Ask HN: How do you choose a hostname for personal devices?

I’ve been using sci-fi authors. My laptop is “lem”, the cluster is “Gibson” with machines numbered from zero. The Mac Mini is “harlan” after Harlan Ellison (didn’t want it to be confused with that Oracle guy). The Windows machine is named “Brian” after Brian Herbert, because he is a terrible writer. There’s also Douglas Adams, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Charlie Stross, and many others.

I name my machines after Neutral Milk Hotel song titles and lyrics

I use old man names, old man names in this case being those names which where archaic when I was little and only very old men had them. No idea why, just started doing it 25 years ago and kept it up. But hostname for my main computer has always been yeoman, I assume it is because it does the yeoman's share but I really don't remember, might have just been a whim.

username+location

amino acids, alkanes, or elements

[dead]

I'm boring and usually just call them by their function. "Gaming desktop", "TV streamer", "work laptop", etc.

Descriptive words translated into an uncommon language

Anime names. I’m partial to vegeta and goku.

I name mine after major rivers. Had a mekong, nile, danube. Sometimes it’s wordplay, my first Mac was Potomac.

Norse mythology

For a long time I used names of (usually) the transitional metals on the periodic table. It started just as "Titanium" for a PowerBook G4 since that was its codename anyway, but went on from there.

Then it transitioned to plants and trees: aster, begonia, willow, maple. I had a shift in life where I began to value the organic world more than dry, boring metals.

I settled on US presidents, in order, a while back.

Currently on Fillmore.

I’ve had pet rabbit nearly my entire life and tend to name my devices after things rabbits do or nicknames I’ve given them - hopper, sniffer, nibbler, loafy, etc…

My college computer lab used element names. The ones hardest to spell had the least amount of people connected to them.

Famous chemists, physicists and computer scientists. Turing, Bernoulli, Lovelace etc… with a rough association between the namesake and function.

Prior to that was using Jupiter and its moons but ran out of named ones.

I name hosts after a place in the city I live in that is not where I live. Some hostnames from recent years are khamovnik, whitby, zamalek, sanduny.

It's interesting because it makes me consider places that I don't go to every day, and then rate them for "hostnameability" and so on. Ends up with hostnames being quite memorable.

OwnerType

JakeBook = MBP

JakePods = AirPods

JanePad = iPad

Short, easy to tell whose device is which in the house, uncreative.

Rivers, all lowercase.

My first Linux machine was `congo`. My oldest extent one is `volga`. And my beefiest (biggest) machine is `nile`.

My local backup NAS is `danube`, and my offsite server is `yangtze`.

If I were you, and didn't want boring job-themed names, choose a theme and use it.

You could choose mountains, and your biggest machine could be `everest`, while your most sacred could be `olympus`.

Or you could choose cities, Pokemon, anime characters, authors, fish, mammals, etc. Any category with a lot of items. Seas, for example, won't work because there aren't many.

Pokemon.

Bonus: If you remember the numbers and do static assigment, now you have a scheme to map names to IP addresses in your head. An old Pokemon poster becomes an address lookup table.

Any familiar theme with an ordering (periodic table?) should do the same!

I usually just use my name (or shortened username) + the laptop model. Like "resxps" if I had a Dell XPS, or "respad" if I had a Thinkpad.

all of mine are named after songs by the Japanese noise band Boredoms. so far I have TV Scorpion, Mama Brain, Chocolate Synthesizer, Telehorse Uma, Pop Tatari, Seadrum, Super Going, and Domsbore

I use 'hacker' terms.

I've got Mainframe (my server), Phreak (my phone), Baud (my laptop), etc.

Names from Black history and the arts: frederick, joplin, randolph, etc

Devices in my house are prefixed with the owner of the device (CRDNL- or CZZN-) then generally around the reason on why the device was built/upgraded.

For example, I've got CRDNL-NIPPON for a machine that I was intending to take with me to Japan, and my partner's machine is CZZN-VTUBER for when she was getting into being... a VTuber.

Human languages. There are more than 7000 and I highly doubt I’ll ever have more than a few hundred devices in my lifetime.