Hardware reuse and recycling

 I recently boosted a post about how some US school systems have come up against a problem with Chromebooks - the fact they fall off the supported hardware list after about five or six years.

This is a problem.

Often the hardware has more life left in it that the artificial cut off date, and while in the past I've used a chromebook well past its use by date, this is not something that you would want to do in a production environment where you need everything to be kept at (more or less) the same release level.

Now, you might think I would go all precious and point to how I turned a 10 year old refurbished machine into a decent little research workhorse, but I won't.

It's one thing for me to do this, it's another thing to do  this at scale and provide a supported environment, simply because to do it at scale would need technicians to do the installation and troubleshooting, some user training, and a little helpdesk team to support the user community. And that of course costs - human beings are incredibly expensive to employ compared with the other costs involved.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but to quote a former colleague 'yes, but you're you', ie I have the experience, expertise and technical skills to put together a solution that works for me.

Not everyone does so, nor should we expect them to.

What one of course needs is an easy to install, easy to maintain, Chromebook like environment with some user support behind it.

Given that most educational services have a set of preferred hardware this ought to be possible to deliver, but other than a few experiments in Latin America, such as Huayra, I'm damned if I can think of one ...

[update 04/08/2023]

One of the problems with the longterm support of Chromebooks is that often they use weird processors rather than the standard Intel range, which complicates the problem of updating them to an alternate operating system for long term support.

However, I've just learned of a new project, LaCros, that aims to allow you to install an updated browser on top of the old ChromeOS monolithic operating system and browser binary.

As the browser component is updated more frequently than the operating system on Chromebooks this potentially provides a way of running a more recent and secure browser on an older version of the underlying operating system.

Some FTTP progress ...

 We've recently moved back to Telstra in order to get our link upgraded to FTTP.

Well we've had some progress, and I'm quietly impressed. 

The Monday after I made the upgrade request Telstra texted me an install date, which is rather sooner than they first said - which is good, and about ten minutes later I had a second text to tell me not to be alarmed if a strange man in orange hi-vis gear came into our yard - it was a pre installation survey so that they could check how to route the cable.

They also sent me a link to an amazingly sensible little video about what happens during the installation to help us prepare.

Clearly, they've done this before ...

[update 20/07/2023]

Well, we got rather more than a single man in hi-vis - we got a truck full of Bengali speaking cable guys. 

I was down at Chiltern working on the Dow's documentation project, but they phoned me as they'd arrived while J had nipped out to the supermarket, to ask if it was ok if they dug a trench, and MMS's me a couple of pictures of the front yard and the wall of our house showing where they were going to dig the trench and bring the cable up.

J talked to them when she got home and double checked what they were doing - they didn't  have particularly good English - with the result that we now have a fibre optic cable and NBN Fibre Optic termination point on the wall of the house - all we need now is for Telstra to install our fibre optic connection module ...

Another iteration of the lightweight research machine

 A couple of weeks ago I put together a post about how you could use an old laptop to make a distraction free writing machine.

That was in part informed by my experience documenting at Dow's and also various attempts to make a lightweight linux machine for research, first with an old Eee PC, and later on an old Dell laptop.

Well, the Eee has long since gone to the recyclers, and the old Dell laptop now sits in the outside studio as a general purpose machine - in practice it proved a little too bulky to carry about.

So, for this exercise I picked up an old Lenovo Edge 11 for around a hundred bucks, which when it booted up showed its origins:

but the screen was nice and clear, the keyboard clean and fully functional, as was the trackpad.The only problem is the battery, which is obviously in need of replacement - basically it gives a bare 30minutes of power, which really isn't enough.

However, that's an exercise for another day - new compatible batteries are around $40-45, so it's not a stretch.

The machine had come with Windows 10 professional but I decided that I didn't need another windows machine in my life and installed the Debian 12 Crunchbang plus plus linux distro in its place.

(I'm a quiet fan of this distro due to its incredibly small footprint and the fact it runs well on older machines. It's derived from Philip Newborough's original Crunchbang linux, which I've used on and off over the years.)

Installation just worked and in an hour or so I had a working machine

Crunchbang comes with a decent set of preconfigured software, including LibreOffice and Gnumeric, to which I added

• Focuswriter for distraction free writing
• Notable for building up little collections of notes
• Ristretto, purely because it's my preferred image viewer,
• Kate, my preferred editor
• Ghostwriter for when I don't want to write raw markdown
• Deja-Dup to back up to cloud storage

My plan basically is to dump all the created content, including Notable's .notes in ~/documents and then use Deja-Dup to back it up to my OneDrive account.

Stuff I've been working on and want to move elsewhere can simply be uploaded via the web or emailed using a service like EmailItin.

There's no mail client installed, deliberately, and nothing that will beep or bong in the background, meaning that it can be treated as a distraction free machine but the browser is there to check email, or indeed anything else. As always, the key is discipline, and for this to work as a distraction free work machine you do need a bit of commitment to avoid sliding into aimless surfing as a displacement activity.

The desktop is OpenBox and satisfyingly minimalist, with little or nothing in the way of annoying widgets. I, of course did have the fun of editing the XML configuration file for the Window manager to add my extra applications to the menu - being old school I edited the raw XML rather than the funky menu editor I've never quite got to grips with.

All in all it probably took a couple of hours, and I'm pleasantly pleased with the result ...

[update 25/07/2023]

Well I cracked and bought a replacement battery - a new one rather than a reconditioned one - for about $45 - fully charged it gives me a nominal two and three quarter hours which is enough for most desk use where there's no access to power, such as on the train or some public libraries.

Well pleased.

Moving back to Telstra ...

A long time ago, just before last Christmas in fact, I had an email from NBNco saying that we could have an upgrade to a pure fibre optic connection, rather than our current FTTC connection.

The only problem was that our current ISP wasn’t part of the upgrade scheme.

I emailed them and asked them if they were going to participate. Naturally, they said yes, and even emailed me a link to an online form to register my interest.

Several months went by, during which time our FTTC connection started having more frequent minor dropouts, culminating in a complete failure one Sunday morning.

I phoned our ISP, who did some tests, agreed the link was dead, and said that they would refer it to NBNco as it looked like infrastructure.

In the meantime our link started working, but nevertheless, a couple of days later we had three NBN trucks outside our house. They poked, they fiddled, they repatched our connection, and it did seem to work better, but we were still getting short duration dropouts.

Clearly our current ISP, iiNet, wasn’t coming to the party, so it was time to change ISPs.

Now, we live in a rural area. While there’s a whole lot of participating ISPs listed on the fibre upgrade website, most of the smaller ones don’t have much of a presence outside of the cities, and will understandably use subcontractors to do all their installation and configuration work.

I’m personally very conservative about infrastructure. Of the three players with a significant local presence, only Telstra has boots on the ground.

So, while it’s more expensive, Telstra seemed to be the logical choice.

So, I contacted them.

You would think it would be a simple thing to change ISPs.

Not with Telstra.

Despite the fact I already have a mobile phone account with them (the joys of rural life) I had to go through Passport, Drivers Licence, credit and income checks.

Then, they found they couldn’t actually order a fibre optic upgrade without me being an established customer, so the solution was that we change to Telstra, and I then request an upgrade, which apparently you can do once every billing cycle – or month as we normally call them.

All in all, it took over two hours to actually sign up with them

Telstra insisted on supplying me with their own modem rather than have me simply reconfigure our existing device.

Now we have been having some very wet weather recently, and I was understandably concerned that it would be delivered and left out in the weather.

They assured me that they would use StarTrack to deliver the unit, and that it would be taken to the post office if there was no one home to sign for it. That didn’t quite go as planned – only when I got a text message from Telstra saying the unit had been delivered did I discover that StarTrack had left it on the mat.

The other problem about changing ISPs is that we have FetchTV service through iiNet.

We wanted to keep our Fetch service, and I needed to find out if we could migrate it successfully.

No one at Telstra knew, and they only wanted to sell us some expensive monolithic FoxTel subscription.

iiNet clearly wasn’t going to tell us, and FetchTV’s own website was singularly unhelpful.

I eventually found a technical support email for Fetch, so I contacted them and asked the question. A very helpful person at Fetch asked me to email them the box serial number, which brought the bad news that it was locked to iiNet, and we would need a new box, which given that the unit is five years old is not a drama. We of course need to configure the box before we can get new subscriptions, and before then we need to get our Telstra link working.

As luck would have it was Judi’s birthday that week, and we’d arranged to go to Melbourne for a couple of nights  to see the  Paul Bonnard exhibition and have dinner out in the city, and she had to moderate a Zoom conference when we got back, so no way was I going to do any installation work until after that was done.

I had told Telstra this at the time of ordering, but of course I got a scad of no-reply text messages asking why I hadn’t plugged the Telstra modem in yet.

I decided that the best thing to do was ignore them unless I got an email or call I could reply to.

Telstra ignored all of this and remotely reconfigured our existing modem, which was not a problem, it meant we had working internet when we came home.

Disconnecting the old modem and plugging in our new Telstra modem took all of five minutes – in fact the modem took longer to boot than it took to swap over.

It was then a case of swapping out our old locked to iiNet fetch box. Again the physical swap took less than five minutes followed  by twenty minutes sat on the lounge room floor with a laptop registering with Fetch and getting various magic activation codes.

In fact the longest part of the exercise was waiting for the box to run various firmware and software upgrades.

We then left things for twenty four hours to make sure that our connection was stable (it was) and then called the number Telstra had given me to call to request an FTTP upgrade.

It was a Saturday, and the call centre that dealt with FTTP upgrades was closed.

However, there’s always an alternative route with Telstra – I used the technical support chat service they provide to ask if they could process an upgrade request.

They could, and after twenty minutes or so of confirming details and agreeing that Telstra could seize and resell various body parts if we did not follow through we had a fibre upgrade request.

In fact, I need to compliment Telstra on their officiousness and thoroughness, they checked about home alarms, medical equipment monitors, if we had a panic alarm, warned us that things might be disconnected and not work during the upgrade process. They even asked if we needed (for a price) a technician to help swap cables. Totally unnecessary, but I can imagine various elderly relatives who might benefit from a service like that.

At the end of it I had a job reference number and we were set.

Apparently, someone from Telstra will call me later in the week to get things scheduled, they say it will take six to eight weeks, but living in a rural area I know that the timescales can be different from those stated, and if they have a crew in the area they might piggy back our job onto one they scheduled earlier.

Here’s hoping …

Threads

 Today the internet and all the various news sites around the world are awash with comment and discussion around Threads, Meta's  (nee Facebook's) twitter killer.

I'm not tempted.

Leaving aside my personal distaste for Meta and all their works, I successfully ditched social media a couple of months ago, and I'm not tempted to go back.

Yes, there are some things I miss about social media, and some of the accounts I followed, but I don't feel that my life is impoverished by bowing out of the booming buzzing confusion of the socials.

I'm happy to sit in my corner  ...