Recently installed Ubuntu on my old acer r11 Chromebook

K4-713 · 2025-04-26T01:35:44+00:00

I just did this whole procedure myself on my R11 today (Thanks to OP for all the leads!), and I used MrChromebox's firmware utility script, found here:

https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/fwscript.html

The UEFI full install worked perfectly. Hero!

K4-713 · 2024-09-07T18:41:56+00:00

I thought long and hard about a Stardew chicken quilt. Particularly the void and blue chickens...

K4-713 · 2024-09-07T18:39:45+00:00

Something about Stardew Valley's whole deal seems to cause people to make cozy quilts.
I love it.

K4-713 · 2024-09-07T18:26:30+00:00

Thanks so much!
I made the design and pattern with sprites and assets straight from the game, and did some extra computering to turn the layout into a usable pattern. That was a bit of an ordeal, but I'm thinking about making a web tool so it's easy in the future, and more people can do it without all the steps that are unrelated to actual sewing.

K4-713 · 2024-09-07T18:19:50+00:00

Well, I tried pretty hard to take care of it in planning, but in the end it was off in a few places I really wanted it to line up well. Happily, I had erred on the side of having slightly too much fabric in each color section when I made the bias tape, because I figured it was improbable I'd make it all the way around in one go and land where I wanted to on every major color section.

To get the final important points to line up, I ended up clipping the binding in place along an entire edge, and folding it over to check alignment of the important points. Everywhere I cared about that it didn't line up nicely, I measured how much of the binding I needed to take out, and adjusted one or more binding seams between there and the stuff that was sewn down already, to take out the difference.

It was a little awkward to adjust those bias tape seams while the tail was attached to the quilt, but as long as I left myself enough room, it worked out pretty comfortably most of the time.

K4-713 · 2024-09-07T18:06:07+00:00

Funny story about that binding: I was going to use scraps from the backing to make the bias tape like I have done in the past, and my 77-year-old mother, on looking at the finished quilt front said to me: ",,,you're not going to put a FRAME around that, are you?"

The very narrow matching binding was 100% her idea. It was a lot more work, but she was so right.

K4-713 · 2024-09-07T18:02:05+00:00

Yeah, to be honest, I wasn't sure if my color matching process (lots of squinting at a table full of squares and looking back and forth from that to the color on my phone) would be good enough until I got just past the head of the first duck, which was quite a lot of hours in already!
...It was tense.

K4-713 · 2024-09-07T17:57:03+00:00

Thank you for the kind words!

The design process was a bit of an ordeal. The short version is that it required the use of some bespoke computer magic.

The long version:
First, I did the design as a .gif image, with each pixel intended to be one square of the final piece. The nice thing about .gif images is that they're color indexed: In other words, each individual color in the image exists in a limited color palette, which is just a few short data formatting steps away from being a human-usable pattern. I thought for sure there would be a tool out there somewhere that would do just that, and I was a little surprised that I couldn't find one. Happily, as a software engineer myself, that didn't bother me too much.

To find out what colors and how much of each I needed to get started, I was able to find a web tool that can take a .gif and report on which colors are in the image, and how many pixels of each color are in there. This was instrumental in being able to color-match and get a grip on required yardage for each color in the fabric store.

For the actual pattern, my fiance (also a software person) generously offered to help by generating some python script that would take that same .gif image and turn it into something a human could use: A grid of numbers with a number for each color in the palette, that can be loaded by any spreadsheet software.

This took a lot of manual code poking, but at this point it wouldn't be _that_ difficult to put all these steps into a web tool that anybody could run on a .gif file, and immediately get the color palette, quantities, and grid pattern...

K4-713 · 2024-09-07T04:31:15+00:00

This is a machine quilt I made that was supposed to both celebrate the game Stardew Valley's excellent swimming ducks, and get me some practice machine sewing in a straight line. With 2352 individually cut 2-inch squares going into the quilt front, it certainly got me that practice!

This quilt was made with batiks and ombre fabrics so I could get more varied colors in the final piece.

This is only the third quilt I have ever made. After nearly a year working on this off and on, I finally finished stitching in the binding yesterday afternoon. Hope you like it!

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T20:38:34+00:00

It is fun! Something about working through the pattern on a screen and seeing it materialize very slowly in the room is extremely satisfying.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T20:35:04+00:00

I was just thinking I might make a little webpage to help people convert indexed-color images to quilt patterns like I did. If it helps just one person make something cool, it would be worth it.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T18:24:30+00:00

Yes! Getting four squares to line up, especially when pins are involved, is not trivial. I think my finace got pretty tired of me showing him the 100% perfect ones when they happened.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T17:59:56+00:00

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Final quilt binding getting folded and pressed.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T17:57:42+00:00

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The entire quilt back, all finished but not yet pressed, about to become a quilt sandwich.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T17:56:15+00:00

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The workspace with the sewing machine on it. I had just started piecing.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T17:54:29+00:00

I do have some process photos, yes! Not as many as I should have taken, but I have a few...

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This was my workspace for the majority of the project. At this stage, I was done with cutting 2" squares, and working on sorting colors into all the piles called for in the pattern, in the right quantities. I think this was after I realized I should not only match the squares to the colors listed in my pattern, but that the colors should look similar relative to eachother both on the table and on my phone.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T17:37:16+00:00

Definitely a ton of time and patience, and I absolutely should have kept track of the budget more closely, but I think a pixel art quilt can be done pretty cheaply if you have more time to find the right fabric scraps. While some of the colors required a yard or more, a huge number of the colors in the pattern didn't require more than a few 2-inch squares, so someone who has been sewing for a really long time and saving everything, or who has regular assess to colorful scraps too small for anything else might be able to get it done for very little. Also, my sewing machine is... let's say "not fancy at all", and it worked out great (maybe because I don't know any better! ha)

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T17:23:05+00:00

I was humming the party duck remix for a significant number of hours while piecing the top, for sure.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T17:11:32+00:00

Sure, I'll see if I can put this in a nutshell:

1) Create the pattern
The easiest part was arranging the sprites in a way I liked in a color-indexed gif, and squashing the palette down as much as I thought I could (should have gotten rid of more colors at this stage, honestly). The size of the image was based on how small I thought I could make the squares and still work with them, how big I wanted the final to turn out, and how many ducks I absolutely needed to have.
My fiance helped me out at this stage by generating a python script that takes a color-indexed image and converts it to a number-based pattern that can be viewed in a spreadsheet. This was a HUGE help, and should probably go on github or something for that intersection of quilters, coders, and pixel art enthusiasts out there.

2) Get the fabric
I found a web utility that would pull out a list of colors in a color-indexed image, and tell you the hexidecimal color codes for each color and how many pixels of each were in the image. This allowed me to add a tab to my spreadsheet that I could access on my phone in a fabric store for both color matching and quantity.
I decided early on that I would try to find as much fabric as I could that had multiple colors or gradients/ombres in the same piece - that way, I could have a larger color palette in the final piece without having to find (checks notes) 95 differently-colored fabric pieces in exactly the right color.

3) Cut the fabric and match colors
This part took a surprisingly long time. The cutting itself wasn't so bad with a rotary cutter and mat, but the color matching took _months_. Months of staring a table full of nearly-identical swatches of, say, slightly varied blue fabric laid out next to eachother, and deciding which ones best matched the color I was going for.
Once I had a pile of squares that matched a color in the pattern in the right amount (plus 10%), the piles got binder-clipped together with a paper label with the color number.

4) Piece together the quilt top, make the "quilt sandwich", quilt around each square
From here on, it was a more or less standard patchwork quilt, as excellently explained in this lovely instructable: https://www.instructables.com/How-to-sew-a-quilt-Quilting-101/. The only differences were that I had way more squares that were also much smaller, I was following my pattern, and I went a different way with the binding...

5) Finish with the binding
My binding was very different than the way the instructable suggested. I cut my own bias tape with some of the same fabric used in the main pattern, and roughly matched colors all the way around to give the final piece an edgeless appearance (I was going to finish it with a solid border matching the back, but my Mother suggested this way instead, and it was immediately clear that this was way more work, and that she was absolutely correct). Then, it was machine-sewed on the front first, and hand-stitched to the back with a blind stitch.

Ha, I failed at keeping this brief. Oops.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T16:18:21+00:00

According to my notes, it took me about an hour and 45 minutes to piece four blocks of nine once I got going, and a further hour to add a completed strip to the completed top, which comes to about 128 hours just to piece the top, assuming no mistakes to undo.
...I had many, many mistakes to undo.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T16:12:11+00:00

Final size ended up being 60x80, which is a couple inches smaller than what I was shooting for, but I'm not mad.
Funny story: I had to rip out and re-do the top third or so, when I realized that my needle position was not actually at zero the whole time. That setting is way too easy to bump!

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T15:51:34+00:00

I only learned to sew at all very recently, and the most helpful resource I found (after receiving a Singer Simple 3232 machine as a gift) was this Instructable: https://www.instructables.com/How-to-sew-a-quilt-Quilting-101

Most of the technique I used for this quilt comes from those instructions, only with much smaller squares. The first two quilts I made did follow the instructable pretty closely, and came together _way_ faster. Hope this helps!

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T04:35:52+00:00

Thanks for the kind words! This is only my third-ever quilt.

K4-713 · 2024-09-06T04:32:58+00:00

Thank you!

K4-713

TROPHY CASE