In the spring of 2020, I had gotten a new iPhone SE – the first generation. The second generation SE was already out but the reason I like the original is the size. I got the phone “new” from eBay but it turned out to have been actually refurbished with a few issues and one of those issues just came to a head. The battery swelled up and the battery would discharge really quickly the lower it got. I now have a fully functional iPhone SE but it took a lot more work to get me here than I expected.
[ continue reading »» ]Category: Technology
Latitude E5470/E5570 Triple-Boot MacOS Catalina, Windows 10, Ubuntu 20
Fortunately, Hacintoshing has gotten easier through the years due to the hard work of a lot of people on tools and procedures. So it only took a few days to get my Dell Latitudes E5470 and E5570 working with MacOS Catalina. But since it was still a bit of a challenge, I wanted to write up my procedure. I’m sure I’ll be doing this again at some point and it may help out others. And with Big Sur around the corner, I may try to do all this again when Big Sur is released.
As usual, I made this harder on myself by wanting to do a triple-boot option with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal. Fortunately, again, this process has gotten easier and just works better now than it has before. For the majority of people who won’t be doing a triple-boot scenario, the sections below are labeled with what is in them so you can do only what applies to your install. Although if you won’t be installing MacOS at all, then you should skip this guide since it relies on the Clover bootloader which is unnecessary if you are going to just use Ubuntu and Windows.
[ continue reading »» ]Minecraft on GalliumOS on a Chromebook
After getting GalliumOS installed on a Chromebook, here’s what I did to install Minecraft on it including transferring the saved “worlds” from a prior Windows computer. And below I have a link to improve performance.
[ continue reading »» ]GalliumOS on a Chromebook
Student Chromebooks are “Managed” by the schools so they won’t allow “Linux (Beta)” to run on them. That’s a logical policy for Google to restrict it and as I discovered isn’t even something that a school can change if they wanted. But it means that you can’t do things like run Minecraft on a Chromebook that is Managed. That’s too bad since I really don’t want to get extra hardware for the sake of Minecraft.
But I discovered that you can install GalliumOS on a Chromebook to dual boot it and then you can run Minecraft in GalliumOS. This post will cover the set up of the Chromebook to dual boot ChromeOS and GalliumOS. A subsequent post will cover the specific Minecraft install and post-install steps. I did it on a Dell 11 3189 but it should work on most modern Chromebooks. The steps look long but it actually didn’t take too long to do and the process seems pretty solid.
[ continue reading »» ]Chromebook Ownership
For privacy reasons, I’m not going to talk a lot about the background here. So I’ll just state that there are two Chromebooks (Dell 11 3189) in my household and that it turned out the local school system had acquired one of them – not physically, but functionally. I learned a lot about Chromebooks, ChromeOS, “Managed” devices and “Owned” devices that I wanted to document for myself and for anyone else that might benefit.
[ continue reading »» ]Setting Up Minecraft Server on Ubuntu
I wanted to set up a Minecraft server (there’s not as much activity this summer due to the pandemic) but I know very little about it. So I did some quick research, found some guides that seemed to look like they would work, and dove right in. Mostly this post is for me to remember which guides I followed. There were lots of possible ways to do it but the ones listed here happen to be the ones I followed.
[ continue reading »» ]Moving Recordings to Videos in MythTV
My MythTV setup has been humming along for years now. It still beats what you can get from cable companies primarily because of the commercial skip capabilities. But there’s also other good stuff like being able to archive a recording. I have previously moved copies of recorded TV to an SD card for portable viewing, for example. For years, I’ve wanted an easy way to make a recorded TV show leave the ephemeral recordings section and move to the video library for permanent storage. Today, I finally got that to happen.
[ continue reading »» ]Installing an iPhone Dock in a Volvo XC90, Second Try
While my first try at putting a doc for my iPhone in my Volvo XC90 was, strictly speaking, successful, it wasn’t as good as I wanted. I had thought it would be cool to have the dock out of sight when the phone was unplugged so as not to mar the beautiful interior with an unsightly growth. So I figured out how to get it in the front bin of the console. However, I realized pretty quickly that the phone just wasn’t visible there which makes it only slightly better than the factory version of connecting it in the main console bin. I eventually accepted that I would need to get a mount for the dashboard and that it would be permanently visible. But I still wanted to keep things as clean as possible. Here’s what I did.
Updating MythTV Channel Lineup
Updating the MythTV channel lineup shouldn’t need to be so confusing but based on some misinformation on the Internet, I wasted a lot of time heading down wrong paths. The upshot is mythfilldatabase does do the right thing but it may not be clear initially. And if you don’t care about channel numbers at all, and you have only one source, then just run “mythfilldatabase –do-channel-updates” and you are done. If you do care about channel numbers (which can be useful when watching live TV switching between sports programs on neighboring channels, for example) or you have more than one source, read on.
Restore a Prior Firefox Session
I had a set of Firefox windows and tabs open on my Windows 7 laptop. I was in the middle of one thing when I started an unrelated effort to rebuilt a secondary disk to allow the laptop to boot MacOs and Ubuntu. I knew I wanted to preserve the session of Firefox windows for my other effort so I was using Chrome to keep the two projects separate. Somewhere in there, I installed new software which automatically opened Firefox and then I rebooted effectively killing off my ability to use Restore Previous Session from the Firefox menu. But I wasn’t ready to be done with those tabs! So I dug around in the Firefox folders and figured out how to restore the session I wanted. Here’s what to do if it happens to you in the latest version of Firefox.