What Does The Future Hold?

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Hope everyone out there has been staying safe and healthy! I’m sad to report this week was my final week with System76, as some layoffs occurred. I bolstered up my savings a bit during that nearly-two-year period working for them, so I’ll be doing a bit of soul searching mixed in with applying to new places.

In other news, I’ve been going on a few walks recently. Clearing my head, thinking about my future.

I’ve also gone ahead and wiped any work-related stuff on my Dell G5 15 SE that I was using instead of my Pangolin pang10 for System76 work. Backed up my notes I kept in Github in case I need some good messaging to learn on in the future. Went ahead and cleaned up this machine physically, then installed openSUSE overtop of the wiped 500gb NVMe I was using for work-related tasks and I gotta say, YaST is super cool! Might throw this on my Framework in the future as well.

For the record, That’s openSUSE Tumbleweed, which I’ll probably throw on the Framework at some point as well. When my Oryx Pro oryp4 model comes back from repairs, I’ll likely give Eggy’s Nobara distro and NixOS a dual-boot try on that!

You might hear from me a few times in October, now that I have indefinite free time as I job hunt. Might be selling off some project Thinkpads as well as a custom build or two I still have sitting in storage as well. Toodles!

"Old Boi" build and Upcycle projects

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Hi there again! It’s been a while. Work and life are going as they usually go. Prepping to go on a road trip back to California in late August, perhaps I’ll sell some of my builds while there!

Building that last desktop during the shortages, along with a Xeon-based guest gaming pc have taken up my time recently. I’ll add those build links below.

As I’ve already completed my iteration of Eggy’s xeon-based budget build, I’ll mainly focus on the Old Boi build that I’ve been working on getting together for testing ReactOS. The “Upcycle V2” build I linked above on pcpartpicker will be a more-future-upgradeable AM4 build centering around a used A12 series processor along with the RX590 and a drive I had in storage.

For this Old Boi build, It was centered around an i5 processor I had in storage and the cost of “renewing” an old radeon 6770 1gb card I had. This will mainly be for testing older software or games, such as the open source ReactOS based on Windows NT, or possibly HaikuOS, a rewrite of BeOS from back in the day. Maybe this setup may end its days as a NixOS system, who knows?

Above we have an image from my workbench as I was testing to see how things are running. After testing some video output from the motherboard and from the Radeon 6770 card, I learned that the cheapo Raidmax 300W power supply would not be enough. I went on to get a better Thermaltake unit from the nearby Micro Center. Perhaps I’ll save that 300W one for a tiny build in the future that has RDNA2 or greater integrated graphics.

Next, on to the testing with a better-wattage PSU!

The system legitimately booted with a better PSU, a Thermaltake 600W of sorts I picked up at the local micro center. Glad to see the ol boi build booting up fine now! Next, I made sure to rip apart this old Radeon 6770 from circa 2011 to clean it out and then repaste it. The extender that this thing has on it, to fit into older style full tower cases, is a bit annoying. After some jiggling around though, everthing looked fine!

I don’t have too many other pictures of the process outside of this side shot of the finished build. The cables, this being a non-modular power supply, were a bit annoying to manage, so there’s a bit of a rats nest of cables around the area where a CD drive would go, but that’s fine. Only thing mounted up there is the 480gb sata SSD. Look how red ATI GPUs used to be!

On another note, I think this machine could use a back exhaust fan, as the case only came with an intake fan on the front and the hot air kind of wanders. Once I add an exhaust fan in the future, the temps will be stable and this will be perfect for testing older software!

Though my week of testing operating systems so far, though, I haven’t been able to get Windows XP or the open source ReactOS to properly boot, so this guy might end up running some distro with KDE themed like Windows 7 for now, to give the retro feel.

I’ll likely end up selling this along with a Thinkpad T440p I’m finishing up soon and a Thinkpad X230 that is incompatible with flashing coreboot.

Building a desktop....for the first time in years

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Hi there tech family! It’s been a busy few months at work, and I’ve mainly just sunk into a couch to watch a show or play a game after most days. I let things get to me too much, and am slowly learning to give myself space and take time for myself to chill out.

That said, one form of chilling out is working with your hands. I enjoy the process of refurbishing older laptops to bring new life to them. While I’ve been falling behind on my corebooted thinkpad projects (linked here), I have indeed finally finished a desktop build.

I went all-AMD this time just for simplicity of use with any linux distro. Here’s the full build spec and part page.

Here we have the motherboard as I left it previously. Two sticks of 4000mhz cl19 or cl16 DDR4 RAM and a Ryzen 5600x with a WD Black 512gb NVMe (3 not 4) under a heatsink. Now we just needed to open the new cooler.

With the help of kind fellow GloriousEggroll, I learned the below case I got secondhand wouldn’t work. Missing a food and the places where one would place standoffs had some ouchies.

So he gave me a massive fractal case and we built in that.

He also gave me some cabling so I could add a few SSDs and previously-server-used WD Red drives to this build in the future. The plan is to game on this and use it as a network share until prices return to normal, then I’ll relegate my older RX590 8gb and my RX6600XT to mining duty while gaming on a higher-performing GPU and Zen 4 processor. Anyway, here’s the build with everything good to go. He and I were cut quite often on this damn motherboard I had in my closet lol.

It also posted fine! I ended up installing Eggy’s fresh release of Nobara on it. Nobara is a spin of Fedora Linux, optimized for desktop use, gaming and feeling snappy. I’m trying out KDE this time. I’ll add a carousel of post-build images below.

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!