First week of January 2026
I went off the rails a little for the holiday. I managed to finish a surprise project but everything else fell by the wayside.
The typewriter
I've been working on setting up a low powered computer with Alpine Linux. You know how people are always saying Linux is so easy now that anyone can do it? Don't do that with Alpine Linux. It was originally intended for running on high security, niche devices. It's probably most commonly used in Docker images. Most people who interact with it probably don't put it on an actual computer.
Why did I want to? I've been using Linux since 2000. Possibly a little earlier. The first time I used it, I did it on an aging computer that I couldn't afford to upgrade. That describes most of the computers I've used it on, actually. The challenge in most of those cases was stripping something pretty full spec down to the point where it ran pretty tolerably.
In this case, I wanted to do it on purpose. On finding out about Alpine, I realized I had the perfect opportunity. The regular install's ISO takes up less than 400 MiB of space. Everything you want, you're adding to that count. Putting Xfce on it along with some other packages I needed have taken me to about 2 GiB. I'd like to set it up so it doesn't load Xfce by default but, right now, I'm most focused on making it a writing computer.
And technically it is. I'm typing this on it right now. The network connection is off. I'm typing this using the micro text editor from a virtual terminal.
When I get it back to a network, I'll run a Unison profile I created. It will copy this and any other local changes up to the network.
Some of my scripts aren't working ... yet but the Typewriter lives.
Update since I wrote the previous section
Turning off Xfce on boot turned out to be much easier than my experience with LXQt. I disabled automatic startup for the display manager using the rc-update del command used in Alpine for removing services from run groups.
When I do want to load the GUI, I type startx and it comes up.
For micro to be a good prose writing tool, I had to put this in .config/micro/settings.json:
{
"softwrap": true,
"wordwrap": true
}
To make Unison work the way I wanted, I created the profile using the GUI on my main Linux computer and adjusted it until it worked the way I wanted. I did a replace all on paths that were specific to my main Linux computer.
I've also adapted some of my writing related scripts for use on Alpine.
Outcomes
Due in part to Typewriter, I wrote almost 13K words in the last week. Typewriter has only been really operational for three writing days and, in those writing days, I wrote 10.5K words. That's an average of 3.3K words per day.
For me, those are pretty good numbers. If those are sustainable, I could write about 23K in a week.
Next week's goals
This is going to be a little sparse for a while.
- Figure out my next project
- Get some words written
- Record at least one video
The current projects are resuming The Novel, starting work on Fallen Heaven, or writing book 3 of Vay Ideal.
I'm leaning toward working on a novel because I think a published Novel will probably drive some purchases of the Vay Ideal books. Adding additional Vay Ideal books while I'm not really having sales on Vay Ideal yet is probably not a useful thing at the moment.
With my improved word count from Typewriter, I did a bit of work on both Book 3 and The Novel.