A couple of weeks back I noticed that Windbringer was starting to act dodgy in the way that Dell laptops do when they're getting long in the tooth: USB trouble, wifi getting weird (he'd only connect to the legacy 802.11b network), power cell not charging fully and refusing to doo so... Dell is remarkbly consistent in this regard. Not too long after that a good friend of mine visited with one of their System76 laptops and let me tool around with it for a while. This started wheels turning in my head because I new that I was going …
Note: The purpose of this post is mostly to document how to reconfigure laptops like my mom's to boot from a flash drive. The actual imaging process is only parenthetically laid out. If you're in a position where this is something you find yourself doing chances are you're already a competant sysadmin and know how to use dd anyway. However, I can't just leave it unfinished.
Due to how many things are now inextricably tied to one's computers these days, from banking to paying bills, it seemed a good idea to back up my mom's laptop while I was in …
Some time ago I wrote up a minor project I'd done, rigging up Raspberry Pi OS to run on a Pi-Top. And then never revisited the post.
I think you can guess why. It didn't go very well.
Even though all of the secret sauce software is available in the Raspberry Pi OS package repositories these days and there is a process for installing it, for whatever reason they don't quite work right. The speakers were never detected, nor was even the system hub detected. Finally, my tinkering wrecked the desktop configuration entirely. After some frustrated debugging, I kicked it …
A couple of months ago for my Lesser Feast I decided to treat myself to a toy that I've had my eye on for a couple of months: A Pi-Top laptop kit. My fascination with the Raspberry Pi aside (which includes, to be honest, being able to run a rack full of servers in my office without needing to install a 40U rack and a new 220 power feed), it strikes me as being a very useful thing to have under one's desk as a backup deck or possibly a general purpose software development computer. Most laptops have one unique …
As you may or may not have guessed I'm a fan of science fiction (I'd have to be to take the name of a certain time traveling alien as my own) as well as an afficionado of H.P. Lovecraft's C'thul'hu Mythos. Maybe I'm in dire need of calling the crew together for another tabletop RPG night or maybe I've been under a little too much stess recently but lately I've been on a Laundry Files bender. If you've never heard of Charles Stross he's an excellent author who writes this particular series, in which a halpless hacker named Bob …
For a couple of years now the US Department of Homeland Security has reserved the right to confiscate the laptop computers of US citizens for forensic analysis upon re-entry to the country after traveling abroad. It didn't matter if you were on one of their watchlists (and who isn't these days?), it didn't matter if you'd mouthed off to a security guard, it didn't matter whether or not they had probable cause, they could do it and possibly never return it to you depending on when the got around to going through it and how they felt that morning. It's …
An article hit Boing Boing today that raised the hackles on the back of my neck as I read it. The Lower Merion School District just outside of Philadelphia received a grant a couple of years back for laptop computers to issue to its students to use as part of their coursework. In November of last year, the parents of student Blake Robbins received a disciplinary notice pertaining to something unspecified (referred to as "improper behavior") in the affidavit. The disciplinary notice was accompanied by a photograph of Blake while he was at home. The laptops issued by Lower Merion …
