By the time this is published, catrat.social will have returned, a new server will have been added to my server list, and this blog will also have returned.
Let’s start with the story of Wheatley.
One day, my neighbor left their Dell Optiplex on their porch because it wasn’t working.
When I saw it, I took it because… who do you think I am??
I didn’t realize it wasn’t working until I plugged it in, so I left it lay for a while.
However, while on a call with chloe, I decided to open the thing up and try fixing it myself.
When I opened it up, I had no fucking clue what to do, so I took a RAM stick out and put it back in.
After struggling to put it back in for a while, I eventually did, and when I pressed the power button, I was greeted with this:
Damn! That shit worked!
It was running Windows 10, and I attempted to download Rufus to install Debian onto it, however the Wi-Fi wasn’t working. So I opened it back up again and was greeted with no Wi-Fi card.
So, I went to eBay and ordered the cheapest USB Wi-Fi dongle I could find. In the meantime though, I did manage to install Debian on it. However, since I didn’t have internet, there was barely anything on it. No package manager or anything.
So, while waiting for this card to arrive, I remembered that my neighbors have a shit ton of motherboards in their yard for some reason, so I looked through it to no avail. In fact, I cut my finger trying to take what I thought was a Wi-Fi card out, but it ended up being a RAM stick.
I had no choice but to wait, and since I already decided to run catrat.social on this thing, I designed a theme using Stylus and minimal CSS knowledge.
This was made with my dark blue and red-that-certainly-has-a-hexcode colors, which is kind of obvious here. Keep in mind this is an early version, so it isn’t polished yet.
While working on this theme, though, I decided to check the porch where I got the OptiPlex, and to my surprise, I found an Inspiron!
I checked to see if it powered on, and it did!
It came with a Wi-Fi card too, so I installed Debian and started work on catrat.social.
Here’s a post I made during this process:
And, after an overnight installation of the Mastodon GitHub repository and everything else the next day, catrat.social is back.
I think that’s where I’m gonna end this article. If you like the new site layout, let me know! :3
EDIT: catrat.social has turned into a personal Sharkey instance for friends. If you want to sign up, sorry. (If you’re a friend, just reach out to me and I’ll give you an invite code.) So it’s gone now LOL