Category: Hardware

I’ve blogged before about my Lenovo Chromebook which I have been incredibly happy with.

However, I was due to start studying for a degree and the pre-course material from the university suggested I would need a little more flexibility to install software than my Chromebook’s operating system provides. I could have continued to use the Debian container in ChromeOS, but I figured that if I’m going to be spending most of my time in Linux, I might as well try to boot Linux natively.

It turns out that this is really easy to arrange for a lot of x86-64 based Chromebooks, thanks to a project which replaces the ChromeOS bootloader with a version of the Coreboot one. From here, your Chromebook is effectively a regular laptop and you can install your choice of Linux, Windows (if you must) or MacOS (naughty!).

For my Chromebook, it was straightforward:

• Put ChromeOS into developer mode
• Remove firmware write-protect
• Run the firmware update script
• Install an OS (I chose Debian GNU/Linux)
• Run a few ‘helper’ scripts to fix audio, and map the Chromebook’s special keys

To remove write-protection on the firmware I only had to remove the battery and power it from the mains supply.

Once that’s done, I ran the firmware installation script and soon had a proper laptop booting Coreboot.

The end result is perfect. Excellent battery life (it easily does a whole day), fanless and silent, very portable size, with a good selection of ports.

I’m running Debian Bookworm, and everything works perfectly. I added a keyboard shortcut for CTRL+ALT+T to bring up a terminal, because I’m used to doing that as a long time Ubuntu user. I also added my Wireguard VPN credentials so that I could relax using public Wi-Fi and benefit from my pi-hole ad blocking. The final touch was finding a suitable sticker to cover the Chrome logo on the lid!

It’s a bit nerve-wracking to take a perfectly good Chromebook and potentially turn it into a brick by flashing new firmware, but everything was really straightforward for me. I was so impressed with the ease of the process and excellent documentation, I made sure I sent a donation to Mr. Chromebox, in the hope that the project keeps going.

I bought my first Chromebook back in 2014, and have been using it daily up until a year or so ago when it stopped receiving security updates. I’ve used it occasionally since but have always a bit wary of doing anything important on it.

So, I decided to upgrade it. This time, I found a Lenovo Ideapad 3 for £97.49 from Argos. The official spec is:

• Intel N4020 at 1.1 GHz
• 4GB RAM
• 64 GB eMMC
• microSD card slot
• 11.6 inch screen

Physically it’s very similar in size to the Chromebook it replaces. It’s so much more useful though. As well as an up to date version of ChromeOS (with updates guaranteed to the middle of 2027), it also is able to run Android apps which means I have access to lots of additional software my old Chromebook didn’t have.

The real icing on the cake for me is the support for Linux. In just a few mouse-clicks, I had installed Debian Buster inside a container. This works really well and gives me scope to install all of the usual Linux software that I like. I’ve added the Signal messaging app (which otherwise would be unavailable on a Chromebook) and the integration with ChromeOS is great. Signal appears in the applications menu, and if I launch it, ChromeOS silently brings up the container (if it’s not already running) and then launches Signal seamlessly. Lovely.

For Christmas I decided I would like my own weather station. I knew that I wanted it to upload the data to the cloud so that I could see trends and access the information from anywhere.

I did a fair amount of research and settled on what I wanted, but the UK company wanted to charge me about £45 on top of an already steep price just to ship it to the Isle of Man! This seemed a little bit excessive, especially as they were only shipping by Royal Mail, so I decided to look elsewhere.

I came across a website supplying a whole host of Youshiko branded weather stations. I couldn’t find much information about these online, and suspected they would be of dubious quality, but took a punt anyway.

I was pleasantly surprised. The build quality isn’t that bad, and everything worked first time and was easy to set up. The external sensors are powered by AA cells, and use an 868 MHz link to the mains powered indoor display unit. This unit then connects over Wi-Fi to the internet so that it can send the data on to two popular online weather sites.

The internal unit has a web server built in, so it was easy to add the necessary API keys for the online services. Data was flowing from my back garden to the internet within minutes of powering the thing up for the first time.

Accuracy seems OK for the price. Both the local temperature and atmospheric pressure agree well with the Ronaldsway Meteorological Office, a few miles away.

My device was even sensitive enough to capture the pressure shock wave from a volcanic eruption about 10 thousand miles away!

I suspect the Manx wind and rain will finish off the outdoor unit within a year or so, but time will tell. Certainly it’s not a serious weather station, but for casual hobbyist use I would recommend these as easy to use and accurate, with the ability to upload to the cloud.

You can see the data for yourself.

After a recent trip away and having to endure the torrent of adverts and tracking that hotel Wi-Fi and mobile internet connections provide, I was definitely missing the ad-blocking features of my Raspberry Pi running Pi-Hole back at home.

I’d also been thinking for a while that I should do something about securing my phone a little bit from the risks associated with using an unencrypted Wi-Fi connection like the one available to me at work. Using insecure Wi-Fi is a bad idea because anyone else on the same network can examine your traffic and potentially log in to all your internet accounts by stealing session cookies and account details.

So, I decided to add PiVPN to my Raspberry Pi and Pi-Hole setup. Now when I’m away from home, my phone encrypts all of its traffic using WireGuard and sends it back home to my Raspberry Pi. Here, all the usual blocking of adverts and trackers happens and I get the same nice experience out and about as I do at home. There’s also the added peace of mind that means nobody on an insecure Wi-Fi link can see the traffic between my phone and the internet any more – everything is encrypted on its way back to my house. Lovely.

PiVPN was a breeze to set up. It took just seconds to install and set it up, and adding the phone’s connection was as simple as pointing my phone at a QR code. Amazing work by the community.

I’m old enough to remember the World Wide Web in its infancy in the early 1990s, when the focus was on information sharing. These days the main aim of the web seems to be to make money by tracking people’s habits and showing them adverts.

I missed the old experience, and I wanted some protection against being tracked everywhere online, so I installed Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi and tucked it away behind the sofa. It was very easy to set up, and has worked perfectly for over a year, protecting all of our devices from the spying panopticon of advertisers.

I have genuinely been surprised at just how much of modern internet traffic is related to tracking and adverts. In fact, my Pi-Hole has blocked more than half of the total requests for data! That’s right – there’s more stuff flying around for the adverts and trackers rather than the actual content that you see. Crazy.

With Pi-Hole blocking things silently, you end up with cleaner web pages without the clutter of adverts, and pages load noticeably faster when they aren’t reporting back to big brother too. Mobile apps and games no longer show annoying full-screen adverts and things just work much much better.

In fact, Pi-Hole blocking has been so good that as soon as I go out and about away from my home network it is very jarring to see the internet as everyone else sees it. Full of adverts and junk. Yuck. I do have a plan to fix that little problem soon though…

I changed jobs about 18 months ago, and I’m already getting known as ‘that’ guy when it comes to fiddling with technology!

So, a colleague turned up at work with a laptop which had been given to him by a family member who had bought a newer machine. He said it was running slowly and asked me if I’d have a look.

It seemed reasonably modern, probably about 7 or 8 years old. However it was running Windows 7, which I don’t really know my way around too well, having not used Windows myself since the days of Windows 98 and Windows XP.

I was able to find out enough information to establish that the machine was slow because the hard drive was struggling with multiple read errors. My colleague also said it crashed a lot and some files had disappeared. A quick boot into Linux with my trusty USB stick (which is always in my pocket!) confirmed the SMART data on the drive showed it was unserviceable. So I gave him the bad news and suggested it needed a replacement disk.

We discussed use cases to decide on a size, and he ended up ordering a small solid state disk for about £25 including delivery. I showed him which screws to undo to swap the drive out and gave him a USB installer for Ubuntu, explaining that I didn’t have a way to get him a copy of Windows and he’d need to talk to someone else about that.

The new drive duly arrived, and my colleague was able to fit the disk and install Ubuntu from scratch using the USB stick I’d lent him. My colleague would be the first to say he’s not very technical, so I think credit is due to the GNU/Linux community for making Linux so easy to use these days.

Even more exciting (to me!) is that my colleague has absolutely no plans to go back to Windows. He’s found software to do everything he wants, says the machine is faster than it ever was and is happy to have an up to date and modern laptop for an outlay of £25.

I really enjoy helping people to try Linux and realise that when they thought they needed a new computer, they often don’t. Machines are saved from landfill, and resources aren’t wasted on an unnecessary new machine. Everyone wins!

If you’d like to try running Linux on your computer, I’d recommend trying Ubuntu because it is well thought out and works on most things with ease. You can download it for free.

While at Liverpool Makefest last June, I bought myself a kit to build an RC2014 Z80-based computer.

The kit was very well made, with high quality circuit boards which accepted solder very easily, along with sufficient documentation to make the whole building process smooth and enjoyable.

I found the process quite educational too, as the design of the kit splits out the various functions of a computer into separate boards which then plug into a backplane with a common bus linking the parts together. It was good to see how the CPU, ROM, RAM, Clock and I/O all work together to make a functional microcomputer.

I was able to talk to the RC2014 from another computer over a serial connection, but I found I got the real ‘retro’ feel when I added the RC2014 ‘video card’ – which is a serial terminal based on a Raspberry Pi Zero. This meant I could plug my creation into a monitor and keyboard without the need for a separate computer, making the whole thing into a self-contained 8-bit microcomputer.

I also added an I/O board of LEDs and switches so I could interact with the computer without the need for a monitor or keyboard.

You can purchase a kit yourself or find out more about this little marvel at this website.