The Hainish Cycle books – I’m a sucker for Ursula K. Le Guin. The Dispossessed is one of my favorites. I’ve never read any other book in this series. Why not try a few in 2023?

That series has some really great books, but also some really really boring books. If you pick at random, be aware some of them are not great. At least in my opinion. Tastes vary of course.

Thanks for the post, which I enjoyed and very much agree with (in my case s/vim/emacs/, but everything you said is still true).

You mentioned a Debian package as “gcide-dict”, but I believe the actual package name is “dict-gcide”.

Best regards, -Karl

Looks like you’re with me on A5s. 🍻

Agree on the Leuchtturm1917, five stars, but originally found the dots a little too dark and distracting… Needs a thicker pen. Sharpie makes some great felt tips pens (not their markers, their pens) that get that bolder look which makes it tolerable.

Honestly my go-tos are hard to find in the USA. “Oxford Office A5.” They come in fun colors, they are lined which may not be your thing, they are some of the only wirebound journals (lays flat!! Huge for playing guitar lol) that are NOT perforated (fuck perforations God made scissors for a reason) and don’t lose their wire shape and become unusable. I have one notebook from them which did but the story is just funny: I had drawn out plans for the bedframe that’s now in our bedroom sketched out on one page, went to Home Depot to buy the lumber, put the notepad on top of the car then left it there like a coffee cup. The next day I realize I don’t have the plans and go back and eventually find that bright blue blob in the middle of the street, tire marks on it, rainsoaked… Still worked but didn’t open so smoothly, hehehe. But it damn well held together and I copied my plans to another book and got that thing built.

Don’t know why I felt the need to comment, guess I just detected a kindred spirit.

Whitelines is the company that holds a patent on inverted rulings. In Sweden, one could get notebooks with such paper in most department stores: https://www.clasohlson.com/se/Kollegieblock-Whitelines-A4-linjerat/p/Pr442670001 You should give it a try to replace a SparkFun notebook. There are also similar notebooks, some in better binding on Amazon: https://www.amazon.de/Dennison-Zweckform-7021-Notebook-Flexible/dp/B005OH1OWM

P.S. OpenID login, what a blast from the past!

Hey,

I used this instructions before and they really helped me in the past. Now I bought another x220 and wanted to do the same and was quite confused, that I couldn’t find the winbound chip anymore. I did the trick with spispeed=512 and expected to get it. Instead I needed to use the Macronix Chip with the flag ‘-c MX25L6405’ as flashrom suggest, but needed a long time to get that.

So someone in the future: don’t get confused, not every x220 has a winbound chip, just proceed

regards

elvirolo – thank you for all the resources! Very cool!

I definitely used me_cleaner on my machine as well following a guide on the hardened gnu/linux site.

Comment by elvirolo — Tue 2018-01-09 02:18:38 PM

flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick -c MX25L6445E -w coreboot_mecleaned.rom

that command

I was able to flash the new ROM internally (with a neutered ME - see this guide) by running the following command on the laptop:

flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick -c MX25L6445E -w coreboot_mecleaned.rom

Of course, you need to recompile coreboot first. But it does work

Hi!

Thanks a lot for your guide, which has helped me tremendously. I’d like to add a few instructions here for people wanting to flash their BIOS chip with an Olimex Olinuxino Lime2 board. It took me several days to figure out how to do it, so I thought it might be helpful to include a brief summary of the required steps here.

1. Flash the latest version of Armbian (Debian) Stretch for the Lime2 board onto an SD card. It should also work with Olimex’s official image, but I couldn’t get it to work. If you do use the Olimex image, which includes a 3.xx kernel, please refer to this page. Since it didn’t work with me, I won’t be telling you how to do it here, but feel free to send me an email if you think I can help.

2. Before booting the board, you should wire it up to the BIOS chip. Because the pin spacing (pitch) on the Lime 2 is smaller (0.05”) than that of the Raspberry Pi (0.1”), the easiest way to do it is to get this adapter as well as this ribbon cable from Olimex.

Plug one end of the ribbon cable to the GPIO2 port on the board, and the other end on the adapter. Make sure to plug it in the right way (use the pin numbers that are printed on the board as a helper). Connect the jumper wires to the Pomona clip as described in Tyler’s guide. The pins you should use on the adapter are the following: GND: pin 2, VCC (3.3V): pin 3, CS(0): pin 29, CLK: pin 31, MOSI: pin 33, MISO: pin 35.

3. Boot your lime2 board, find its IP, and SSH into in (ssh root@ip). The default password is 1234. You will be prompted to change it when you log in.

Add the following lines in /boot/armbianEnv.txt:

overlays=spi0 spi-spidev

param_spidev_spi_bus=0

Reboot. /dev/spidev0.0 should have appeared!

Note: I couldn’t get my board to power the chip, for some reason. I thus removed the VCC cable, and instead enabled Wake On Lan in the BIOS, switched the laptop off, removed the battery, plugged in the AC adapter and an Ethernet cable. The chip then gets powered and the flashing process works. I read that one cannot use me_cleaner if the chip is powered that way. I haven’t tried yet, so I can’t confirm that. I’d be grateful if someone who knows more about this would let me know.

PS: I found a script that automates much of the process. I haven’t tried it, but it looks very helpful!