All Linux Things

I still wish they'd come out with a "normal" laptop with the same color scheme as the slatebook though. Mostly a very dark grey but with BRIGHT yellow accents all over. Fantastic.

HP has a wide variety of colors with their laptops these days. I was watching HSN and was stunned by the amazing colors they were offering with their laptop. My former boss bought a new HP laptop that was pink.

Yeah, they have some colorful ones in the "Stream" line, but those are literally all entry level essentially Chromebooks with Windows 10 on them. I had the blue and pink 11" Gen1 Streams, haven't had the purple 14" Stream. They were...adequate-ish at the time. I think the purple one I've seen with 8GB ram so it should still be adequate-ish. But the 4GB ram ones would be difficult to use now. Also the LCD's were absolutely GARBAGE on the 14" one last I looked. Like, FAR below what I consider usable.

I have a very old Pavillion HP laptop. It was a multi-media unit. Has a remote control stuck in the slot in the side. Goofy chromey plastic, horrible paint job, just poor construction through out. My thoughts on it are, "How the mighty have fallen."; said while thinking of Hewelt and Packard turning in their grave. It came with XP installed along with all the finest bloatware available common at the time. Perhaps the only thing interesting about it is that it has an early Athlon processor and is a very early 64bit machine.

I would not part with it for love nor money. It is my example of the worst laptop I have ever seen or used. That rare combination of gaudy plastics, poor design and build quality in combination with lots of bloat make it a real piece of american. Think if John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever turned into a computer.

Never seen an HP laptop like that but Ive spent a lot more time on the early IBM,Dell and Acer side of things.

I wanted to put a bigger drive in my Firewire case before I put it to use. I found an HGST 1TB 7200rpm drive on eBay for $20 shipped. It was suppose to be new. Who really knows what goes on in eBay sales. It arrived in a plain white box in a sealed anti-static bag. It has a date code of OCT 2016. So maybe new old stock.

I wanted to format it before installing it in the case, so I used an adaptor to plug it in. Well it has got stuff on it. Looks like an fresh image for Windows 10. I tried to slip it into the X230, but it is too fat, so I used the USB adaptor and started from USB.

Pretty slow over USB. Then I am greeted with a "Welcome to your new Dell Optiplex 7740(?) AIO." So I gather the drive while perhaps new had originally been imaged for install in a Dell Optiplex, never got used and was sold off as surplus? Strange, it was made by HGST Japan for HGST Europe, located in the Netherlands. And it ends up as new in Minnesota via eBay. The hard drive has been more places than most people before it was let out of the box.

HGST use to be Hitachi and before that it was IBM and it is still a Travel Star drive. IBM started mfg drives in Rochester, MN in the 50s. Engineers from IBM left to found Seagate which is located just down the road from me. 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) is the draw for here. They were/are the worlds experts in magnetic coatings.

Price is a bit low but that shouldnt have happened. I would have contacted the seller and let him know what happened. Probably a mistake but it depends so much on who you buy from on Ebay. Sometimes they will give a price break or offer to send a replacement drive. Ebay takes a dim view of that sort of practice and vendors are desperate to not get bad feedback.
I just got what was suppose to be a used laptop but it came broken in many places and appears it wasnt damaged during shipping as no loose pieces were in the box. Somebody tried to pull a fast one and now its being returned and had a talk with the vendor. Ive done around 12000 transactions with Ebay and overall there have been few problems but they do happen. Ebay is quick and responsive handling situations.

The new drive in the Firewire case is working well. With Firewire 800 it transfers data at ~1GB a minute. Firewire works as a networking protocol as well. Connect a firewire cable between devices and you can do network sharing and remote desktop over the connection. As an added bonus Firewire is daisy chain able.

With Macs you can boot one device off the hard drive in another device. So you can download an iso, mount it, and then over firewire use that mounted disk image to boot another Mac. It is really geeky download Fedora 37 and mount the iso on a 2004 PowerMac G5, and then boot a 2008 MBP from that image, run it as a live image to see how it works, then go ahead and install Fedora 37 from that image on a completely different architecture.

I just feel like I have entered some nerd nirvana

LOL!! Nerd nirvana is a great place to be. Now that Im retired I get to do the same everyday.

I've got the new LCD installed on the T14s. Mostly went well, although the bezel sticker is kinda lumpy and I don't know how well it'll stick. I'll need to look into how to redo that, as to replace the tape I'd really need to clean the bezel off really good so it wasn't setting super high. The LCD itself works perfectly, and is SOOOOOOOOO much brighter than the 300-nit that it replaced. Totally worth it.