or why I decided to refurbish an unused five-year-old PC

I had a thing for free and open source software back when I was around 11 or 12 years old. It was a time when I first opened myself up to the internet: my dad had just hooked us up to a DSL connection, with amazingly fast speeds compared to dial-up. I was no longer content with playing video games or visiting flash websites; I dabbled a bit in programming, first learning qBasic then moving to C++ and Python. At the end of seventh grade, I would get my own laptop, which liberated me at last from the old beige box in the family room. My boredom over the summer days led me to pore over different pages on Wikipedia, where I learned about GNU, its philosophies, what free and open source meant, and of course, Linux.

To the 12-year-old me, Linux represented a new frontier in my thirst for computing knowledge. I mean, this was a...

There’s nothing quite like the smell of a copy shop: The scent of reams of pulp and papers, combined with a whiff of ozone from the photocopiers sure to induce nausea and increase one’s risk of developing some form of cancer if anyone stood there all day.

There’s also this fascination I have with printed material: unsoiled, perfectly typeset text on medium weight paper stock, or, say, a page of physics equations straight out of a college-level textbook, each rendered in the eternally standard but pleasing TeX; the edge of each serif slowly trailing off into nothing, the ink slowly devolving into minuscule drops creating the perfect edge.

The printed word entails creation: a tangible record of one’s writing effort—one easily shared among peers—that can be passed around or duplicated—copied, if you will. Today, people still make a fuss about ending up published, cited, named in a...