brb dragging everyone to XMPP

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:02:04 -0700

Discord will come and go. Any minute now... annnnny minute now.

Veronica Explains said it best:

Quote:Platforms can be killed, but protocols are forever.

(Hey, I've also quoted that before!)

I have yet to put one together myself, so I'm linking to this XMPP guide: https://xmpp-guide.codeberg.page/

Technerd streamer with AuDHD AMA!!

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:18:30 -0700

Just gonna set up shop over here for a bit and do tech nerdy wizardry with 3d stuff.. HEre is my current checklist of Hyperfixations I bounce between.

1) 3d Design and printing. I design cool cosplay stuff and make it real!!
2) Foodtruck So many ideas, so many parts. So What should i do with a 27 ft long truck I mean I gotta make foodz
3) Riding, I love ebikes, scooters, motorcycles, Mopeds. You name It i have laid it down.
4) GOt myself back into cosplay... damnit.

Seriously and I love intermingling my hobbies I 3d print motorcycle parts sometimes.

Feel free to ask me anything!

Chat Protocols And Things

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:27:57 -0700

"Platforms can be killed, but protocols are forever." -Veronica Explains

Here, Veronica discusses how to set up your own AIM server. And also, once more reminding that we should probably look into alternative means of reconnecting with each other.

I don't have the grumption to setup my own AIM server (yet), but I've mostly returned to using Jabber/XMPP. Because the protocol has yet to let me down, but Discord will (and honestly, already has).

Adventures in Acer Aspire AXC-603G-UW13

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:24:56 -0700

On my blog I've rambled on about repurposing an old computer tower I just had laying around and couldn't part with. But after that initial rush, there was also a rush due to Life Upheaval, and general Life is Life-in stuff, and the project just fell to the wayside. It now sits in the living room, a keyboard/mouse combo resting on it, within reach of the long HDMI cable attached to the television. I hate that I've been too busy.

It's time to play with it once again! Once I get a breather, I'll do a long-overdue MEMTEST and see if anyone has any RAM to spare. Maybe even change up the Distro. In my dream of dreams, I could even start up a Gemini thing! But that's incredibly ambitious. But hey, go big.

So, yes, adventure!

...to be continued.

Image description: The Acer Aspire tower next to a widescreen monitor, displaying Linux Mint desktop with some folders open. One window has a big checkbox as it declares that everything has been updated.

P.S the prophecy had come true! I warned you:Your Chromebook is next.

Actually, yeah, let's bring back netbooks.

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:57:01 -0700

netbook.png (Size: 437.91 KB / Downloads: 12)

Image description, from Wikipedia: "An Acer Aspire One netbook sitting on a standard sized Toshiba Satellite laptop, demonstrating the size difference." You can read more from the originator of this image here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zieak/3217657200/

They're not as big as a laptop and, you know, another thing I can slap Linux on. And did I mention that it's smol?

Everything else is coming back, so why not these lil funkies?!

Tiny World needs tiny comps!

What are your favorite apps/programs to use?

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:39:40 -0700

Yea, what the thread says on the tin!

I'm still using Notepad++, but have been turned onto Sublime Text, too.

romebook

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:41:08 -0700

I've hated google since before it was cool, but I have not done as much as I should in extricating my e-life from its tentacles. But this list of things are among the reasons to despise Google. The people who run the company profit from our eyes, our attention, and selling services. So let's divorce from google. This will focus on hardware.

"We just talk about linux here" OK Accurate, but also I'll have to share virtualizing Windows in Linux. For when you want to run Microsoft Excel ™ and don't want to boot Windows for real. Or old games.

I love Linux and I love laptops. Especially small cheap laptops. And the most common cheap laptop these days is the humble Chromebook. But Google's motto is: don't be evil. And this carries over to Chromebooks. You probably haven't thought about it, but Google profits hugely from the Chromebook OS.

I wrote this next section mostly offline, using the lovely Wordgrinder program. And I wrote it on an old chromebook that was lying around, ready to spy on my family more. Eew google. Eew AI.

(ch)ROMEBOOK
Google has a problem. Whether we call it Google, Alphabet, or "That web site that used to be good at search," we can at least point at their problem. The problem is inherent to the system we're in: That corporate leadership is always rewarded for actions that seem to bring short term gains over any other option.
Google in its aspects as Search, as AI, as the provider of the Chrome browser and the Chromebooks, is not working for long term goals you like. They are directing all their resources to capturing more money, more mind share, and more souls. In a bit I'll get to those last two.
Sources: https://commandlinux.com/statistics/chro...education/ , https://cybersecuritynews.com/chrome-gem...erability/ ,
Google is capturing more money. Google is the sole provider of "ChromeOS Enterprise Licensing," listed at a cost of $4.17 per device per month. These enterprise features are marketed as providing security, safety, and web access control features for schools to manage the ChromeOS devices. In 2025, 93% of school districts in the USA reported plans to use chromebooks, up from 83% in 2023. Google has a steady cash flow (in 2024 it was reported that there are 38 million Chromebook devices at USA K-12 schools). But as recently as January, a critical vulnerability in Google's chromeOS, exploited through Google's AI the first month it was made available, gave attackers access to camera and microphones installed in every Chromebook. Since children older than 4th grade often take their chromebooks home, this 'attack surface' reaches tens of millions of children at home. Google did not make Gemini available to children in ChromeOS out of the goodness of their heart. They did it to build up a market of millions of children addicted to Gemini at an early age, who will soon pay for access to the drug of a constantly present, constantly affirming, constantly engaged mirror magnifying the worst of the internet.
Google broke search because they make money with search. IN particular, if a user makes 10 searches, Google gets to show 10 sets of ads. Making search worse, so more users have to search twice to get what they need, doubled ad income. See more of Google killing search on purpose here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ . In short: Google monthly Search growth was less than projected, so search was worsened so that someone who needed to find information on Google was likely to have to search twice. You might wonder "Didn't Google return to China in 2017, therefore covering the whole world by that point making rapid growth impossible unless the whole world suddenly starts asking Google more questions per day or else the same questions more times?" Google decided to use the second option, which they have control over, by making Search worse.
Google is capturing mindshare. Over 90% of K-12 students in the USA use a Chromebook daily. While some of them also learn other operating systems (Unfortunately often Windows), most new adults today are unfamiliar with anything but the Appified Computer. The Appified Computer is algorithm driven, cloud surveilled, and utterly not owned. This mind share is paying off; with more and more computer users not being used to the ideas of local files, alt-tab and side by side windowing, and other things that are user-centric instead of cloud-centric. The cloud is someon else's computer, someone else's pocket, and paying someone else for all of that. More than a billion dollars on licensing is a lovely piece of change from schools, and capturing that learning of computer use retains most users for the rest of their lives. And even though those users won't use enterprise ChromeOS, they will use Google accounts, Google devices, and view Google ads in Google apps for the rest of their lives.
Sources: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11242v2 , https://link.springer.com/article/10.100...26-01014-5 , https://futurism.com/artificial-intellig...i-addicted ,
Google is capturing souls, because that is the most powerful addiction it's legal to give a child. Most research about the impact of Large Language Models on children show enormous problems. Suicide, depression, delayed and reversed mental development, an even faster pipeline pushing them to racism and fascist ideologies than was enabled through internet 3.0 (Ugh: social media of the algorithm age), adult sexual content and interactions, along with enormous data breaches. Children should definitively not have these in their hands, their backpacks, and their lives without very thoughtful control. For several years we have known that raising children on The Apps led to enormous mental health issues. And recent research shows the AI programs are worse. You probably know a child who has had sexualized conversations with a Large Language Model. You probably know people who are mentally addicted to those interactions. And these interactions are not healthy for anyone, and are actively harmful to people who are still growing, still practicing interacting with people. Do you know about the researchers who pointed out early on and often that Large Language Models would do all these things? Sadly, no - And that's partly because of Google.
In the rebuilding of this romebook, I found that the camera-microphone module always has power. While convenient for taking out the camera board to add an LED keyboard downlight (In the manner of the older Thinkpads), it should worry us that these systems interact and tie together in ways that add up to vulnerabilities. And when I say "always," I do mean "While the battery is not Shut Down." Whether the device is on or hibernated, lid closed or open, charging or not, my little LED stays lit. So the camera/microphone module was powered, and available to access to any program that can blank the screen to appear hibernated.
Google has defended its nefarious schemes. They defend a billion dollars in ChromeOS licensing to schools by comparing prices to Microsoft's business offerings. They defend their quest for ad-watching eyes and minds by hiding the harm done. And they defend their hunger for souls by firing and suppressing researchers who point out the harms Google's programs are doing:
Sources: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922 , https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12...nit-gebru/ ,
Headline: "We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says."
Corrected headline: "We read the paper Google fired Timnit Gebru over"
The company's star ethics researcher highlighted the risks of large language models, which are key to Google's business.
Timnit Gebru wrote an early groundbreaking paper that called out the harms researchers are seeing inflicted on people every month. From companies finding that their training data includes literal CSAM; to enormous companies stealing every copyrighted work ever made "Because if I don't I might not make infinite profit"; to people driven down fascist and racist rabbit holes of hatred and disgust; to open mass manufacture of CSAM of children and real-looking porn of women; to enormous resource misappropriation; to provably racist approval processes; to systems that work for white men best, women and POC less if at all. She wrote this 18 months before ChatGPT launched, and so much in that paper is exactly on target. And the science became a warning, the warning became a guidepost, and nearly every dire prediction has filled the news (IF you can find the news local to the disastrous effects).
If I wrote a story where "The richest man in the world who grew up in a segregated country built a profit-driven pollution machine with illegal (Unpermitted) asthma-causing power generators in a neighborhood mostly populated by black people, to run computers that literally generate porn of anyone for anyone, using more water than a whole State, more electricity than most cities, and he keeps tweaking it to be nicer to Nazis" most editors would ask whether I meant such obvious satire to carry a plot. But no, that was just "Mid 2025 AI shit."
So End Google. End Chromebooks. Here are steps to do a few of these things you might like doing, too:
1. Get the Google off a device
2. Rescue some eWaste into something that works
3. Support someone with an old Chromebook having a Real Computer (And not a toy OS designed to sell their eyes)
4. Make a cheap laptop into a low-distraction writing device
And eew, don't just run Linux side by side with Crouton. I want Google gone, not sidelined.
I call it a Romebook. The photo shows this one with the CH scratched off. May the stone legs of the last monument to Google one day stand in a trackless waste, left behind by a better world.
First, check exactly which Chromebook you have. There are a few ways to do this: Model number on the back, software version, etc. There are broadly two classes: ARM and X86. These categories describe whether the CPU is designed around simpler instructions that use less power, or more-complex instructions that use more power. An ARM CPU can be powerful, and an X86 CPU can be efficient. This influences the specific operating system files needed.
The label on the back of my Romebook says:
Lenovo 100e Chromebook 2nd Gen MTK
Model Name: 81QB
Input: 15V 3A D
Mfg Date 19/11/20
So it's a 5 year old chromebook, uses an 'MTK' (Mediatek) ARM cpu, and is a Lenovo 100E Gen2. Searching tells me to try an OAK or HANA installation for ARM / Mediatek.
If you have an X86 CPU, go through Chromebox https://www.quantulum.co.uk/blog/debian-...hromebook/ .
If you have an ARM CPU, start with Velvet-OS https://velvet-os.github.io/ .
The general process is:
1. Enable Developer Mode
2. Set up a Bootable Media with the right type of operating system*
3. Test the Operating System
4. Update GBB Flags (To avoid some problems like a dead battery bricking the romebook)
5. Install your future operating system
* A Debian linux is a good way to start using Linux, and widely available for installation as of 2026. It may remind you of Windows XP, let you do almost anything you could want in Linux, and work well enough. If you are dying to use Fedora or something more specific, give it a shot! Just get the google out. In the future Fedora and Arch will become more available.

I added a reading light. I had the fun of cutting out the camera module and using its always-on 3.3v power line and a potentiometer. This shines light on my keyboard. But how nice! There's no google here. And that's pretty cool.