Q3 2023 Update

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Greetings, all! Outside of hiking and the job hunt, there’s not much to update on here for now, but I am still alive and active!

The original plan was to sell a bunch of self-refurbished and wiped machines on a store here. Turns out I didn’t have enough traffic for that, due to not sticking to a posting schedule, so I went ahead and listed the original Corsair One Pro on a family member’s eBay.

As my Dell G5 5505 is casually experiencing cpu errors in the journal and dmesg logs on a bi-daily basis, I’ve gone ahead and completely wiped both drives in it. If my tinkery friend ends up not wanting it, I’ll probably gut what parts I can reuse out of it and dispose of the hull at an ewaste facility in Denver.

Next, I took the rear panel off the T440p that I’ve used for a good few years. More on my known computer timeline on my current hardware page here. I went ahead and cleaned the little fan, as well as repasted the i7-4710mq I believe it is. Looks like the SSD I had originally added to this customized beast back in the day is still rocking and working fine. Go sandisk!

One downside with the original plastering of stickers this had on the rear of the LCD panel is that isopropyl alcohol + a razor blade seem to cause damage to the rubberized coating that was on here. Now I’m waiting on a decal to cover up this coating and better protect the rear. Once the rest of the chassis for this guy is cleaned up, I’ll do a test install of Ubuntu and a test install of Windows 10 before re-wiping the drive and posting it up on eBay as well.

The next machine after these two that I’m going to work on selling is the old Oryx Pro oryp4 model that I have. It was refurbished by System76 officially in 2022 for me, though I believe it was originally released in 2018- here’s the web archive link for that page.

In the spirit of the original release for that machine, I’ll likely end up listing it with either No OS or Pop!_OS 22.04 preinstalled.
On another note, here are some cool videos and blog posts that I’ve been into recently:

Side Projects and Small Updates

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Running stress tests on the x250 before repasting

Hello there again! Just thought I’d give a nearly-mid-month update on things.

While repairing the Thinkpad X250 I’ve been working on recently, I found that two separate replacement keyboards did not have ribbon cables long enough to fully plug in to the connector on the motherboard- this seems to mess with trackpoint functionality. Guess I’ll wait on testing other cable and board replacements on that before coming to a conclusion. Looks like the thermal paste on that core i5 4th gen may also need to be replaced, as it seems the processor hits a solid 99c after only a few seconds of being stress tested, whoa. I intend on giving this to a friend once fully repaired.

I also have a System76 Gazelle model gazp9 that I’m working on getting the body plastics and screen repaired for. Looks like the previous owner I received this from had a habit of punching their screen, so might need an entire display assembly to fix that. This’ll be the extra computer I keep in case a family member ever needs a computer, and are open to trying out Pop!OS. Once I get that guy into functioning order again, I’ll definitely see if I can get an Arch Linux rice as well as a Pop!_OS screenshot from it with inxi and neofetch information.

Looking forward to using my Framework Laptop and a future System76 mobile workstation as my daily drivers in the future. More cores on one machine means I can use one for Virtualization and application compiling for work, with the other being the modular thin and light for everything else. Here’s hoping the JingPad’s software matures as well, as that would be the perfect companion tablet that ran an Ubuntu-based distro. Keep an eye on those project and hardware tracker spreadsheets for when I update em- looking forward to testing some fun hardware soon, as well as next year.

That’s it for this week! I’ll throw some fun things I’ve been reading or watching below recently:

  • Foxes Afloat is a fun youtube channel with a couple who have lived on narrowboats in the UK Canals for a while. I especially like them because I can relate to Colin who is also on the Asperger’s Syndrome train

  • My coworker Nathan Dyer wrote a great blog post about his life hacks for better wrist support, and another one previously about how he’s improved his Bluetooth experience on Linux

  • Watched a fun video on why Tesla made their DOJO computer from a Tesla fan channel

  • Nick from The Linux Experiment channel gave an update on how his JingPad is performing, with updated software.

  • I have a PineTime and PinePower Desktop unit arriving from the fun folks at Pine64 soon, looking forward to seeing how the PineTime can replace my Pebble Time Round. Here’s their october update

  • Jeff Geerling recently reviewed a pre-production board of the Cutie Pi tablet. After running through my emails on my no-longer-used email account I used to have as a main account, it looks like I might be receiving one of those in upcoming months too!

Hello System76!

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Quick update.

I now work at System76 on the Happiness team.
Going to build some machines and sell them as a side project for a short while, and downsize everything I own that doesn’t play well with Linux so I can have a streamlined setup in the future.

Also I’m super psyched for our upcoming open keyboard launch.

Some cool things I’ve found recently: