08/06/2023
Relaxing day getting caught up on things left pending after the VCF. I did the month-end record of the Nest Egg status. I’m still wealthy.
Next I edited the video I made of the G.I.F.T. kids performance Thursday night. Unfortunately the audio balance came out wrong, the musical accompaniment is too low so the singers’ voices are too loud. Still, I tidied it up and passed it on to the people who sponsored it, to send on to the director for his use. Well, anybody can see it for a while until I get around to deleting it. (Skip to the 3:00 minute mark to get over the intro.)
Then I started on a project that took most of the rest of the day. Back in ’19 I bought a cheap HP Chromebook, to take along when traveling instead of my expensive Macbook. A Chromebook runs a cut-down Google-modified form of Linux. It’s basically an Android phone in the shape of a laptop. The thing is, Chromebooks have an expiration date. About three years after purchase, the announce to you that you’ve had your last update and there won’t be any further software updates, security or otherwise. This is currently a major issue for local schools, who bought these things by the truckload to give to students so they could study remotely during the pandemic. Now the schools have literal truckloads of chromebooks that can’t be upgraded or have new apps added.
It seemed to me that there ought to be a way to get the Chromebook to boot plain old Linux. It is an Intel-based system, just cheap PC hardware, why not? Well it turns out the Google had gone out of their way to make that difficult. The firmware that runs the boot operation (what we used to call the BIOS back in the last century) is designed so it can’t be used for a general OS boot, but only Google’s software.
After much searching however, I found Chrultrabook which documents how to do it. It involves a rather complex series of operations ending with completely rewriting the boot ROM, but after that, you have a normal laptop that can boot anything, even Windows.
And I am very pleased to say that I got through that whole process — including disassembling the laptop to remove the “write protect screw” from the motherboard! — and re-flashing the boot ROM, and installing a Linux system, which boots, and runs, and the wifi works and everything. Which made me feel like I AM TEH KING NERD. Bow before me. And now I have a slow, but functional, cheap laptop to take traveling. If I ever travel.
Codgerville 