That's sweet, I didn't think about using nixos-anywhere for this purpose (just simplifying the install process on a new machine). I used it to great success to install NixOS on a VPS that only had a few OS options like Debian.

To be honest, the animalmaxxing theory was just to amuse myself, it's not a real thing as far as I know. But you ever look at a cat just staring at a wall and think, how is the cat not bored?! It must be because it feels good

If I understand what you mean, I might have experienced something like it. I think I noticed it more when I was a kid, especially while sitting in my desk at school when I'm done with work, any time I could daydream a bit. It's a nice connected feeling to my surroundings, almost feeling like the world is alive but not really.

That's how I interpret this poem When Traveling I Used to See - someone who felt this kind of feeling and experiences/daydreams it as girls watching him. I take it like anthropomorphized version of the feeling you describe.

I suppose it's some kind of mild meditative state, and probably also related to your body being relaxed in general.

Or, alternate theory, maybe you're just animalmaxxing. I mean, you ever look at a goat or something and think how they're so content to just stand there and do fucking nothing for hours? Maybe it feels really damn good to do that for goats. Humans are animals too, maybe you just got to that part of the brain.

There are some browser based solutions like sharedrop.io and file.pizza. I haven't had the latter work for me though, not sure if it's still functional. They work through WebRTC to discover local candidates for receiving files, the same way that video calling typically finds the best connection.

Security

ShareDrop uses a secure and encrypted peer-to-peer connection to transfer information about the file (its name and size) and file data itself. This means that this data is never transfered through any intermediate server but directly between the sender and recipient devices. To achieve this, ShareDrop uses a technology called WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication), which is provided natively by browsers. You can read more about WebRTC security here.

For Linux I started with Wubi to install Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. It installed Linux as a program in Windows and added some kind of hacky boot entry to boot into Ubuntu from your windows partition. Pretty cool, and I'm still pretty nostalgic for the GNOME 2 aesthetic with compiz effects from that time.