Matt posted about Facebook vs. Twitter on Medium. We were talking the other day about this and I said something that occurred to me during our conversation. Facebook vs. Twitter is essentially real names vs user names. And it makes sense that most of my friends from the old days of the web, when user names were king, have gravitated to Twitter. While all the people we were getting away from have taken to Facebook.

I did create a Facebook account many years ago, but deleted it. Then when MLKSHK was starting up I created another so I could make a MLKSHK page, but Facebook itself has never, ever been interesting to me.

After I left FM I had lunch with a Facebook co-founder. We could not be more in disagreement about real identity versus fake names. I left that conversation feeling like perhaps I had it all wrong and I should give in to the world of real names, but Twitter has validated my feelings about what some people want, and I love that.

For my birthday a couple of weeks ago my friend Omar gave me a Raspberry Pi. I’d been aware of them since in 2011, but I never got around to buying one.

I’ve been toying with it the past few nights as I have had time. After buying the case above, I had to scrounge up a USB keyboard, then an SD card, then a monitor I could use that took HDMI input. At every turn it was some piece of tech I had discarded or at some point put away in a box. I didn’t even have an extra micro-USB cable so I am using the one that came with my Kindle.

But now that it is running I have fallen in love with this little computer. It is one of those things you think you understand until you actually get one in your hands and powered up.

Now I can play with these little ideas I’ve had, on a computer in my house, that didn’t cost $1,000, and only pennies to keep running 24/7. These are small ideas: a little Spyonit app I’ve been wanting but didn’t feel like paying an EC2 instance for, a big Twitter API idea that I have been toying with that will simply publish static pages to S3, and another idea I had about coordinating backups.

There is something indescribably pleasing about this thing. It feels like the time when I owned computers purely for fun. (And at 512Mb it has even more RAM than those computers.)