programming team, but for Linux.

But this isn’t about what’s working. Some companies have hard-coded checks in place, and unless I have a full emulation setup (read: I open Windows in Linux so I’m running 2 operating systems for the price of … 2 operating systems) so that the software’s running in Windows anyway, it just won’t work.

This has only personally been a problem for me with one program: The software I use for my vinyl cutter. This isn’t enough to drag me back to Windows, but it’s annoying.

(Bonus complaint: Some web-based apps will do this as well, but for Chrome. Google Meet has no problems with audio or video in Firefox-based browsers, and yet some 3rd parties insist they can only access your camera and microphone if you’re using a Chrome-based browser. I fail to see how this is anything other than lazy programming when the stance is coming from a rather large company.)

4: Driver Compatibility

This is, again, a rare occurrence, but most of my troubleshooting on Linux, if measured in hours or frustration, has been spent solving this problem.

A lot of hardware just works when I plug it into a computer running Linux. I’ll have the occasional hiccup with Bluetooth, but no more than I did when I used Windows because the problem’s with Bluetooth, not the OS.

There’s two exceptions to this: The new and the niche.

I’ve rarely had the opportunity to install Linux on a freshly manufactured computer, but most of those times something failed to work. The drivers (bits of software that let the hardware talk to the rest of the software) might be out there, but not incorporated into the OS quite yet. Sometimes I’ll find a forum post where someone managed or discovered a workaround and I’ll install some hope-it’s-not-shady code with the terminal so *poof* now I have Wi-Fi on this new machine, but frequently, if I can afford to wait, the problem gets solved in a way where an update will come down the line without me having to do anything strenuous.

(I’m impatient, so waiting is not something I tend to do.)

And then there’s the niche products. Personally, I’ve encountered this with some older (before 2008) tablets and one specific portable USB monitor I picked up at a thrift store. Other devices in those categories will work just fine, but if there isn’t a programmer interested in getting it to run on Linux (or a company willing to pay a programmer to do this) then best case scenario I have something for someone else to use.

3: “Helpful” Instructions

While there’s a lot of incredible resources online for the novice Linux user, most are created/shared for free, by amateur enthusiasts.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and they’ve gotten me out of a jam multiple times (see #4 on this list), but a guide isn’t always written with the assumption that the target audience is a novice.

Or also possible: The author has a different bar for “novice,” and it’s higher than where the actual novice can reach.

On many occasions I’ve found a tutorial for solving an issue that listed step after step after step, with commands I could copy/paste into terminal, but then the whole thing didn’t work because there was something so obvious to the author they didn’t include it, but it was kind of necessary if you wanted a good result.

You know, the classic “Step 1, Step 2, ?????, Step 4” scenario, but the question marks weren’t even implied and Step 4 was labeled Step 3.

(And this is all from people who by all accounts legitimately want to be helpful. I’ve seen others complain about Linux gatekeepers but because I spend less time asking for help on forums than I spend looking for solved problems, I don’t tend to encounter as many of those. When I do see them, it’s because I scrolled past the response that included the solution.)

2: AI Slop

Here we go, the bane of my existence is coming for me even here, in my sanctuary.

One of the many aspects of artistic expression that is getting hit hard by prompt writers posing as creative geniuses is coding, and the advent of “vibe coders” legitimately thinking they’re being helpful by submitting code when they can’t explain how it works is putting a lot of extra strain on the people in charge of approving/denying proposed changes.

It’s not just that those approving the code have a lot more things to sift through, it’s also that the quality of what they have to examine is greatly reduced, with the people “writing” it unable to explain how it works.

If you don’t understand how it works, you’re not going to be able to maintain it. And no, “I’ll just ask an AI to maintain it” is not the solution. You don’t solve a slop problem by stirring the slop around a bit.

The whole thing is stressful enough to make some maintainers want to leave, and any time that happens the brain drain on a project can be intense.

Some projects are implementing “no AI code” policies, either as outright bans or at least limiting the AI assistance to changes that can be explained by the person submitting them to compensate for this.

You might think “Oh, well people will just lie about the AI stuff, then,” but unexplainable code is still unexplainable, and also the vibe coders seem to really like to brag about their lack of talent.

1: Less Than Progressive Personalities

I was very generous with the name for this section, but yeah, some of the heavy hitters in the Linux world are less than savory.

Let’s look at the GNU Licensed Image Manipulation Program, frequently touted as an excellent alternative to Adobe Photoshop for those who want to get out from that particular corporate entity’s subscription racket.

Thing is, almost no one calls it the “GNU Licensed Image Manipulation Program.” That’s what its acronym stands for, in theory, but it’s actually a “backronym,” where the person behind it really just wanted to name it after an abeleist slur they’d seen used in Pulp Fiction.

There’s alternatives to it (I really like Inkscape), but none of the actively maintained ones have the same feature parity. On a whole the FOSS community ignores that its name is a slur, isn’t aware, or begrudgingly uses it anyway because for what it does there isn’t a lot of good competition. Those who abandoned it for an alternative seem to be few and far between.

And then there’s Framework, which has made a name for itself as a computer company driven to make repairable laptops that you can build yourself. I really want to like Framework, and I want to see other companies trying to compete with them to bring the cost of repairable computers down.

And then they went and gave money to a right-wing extremist. When confronted, their CEO said they’re trying to maintain a “big tent.”

There was some initial push-back about this, but outside of a few vocal pockets this seems to have completely died out. Those who care enough will likely not buy Framework again (if ever). Those who care but not as much as having a repairable laptop when there’s practically no competitors in that niche will silently keep buying Framework. Everyone else decided it was a non-issue or got very, very vocal in support of right-wing extremists.

Do I think this is typical of all Linux users? Of course not, but it bothers me that any percentage of them are like this and that good alternatives to what they provide aren’t readily available.