this is no longer a mobile device like i planned it to be. i am using the mp4 player for that purpose and that is ok.
i want to continue using one of these expired chromebooks to stream youtube, one of them as a studio terminal (to connect to bandcamp, etc) and of them as an email/news reader. the major design flaw with the entire concept of a chromebook is that they force you to make your email password short enough to be able to type in with your fingers and to remember, which is unacceptable. you want your passwords to be 100 characters, or longer if they let you, and to store them on thumb keys or external drives. the chromebook won't let you do that - it forces you to type it in, and that's just not workable. then, you need to do something like what i'm doing, which is log in with a stub account with a short password (like you would use on your windows account) and then login into google to use it with a separate account. but, then, what's the point?
for that reason, it is going to make more sense to turn all of these chromebooks into non-chromebooks, which is frustrating,
the best way to use these devices is as terminals, which means to log in as a guest and then log into the google accounts from the guest mode. you don't need local storage on a streaming device, or a device used to buy or upload things, or even on a news and email and facebook reader. you should keep your local storage in air gapped windows or linux pcs, and just use an assortment of cheap streaming devices for online interactions, each with unique online accounts that don't speak to each other. due to the fact that they're cheap, you might have to replace these devices every ten years instead of every twenty or thirty years like you do with pcs, but you really shouldn't, they should last longer than pcs.
i bought cheap/expired chromebooks because i realized that buying expensive laptops was stupid, after watching a few overheat and explode. there is no way to engineer a device to run hot in plastic and expect it not to break; laptops are what the masses wanted, but they are a stupid concept, thermodynamically. you can't make these things last. they're going to break. it's hopeless. i don't have the money to spend $2000 on a laptop every five years, so i bought a brand new expired $99 laptop expecting it to break. if i have to replace it every 3-5 years anyways, i'd rather spend $99 dollars than $999 dollars; the thermodynamic reality of laptops is that your $999 laptop has no greater a shelf-life than the $99 expired chromebook.
but then i realized that these ssd chromebooks with cheap processors actually solved the thermodynamic problems with windows (or apple) laptops. these are cheap to buy because they are cheap to make; they're cheap terminal devices that came out of the "one laptop one child" initiative intended to get silicon into the hands of starving africans, who would probably prefer a sandwich, but whatever. they don't have hard drives. there's nothing spinning. the chips don't run hot. the monitors are led screens. and the chrome os does nothing in the background. this dell 3120 i'm typing on needs a few new keys, granted, but the device itself should last forever. there's nothing in it to break and there's nothing driving it to overheat. a slightly more sturdy build construction, and a chromebook should last 300 years, not 3 years.
oops.
so i bought some more of these and wanted to buy even more. this was the solution, not the problem. i wanted to put linux on them but i didn't have to so i didn't.
google won't let you do that anymore. google is trying to force you to buy more hardware. you shouldn't have to replace these slave terminal devices that let google servers do all the work every five or three or two years. these are increasingly devices with little to no moving parts that should actually work for decades, but google increasingly won't let that happen.
there's two answers to this.
the first is to acknowledge that google is increasingly becoming the monopoly that the united states successfully prevented microsoft from becoming, partly by funding google as a competitor to microsoft. google was able to succeed largely due to the antitrust suits against microsoft. i think people don't understand that. those antitrust suits also stopped apple from dying. apple was dead in the 90s. who saved apple? you want to think it was steve jobs, but it was bill gates. gates brought apple back from the dead with cash injections, partly on the condition they bring jobs back, in order for gates to have his old competitor back, and that worked for microsoft. apple is not a monopoly and is really largely a joke; the ability of apple to corner the naive rich person market just brought the price of pcs down, when helped sell more copies of windows to consumers and businesses. however, google is now becoming what the ftc aggressively prevented windows from becoming, by stopping microsoft from monopolizing explorer and search.
the ftc should let google keep search and let google keep chrome, but force it to sell it's hardware and operating system businesses. the problem is not that they have all of these server apps, that's good; the problem is that they're making laptops and phones to access the servers, too. tell google to just be google and focus on server-side applications. force somebody else to build the terminals. it can be hp or compaq or dell or ibm (it won't be ibm), that's fine. it could be a different company altogether.
don't separate the browser from the search; that won't help, that will hinder. what will help is to separate the terminal/slave device from the server/mainframe device. this is a very old way to look at very new technology, but it is the truth of what google, nvidia and others are doing right now, they're bringing back the 60s and 70s model of dumb terminal machines connecting to smart super computers, and the truth is that that makes sense for the internet, while not making sense for home pcs, which you really don't and never did want on the internet.
i want to buy a terminal that connects to multiple mainframes - google, microsoft, nvidia, apple, etc. the terminals should be cheap because they have minimal functionality, and almost never need to be replaced because they do almost nothing and require almost no parts. anti-trust function should focus on that endpoint.
i knew what i was getting when i bought expired chromebooks, but google shouldn't be able to tell me i can't upgrade the firmware on the terminal, or turn off javascript from the server. the ftc should step in and break that.
for now, it works, that's fine, but i'm going to need to convert all three of these devices, and i want to convert them into devices that run in guest mode. that's the next issue. are there linux distros that have guest modes like chromebooks, and run in guest mode ike a chromebook? if there's not, there should be. go build me that, and make it for free. that's what i want to flash these devices with.