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.
A Dell desktop
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Tag Archives: computers
Circular Slide Rules
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):
Cory Doctorow on Apple
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:
An LLM on a home computer
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:
From the Unix past
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.
More on the garage sale laptop
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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Debian Notes
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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Installing Debian 12 on another laptop
I found an HP Pavilion g6 Notebook at a local garage sale. 64 bit system, 4 GB RAM, 600 GB hard disk, Windows 7 Home Premium edition. $30. It did boot into Windows 7, but I had mixed results when trying to access internet sites. This may be because Windows 7 is obsolete and no longer supported. Given that I decided to install Linux. The Debian 12 installer did not recognize the Windows installation. This may be because the hard disk is MBR and there were already 4 primary partitions. I might have been able to manually rearrange the partitions and add an extended partition, but that process would have been tricky and it simply was not worth the bother for Windows 7, so I let the Debian installer wipe the drive. With Debian there were no problems connecting to the internet and my configuration process worked perfectly. I really do not need this laptop, but the price was hard to resist and I enjoy computer necromancy.
Windows hibernation file
I discovered the C drive on my main Windows 10 system was almost full. I was not expecting this, since I use Linux most of the time. A lot of the trouble was a file in the root called hiberfil.sys, taking up 13GB. This is used if you want to hibernate your Windows system, and needs at least 40% of your RAM. I never use hibernation, I simply disabled it in an administrator command window with
powercfg -h off
and the file disappeared, as described in How to Disable Hibernation on Windows 10. I also moved a few large iso files to other locations and now have a comfortable amount of free space on the drive.
Installing Debian 12 on a laptop
I installed Debian 12 on a laptop. This was the same ThinkPad X130e on which I had installed Debian 11 nearly two years ago, but subsequently deleted. Installing Debian 12 was a lot easier. I had no trouble with the wifi. At one point the installation gave me an error during the actual software installation phase, but it offered the option to retry, which I took and then everything worked fine. Afterwards I had no trouble with my configuration process.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 