Because I was traumatized by the lack of storage space on the ancient desktop, I wanted to have actual storage space on this laptop.

This thing was very heavy and kind of a pain for 10-14 year old me to lug around. Also it was constructed poorly, screws fell out, so my mom’s friend’s husband said he could fix it. But his fix was to drill holes and add long M3 screws to it… look it was really janky.

For the longest time, my mom didn’t let me use it when she was at work because she was afraid I would develop a gaming addiction. So, she tried locking my user account behind a password.

My “social engineering” hack was to leave the computer on, but the lid down, and to not lock the computer when the lid goes down, so when she leaves the house I can go play Team Fortress 2.

Thing is, I think I found guides to remove her password, but that wasn’t enough, I needed to know her password, or else she would suspect that I did something to it. I tried to crack her password using Ophcrack, which was a piece of software that I had no idea how it worked, and a process that I had no idea how to do. It didn’t work, and if I were to do it again, today, I would know that she didn’t use English words so the dictionary attack wouldn’t work – she most definitely used pinyin. I’d probably also secretly film her typing the password in. But anyways, that was the total length of my script kiddie phase.

When I got into modded minecraft around 2012 or so, the FPS was in the range of 30 when I first joined the multiplayer server and wandered into the wilderness, but it decayed slowly into 10FPS. It was at this point that I decided to install Ubuntu on it, but only using Wubi because I was too scared of losing all my data. Modded minecraft on Ubuntu ran at 24FPS! But then it dropped back down to 10 again after some more basebuliding…