Laptop Lid Stickers


Because of my age relative to the era of computer, for a good portion of my life computers were Serious Things used for work and school. They also belonged to the family and there’s no way we could have gotten away with putting stickers on them without getting in trouble. So back in 2006 when I went to Blackhat and Defcon, for the first time I saw people’s laptops covered in stickers. The EEE PC (new at the time) had a meetup session where I saw others who’d painted their machines various colors. I’d ended up with a bunch of stickers after Blackhat and Defcon, so I decorated my first-ever laptop, an Acer.

The Acer is still in the family. It was my daughter’s laptop until she got a new one from my mom, right in time for COVID-19 to hit and necessitate a modern laptop for her to use in her schoolwork. As you can see, most of my stickers there are from that first Blackhat/Defcon trip. The others are from the Free Software Foundation, of which I was a member at the time. The Parker Solar Probe sticker is relatively new. For now the Acer remains powered off except when I occasionally pull it out to update Debian. This may end up being for the twins when they start kindergarten.

The Acer Aspire was my travel netbook for a long time. It’s mostly got stickers from bands I’ve seen in concert recently as well as some Red Hat stickers from from local Red Hat events I’ve been to.

This is my current main laptop. Once again, there are lots of stickers from Red Hat, including one that declares my love of both Fedora and Python. I got both NASA stickers on a recent trip to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. And, of course, anyone who has followed me long enough knows how important Extra Life is to me. We’ll see how this one continues to evolve as I get more stickers (once COVID is done and we’re going to conferences again).