Moving to India, and Re-Treasuring

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but the family is going to be moving to India for a while. It met my wife in India, we got married, and soon enough moved to the US, because that was my job base. That was back in 2008. Now we’re in 2025, I’ve retired from MSFT, and it’s time to go back and be interactive with that side of the family.

There is sure to be a lot of adventure ahead, with trials, tribulations, triumphs and rewards. The only thing for certain, is that we’re not certain how it will turn out, but we’re up for the challenges, so here we go.

The process…

We have a nice 4 bedroom house, with a couple extra living spaces, and a garage. You can be sure that this tinkering tech bro has filled every nook and cranny of my allotted man cave space with every doo dad and doohickey known to man. It’s all fun and games until you have to move things.

Since we’re moving half way around the world, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to truly de-treasure, so that I can start afresh. This has been a running theme, and I’ve written about ditching old electronics in the past. But, this is different. This time around, I really mean it!

Me and the kids had a little contest. I had a box of old tv streaming devices, and I said “guess how many there are?”. 7… 9…? Turns out there are 14 streaming devices in our home at present. Only 4 of them are attached to screens and active on a regular basis. 3 of those are Apple TV, and one is still a google tv holdout. All the others are everything under the sun. Roku, Amazon fire stick, google dongles of every generation. I mean, it has been 16 years of accumulating these things, and they change often enough that you end up getting a new one every couple of years. If you have more than one screen, it adds up. Now that we’ve put Apple TV on all screens, I don’t think there’s going to be a change up there for a while. But, we’re leaving them all behind anyway, so we’ll have to purchase new ones, or do we?

Also not making the cut, the 7 monitors that are sitting right in front of my face right now. This is my daily driver workspace. Three 4k displays offer a nice panoramic view, allowing me to watch tube, code, and read docs, all at once. All from a 7 year old intel desktop machine I personally put together. All that is being replaced by a single M4 Mac mini, with two studio displays, keyboard, and mouse. Nice thing about that setup, the mini can certainly do what the Apple TV boxes were doing, so maybe we don’t need to get any more of those. One more 43″ monitor to run other stuff on, and we’re all set.

Over the years, we’ve had various forms of external storage. Back in 2011, I built a nice Synology setup, and it’s been running ever since. Mostly it’s been the place for archiving dvd content, as well as family pictures and the occasional dump of my dev machine. I’ve had Western Digital drives, SanDisk, key fobs, USB sticks, you name it. Typically 500Gb – 1Tb. All that is being left behind in favor of SanDisk 4Tb SSDs. I mean, these things are so small, silent, and just get the job done. All the DVDs fit on a single drive (all converted to mlv format). Another one holds all my repos, and yet another one holds the entirety of our family photo albums.

Speaking of those albums, for various reasons, the entirety of about 80 years of family photo albums have landed in my possession. It’s a lot. An encyclopedic amount of photos, that we cart from place to place, just in case someone wants to crack one of those albums open to see aunt Mable when she was a toddler. Well, my family is very small in the US, and no-one has cracked those albums open for at least 10 years. So, we’ve taken the opportunity to digitize the lot. One by one, thousands of pictures scanned, and stored. All the physical albums are going to do their part to add structure to the landfill.

What about 3D printing? Gave away the smallest of the Prusa mini machines, along with some plastic. All the trinkets that I’ve printed, but not actually used, have headed to the recycling bin. The Bambu Labs P1S is coming with us, and will be the cornerstone of a new chapter in micro manufacturing!

And on to the garage. Oh my gosh have I amassed a nice set of tools. The best SawStop table saw, the best jointer, routers, work table, floor standing drill press, laser cutter from G.Weike!! Problem is, India is 220v 50Hz. Yes, you can get converters, but from my last experience living in India, I know this is not the way to go. Your machines will ultimately fry. So, instead, I’m only bringing battery operated tools. Lucky for me, I’ve amassed a fair amount of Milwaukee tools over the past few years, as well as the containers to store them in. I only had to tell the movers “everything in red”, and that’s it for the garage. Well, that and the bicycles, helmets, one work table, but that’s it!!

Circling back through the house, we found new homes for a number of items, from furniture, to kitchenware. I mean, no matter how much we gave away, there always seems to be another drawer that has a little bit more. But now that the movers are actually here packing up, it brings clarity to the situation. If it didn’t get packed, it was not a high enough priority, so you can let it go. As I told my son, you can hold onto that 15 year old Xbox 360, or you can let it go, and we can buy a new Nintendo Switch…

That’s the way this re-treasuring is going. If I let go of 4 or 5 old storage solutions, I can replace them with one new one, which is smaller, faster, and more energy efficient, with a longer life. Throw away the physical DVDs, keep the copies, and rely on streaming more.

There’s even our original MacBook Pro (circa 2012). Finally found its charging brick, and the thing is still as much of a beast as it was before I got the MacBook Air. I mean, it’s still fast, still runs Windows, Mac, and Linux, still as spry as ever. But, the battery has seen better days, and it’s not worth replacing, so it’s permanently tethered to its charger. This is a nice machine to be gifted to the next owner, so they can have their way with it. It doesn’t make sense to take it to apple recycling, because it’s still a very much viable machine.

Then there’s the iPads. I mean, we somehow had about 4 of them, beyond the recent M4 iPad Pro. They go back as far as iPads have existed. They don’t age particularly well though. They’ve become unusable, not like the MacBook Pro. The ones that can hardly boot, are headed to the recyclers. I would not even gift them, because that’s essentially just giving someone a headache to deal with.

It goes on and on. We have a 4 bedroom house, but we’re really only taking a 3 bedroom apartment’s worth of stuff, while leaving the bulk of stuff behind.

It’s not that I’m looking forward to replacing all those years of accumulated stuff with new accumulations, but I am looking forward to a project directed accumulation, where I only get things that I’m using most immediately.

So, it’s off to India we go!