yeah, so i found the manual and it's insisting that you need to toggle the device's write-protection before you update the firmware, which is what i'm trying to do. i think.

there should be a separate bios chip and a ssd rom with the firmware and the os. right?

https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/x131e_chrome_hmm_en_0c10473_02.pdf

so, i tried to install ubuntu and it told me it didn't have a chrome device on the install. denied. but, there's apparently a write-protect screw. the thing is it's deep inside, and i want to make sure it'll work.

in the meantime, i checked to see if the device reads a spare laptop drive and it does - i reinstalled the chrome os to a 350 gb drive. that's step one in the potential viability of this thing, if i can fix the keyboard.

so, what exactly does this write-protect switch do?

it's just the key combinations that are missing that i find fishy - the refresh key is needed to get to recovery, removing the backspace key makes it easier for a key logger to work, removing the ctrl & alt keys on the most used side makes almost everything frustrating and the t key was cut out - so i can't launch the crosh shell without finding the url online.

maybe it's all a coincidence, but they're all over the keyboard, too. tracing that to a localized spill doesn't seem quite right. and, if it's due to logic on the keyboard, then why did only one of the ctrl keys go out, but the backspace and refresh key go out?

i may get deeper access to the machine with an ubuntu install, if it works, and that might make it easier to get into the bios. if the ubuntu flush doesn't resolve the issue, that's the next thing to check.

if the ubuntu image loads, i may also find myself more interested in a machine i don't have to disassemble and reassemble on each use. it may also provide me with a model to use to install a hard drive, which i think is possible.

if this machine is dying, i've decided not to purchase another chromebook. i think it's still useful enough as an emergency out-of-the-house device, which is what i bought it for, if i can get the battery to read again, which is the other thing i want to test the ubuntu install with.

i want to see what happens, but, in the end, the utility of this is hopefully to allow for an actual fresh chrome os install. let's hope it works.

just to conclude a thought surrounding the whole populist thing....

the reality is that you or i, most people reading this blog, would have been republicans during the period in question, from 1870-1910. as such, you would have viewed this debate between populists and democrats as a sort of schism on the right, and you might have been sympathetic to arguments that it was just a way for the democrats to seize power in the midwest. certainly, the initial organizing heft came from essentially democratic-party aligned white farmers in the south, so the initial impetus to organize in kansas came from pretty shady sources; to kansas' credit, it was able to push back against the racism in the populist movement and instead offer a synthesis between some of the economic ideas of the populists and the racial ideas of the whigs and republicans, but it was in turn firmly rejected by the populists in the south, who clung to the democrat party, largely due to the same kinds of race baiting you still see today. rather, they seemed obsessed with the idea of rebuilding white solidarity across the north and the south, and banishing the blasted "sectionalism". the kansas populists were consequently a reform movement within a reform movement, a fringe within a fringe, and trying to understand what they were and what they stood for means placing them in the context of the wider movement around them, to grasp how unusual they were in the broader farm reform movement, which was almost entirely about white solidarity.

so, republicans like you or i may have seen something of admiration in the kansas populists, if we weren't frustrated with them for electing democrats.

but, we would have seen the broader populist movement as a freak show on the right, not unlike polite society saw the tea party. the commonalities far overpower the differences.

and, that's just the point i want to make - this idea that the populists of times past were pure of heart and free of prejudice is totally wrong. 

so, that hot plug trick succeeded in getting the drive reimaged, but nothing seems to have changed on it. so, i kind of want to use an ubuntu image just to push the existing one off, to make sure it pushes down fresh when i restore it.

who knows if it boots or not.....

the ubuntu image seems like a slow download, though.

it took me a try to figure it out, but i think this is what i did - i downloaded a program designed to reimage the ssd drive, but i have to take the ssd drive out to trigger the process. so, it errored out because there was no ssd drive to reimage. catch 22.

can i hotplug the ssd in when it's running? that doesn't seem like the best approach. then, can i format the ssd on reboot? i'd need to get to developer mode, which is what i can't do.

and, then this:

well, hotplug it is, then. fuck.

so, i'm going to try to push down the factory image, first. i think that's what i'm downloading.

if that gets stuck or doesn't work, i'm going to try with an ubuntu image, just to clear the image if for nothing else. 

i wanted to do something like this to troubleshoot the battery, but lost my train of thought around it. iirc, i decided that i need to reprogram one of the controllers. but, getting a different os to check it could be key....

...unless they fucked with the bios.

pulling out the card did indeed trigger the recovery screen, but i have to boot from recovery media. i had to properly login to the device to do it, but i'm downloading recovery media. and, we'll see if it works or not.

what i'm hoping us that this undoes whatever screwiness got pushed down, or at least resets something that got corrupted.

if i pull the ssd out, it might trigger what i want.

some of the broken keys are where i spilled the water, but others aren't. it isn't sitting right with me.

i'm having second thoughts that the issue is about the water.

i mentioned a while back that it seemed like the cops were trying to push a software install down via a flash update, which is obviously absurd at this point on a chromebook device, given that flash has been banned on chrome for years. but, the install kept getting pushed down, so what can you do but ignore it?

when i spilled the water, i had to mash keys to try to soak it up and i may have accidentally installed that screwy update. i got weird messages in my browser as well that said odd things like "game over", which i don't understand.

i have been able to powerwash the machine, but only by using the backup ctrl & alt keys. the next step to try to fix this is to reset it to developer mode, but the refresh key is one of the broken ones. so, i'm wondering if i didn't accidentally give my cyberattacker (i think it's the police.) some kind of break.

i don't know what to do next. do the cops have control of the machine, or what?

i can get into crosh. let's hope i can reset to developer mode from there, somehow.

permaculture is actually useful for one conception of the future - and it's the one where we respond to climate change by letting everybody die and moving on.

that is the existing status quo, afterall. if you look at what the financial interests, the old aristocracy, is doing, they're looking to mitigate losses, yes, but they're just as aggressively moving into the new municipal seawall market. that is the actual unofficial plan - to let catastrophic climate change happen, and profit tremendously from it.

of course, that's insane and destined for obvious collapse. but, that seriously seems to be what they're actually doing - they're just going to let everybody die and adjust to a smaller global human population.

of course, the basic class conflicts underlying the establishment of a permaculture system in a world that has already experienced catastrophic climate change will largely remain intact, so advocates of permaculture will sill have the corporate farming system to fight against. and, a corporate farming system that is legitimately engineered to minimize energy loss may be difficult to compete with in a world where renewable energy is a valuable resource. but, the concept would at least make sense, as the reduced number of people that need to be fed would better align with the realistic productive capacities of a permaculture based economy.

further, permaculture makes sense in the context of being a personalized means of feeding the elite in a highly stratified society, largely for the reason that it would separate the food distribution networks into one for the elite (permaculture) and one for everybody else (factory farms using dying oil-based farming techniques, and struggling to produce). the excessive use of land to produce a minimal amount of product at a high cost would be a typical display of aristocratic grandesse, as the masses struggle to find anything to eat at all in a faltering mass production system.

but, if we're not to lose hope of feeding the masses, of which i am a member of, and letting them die, which means letting me die, then we need to find scalable solutions that can actually feed billions of people and that's simply going to require more technology-driven solutions - leaving the permaculture option as the escape-hachet, designed for a future where building insular and isolated communities is once again a buffer for survival against the elements.

to me, then, embracing permaculture means giving up, and i'm not willing to do that when there are workable ideas on the table. perhaps the eagerness of others to give up says a little about how they view this society, but i need my misanthropy to remain rooted in analysis and potentially implementable solutions. and, i don't think that returning to agrarianism is much of an attractive solution, especially not when we're on the brink of potentially implementing the first reforms towards a communist system of distribution, but that may be my class biases speaking - and those pushing for permaculture may have their own class biases that give them impetus to seek a way to escape the oncoming redistributive communism of the urban cores.

i also need to remind you that if a bunch of yahoos go out in the woods and build permaculture farms then the inevitable result is that they're going to starve to death. then, everybody will say the system failed, even though what really failed were the farmers. 

but, for me that's not the point. the point of stopping climate change is to stop everybody from dying. that's the struggle, that's the goal. tactics towards food production need to be designed for that purpose, not for the purpose of serving a vanguard seeking to flee from the starving masses, after the whole thing goes to hell.

so, i spilled some water on my laptop and it's left my keyboard in somewhat of a shitty state, with multiple keys in multiple physical spaces having stopped working altogether, including both the t and y keys and the backspace key. so, i have to copy & paste the ts and ys in and navigate using the delete button. it's fairly tedious. oddly, it's the same problem i have on my 90s laptop.

the most obvious immediate solution will be for me to pick up a usb keyboard, but i should also be able to replace just the top on this item fairly easily. to the engineers' credit, it actually seems to have been designed to localize the effects of spills on the keyboard. so, the keyboard may be fried, but the rest of the device seems fine - and the keyboard can be fixed for about $30. don't spill water on your computers.

for right now typing is going to be somewhat annoying for a while.

so, i seem to have survived the 10 g of cinnamon from last night, but that was foolish and i can't do that again.

i only bought $1 worth of it, but i hate wasting food, so i'll just take it in mini half teaspoons until it's gone and that's that.

that just increases the importance of the raspberries, which i'm coming in at 45 g rather than 35. i used to pick 10 raspberries, without measuring them; they measured at 45 g last night. that will also get me enough c to have them beat out the vector for fifth spot in the list, leaving both the vector and the banana as extra items when it comes to c.

i bought a second eighth on friday and am regretting it, but it should be done by my birthday, which was the plan around it. i think i needed this week to remind myself why i quit and refocus myself as i enter year 40.

i need to get the orchiectomy done by the end of the year. that's my plan for the year, if nothing else.

on second thought, cinnamon has something called coumarin in it that i want to avoid. 10 g of store-bought cinnamon on a daily basis could very well be a death sentence, eventually. that was not closely enough researched.

so, i won't be adding cinnamon after all.