Friday, April 27, 2018

Success!

After struggling for days, we a finally one step closer to becoming a Windows-free household! My wife got fed up with Windows 10 taking forever to boot and asked if she needed a new notebook to fix it, when in reality that is just the nature of the beast. So she agreed to let me install Linux on it. Being her first real foray into Linux, I set about installing the same distro I'm currently using, which is Linux Mint. I figure that using the same distro will allow me to provide better assistance if she needs it, as I've become somewhat accustomed to it. So I disable Fastboot in Windows, shrink Windows the partition, set the BIOS to boot from my USB drive, and discover there's no way to disable Secure Boot on her Acer laptop. No big deal, I think, as the installer for Linux will give me an option if it sees Secure Boot is still enabled. Install goes fine, so I remove the USB drive during reboot, and it goes straight into Windows 10. And I try everything I can think of to resolve the issue. And I continue trying everything I can find online for the next couple of days. Until today, I discover the perfect storm of settings to resolve everything. First, you HAVE to set a supervisor password in the BIOS to enable additional UEFI settings. Then, during the Linux install, you have to install grub to the EFI partition. Then, you have to add the new file that grub installs to the EFI partition to the boot options in the BIOS. Finally, you have to change your boot order in the BIOS to make sure your new Linux boot comes before the Windows Bootloader. What a pain! But I am currently copying the documents from my wife's Windows 10 install over to her Linux install. I'm leaving the option to dual boot for now, in case she needs to go into Windows for something, but I suspect that after awhile, we'll be able to remove the Windows partition completely :)

Monday, April 23, 2018

Ready Player One (Movie)

Last week, I read Ready Player One. Over the weekend I finally saw the movie, and here are some non-spoiler notes I have on it. There are scenes in the movie that aren't in the book, and there are some in the book that aren't in the movie. Some of the action happens differently than in the book, or to a different character, or for different reasons, but, for the most part, these do not detract from the movie. I think a couple of the scenes from the book that are missing from the movie could have greatly enhanced it, and I'd really love to see an extended cut, but, overall, I really enjoyed the movie.

Friday, April 20, 2018

Ready Player One

I just finished reading Ready Player One (affiliate link) on the advise of a friend of mine. I became aware of it when the movie trailers started playing, but never really gave it much thought, but as someone who was a teenager in the 80s himself, oh my! This book was such a nostalgia trip! Can't recommend it enough.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

New (Old) Design

As much as I loved the darkEQ theme that I had converted from phpBB to Wordpress, I kinda like my old-school blogger layout even better. I could probably fairly easily convert darkEQ again, but what does everyone else think? Should I still with the current theme, or convert darkEQ?

Friday, April 13, 2018

Blogger's come a long way

The reason I moved back from Blogger.com to self-hosted Wordpress the last time was because of the lack of https support for custom domains on Blogger.com. I've recently discovered that they've added this support, so I thought I'd see about importing my Wordpress blog back in. It wasn't exactly an easy task, but it's been (mostly) successful. I'm sure there are broken images and links from the migration, but hopefully it doesn't take too much effort to fix ;)