I finally upgraded my “daily driver” system, an HP ProDesk 600 G1 SFF, from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04. The process went well, but I did have to do some cleanup work afterwards and not everything is working as it should..
I am continuing to work on my new (for me) Dell Inspiron 3670. I have now upgraded the RAM to 32 GB, replacing the 2 8 GB DIMMs with 2 new 16 GB DIMMs. I ordered the memory from Crucial, which has an “Upgrade my computer” button on its home page. With this you can look up exactly what DRAM and SSD upgrades are apppropriate for your particular system. Physically installing the new DIMMs was a little tricky simply because of where the memory slots are placed on the motherboard, but I managed. Since I am now at the maximum possible memory I will not have to do this again, unless one of DIMMs fails.
I found a Dell Inspiron 3670 at Repowered. 16 GB DDR4 RAM, a 512 GB NVMe SSD, Windows 11 Pro for about $300. I need to get some experience with Windows 11, so I bought it. It is working out quite well for me.
I was browsing some web sites about LLMs and found a link to The Cardboard Computer, which turned out to be about circular slide rules. I have no idea why these are are supposed to be related to LLMs or any other modern AI work, since the first slide rule was invented in 1632. I still have the circular slide rule I bought in high school (1964-68):
The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:
From The antitrust case against Apple. See also:
I saw How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes and decided to try it on my Linux desktop system. It took a lot more than 10 minutes but I got it to work.
Looking at the BIOS, the system dates from 2013. Here are the details:
I recently read Reviving the Glory Days: NsCDE Desktop for UNIX Buffs. NsCDE is based on the old FVWM window manager. When I was a lot younger I got a few chances to look at classic Unix workstations and I thought they looked really cool, but I never has a chance to try one. So I decided to indulge my curiosity.
I have worked some more on the HP Pavilion g6 Notebook I bought for $30 at a local garage sale. I did get the additional RAM I mentioned there. It seemed easy enough to slide into place, but I have not yet been able to get the machine to recognize it. So for now I am stuck with just 4GB. Not long ago that was considered plenty, and I was very happy with a 4GB system, but now “they” are saying you should have at least 16GB on a PC. So now I am looking at lightweight Linux systems to see if I can get some more life out of this system.
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I recently watched Red Hat: why I’m going all in on community-driven Linux distros. from Veronica Explains, after which I decided to try to seriously use Debian 12 rather than Ubuntu in my daily computer work. This is working reasonably well. I have run into a variety of differences, but so far I have overcome them. A lot of these have to do with Gnome. I have learned a lot about Gnome in the last few days, chiefly how little I actually know about it.
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From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 