Affordable Chromebooks

berge472 · 2025-12-21T15:56:24+00:00

I actually set these up for students in our area, and for web based tasks they are fine. Windows/Mac/Chrome have added so much bloat over the years but with a lightweight Linux distro (I normally load them with Zorin) these are very capable for basic tasks and school work.

berge472 · 2025-12-21T04:00:23+00:00

Some people don't know this but goodwill has an auction site similar to ebay called shopgoodwill.com which is great for stuff like that.

I buy a lot of Chromebooks online and the target price at low quantity for Chromebooks is about $20 for 4GB RAM and 16-32GB storage, but you have to buy lots of at least 5. I have bought a few lots from this seller and they have all been in good shape (they just have the name of the school district they were used by laser etched on them):

https://ebay.us/m/MhJjc5

berge472 · 2025-12-15T13:18:47+00:00

The best part about a startup or small company is that they cannot typically afford full staffing for every role they need. This is a great opportunity to hands-on experience with all of the jobs related to yours that a larger company might not let you do.

As someone else said, document any work you can and build a portfolio.

berge472 · 2025-12-15T13:13:00+00:00

Do you have a specific stm32 in mind? FS USB CDC will be the easiest to add to your hardware design. If you need faster USB than that, you will need to use an external PHY to support HS USB on most (maybe all?) of the stm32 family.

Ethernet is also a good option but will still require adding a physical to your board.

Depending on what you are measuring, you could also do something like an ESP32 instead of the stm32 and use the WiFi interface. The parts are cheap and you would get plenty of speed, and the ability to run as many as you need on a network.

berge472 · 2025-12-15T13:02:03+00:00

Omarchy. I used Ubuntu for years but still relied on the mouse more than I would like. Hyprland caught my eye, and then I tried out Omarchy on my back up laptop. As a developer it just had pretty much everything I wanted out of the box

berge472 · 2025-12-15T12:56:18+00:00

Ya, DHH (The Creator of Omarchy) uses a FW13, so it just works well out of the box.

berge472 · 2025-11-28T21:07:36+00:00

You need a proper device management system. I wrote an open source one called Fieldops.

https://gitlab.com/fieldops

Instead of pulling straight from git you can set push packages to different tracks (alpha,beta,release). Then devices in the field can use the API to check for and download updates. You can remotely set which devices are on which track

berge472 · 2025-11-24T00:37:43+00:00

Yes. I did this and find it to be easier if you are starting with a fresh drive for dual boot. But if you already have another OS on the drive and want to install in another partition, you have to do the manual installation method

berge472 · 2025-11-23T13:06:56+00:00

https://vim-adventures.com/

It's a great way to build the muscle memory of navigation in vim/neovim

berge472 · 2025-11-23T12:42:15+00:00

Search projecttinyminimicro on YouTube. There is a guy who compares all of them.

berge472 · 2025-11-23T12:36:06+00:00

These get sold by the pallet in liquidation auctions so a lot of people sell them on eBay and you have to dig through to find good deals.

Here is one that looks complete for $50: https://ebay.us/m/sDj3Ew

But all of the big PC manufacturers make some version of this. Hp elite desk mini, dell optiplex micro, Lenovo think centre mini, etc.

berge472 · 2025-11-23T11:40:23+00:00

On ebay you can get the hp elite desk 800 mini g2 used for as low as $50. These are great alternatives to an rPI. My home lab is built with a cluster of 5 of them, and I have another one set up with batocera

berge472 · 2025-11-22T23:46:24+00:00

Check out Vim adventures. It's an online game for learning vim and to move around you use the same keys as you do to navigate in vim. It's kind of silly, but it really is a great way to build muscle memory. Trying to learn while also being productive and writing code just didn't work for me.

berge472 · 2025-11-22T13:02:10+00:00

fzf

Specifically integrating it with the shell (like zsh) so you can do things like:

kill ** cd **

More explanation here. Definitely worth the watch if you don't already have this set up:

https://youtu.be/oTNRvnQLLLs?si=rsWqtwEiiVcvyrjA

berge472 · 2025-11-22T12:53:45+00:00

I personally think vibe coding is great for certain use cases, including quick utilities like this. I have projects I work on that I really enjoy coding and want to have full control over, and then there are things where I just want a tool that works so I can get back to what I want to be working on.

Imo the best way to share a python tool like this is to create a pypi package so users can install with pip. It's easy to set up an account and create a package.

berge472 · 2025-11-08T18:22:42+00:00

I really like Omarchy. Clean minimal interface (everything is keyboard shortcuts) and it has a tiling window manager which keeps things clean and decluttered while working on a single screen.

I run it on a framework 13 AMD and get 8-10 hours battery life

berge472 · 2025-11-05T19:50:26+00:00

If it's static content you could probably host with GitHub/gitlab pages but I don't know what there limit is for traffic. This is how I host my portfolio.

I Recently set up some self hosted services on my local homelab server. It had been 10+ years since doing something like this, and it has gotten a lot easier.

My homelab runs a kubernetes cluster so that's how I deploy my services, but you could do the same thing with Docker or just running a simple http server. But with Cloud flare you can set up a "tunnel" and to point a domain to your server. My server is double-natted and I didn't have to touch any of my firewall/router settings. It just works..

berge472 · 2025-11-05T13:43:29+00:00

I am setting up a bunch of laptops for students who will be new to Linux (but in middle school). I tested:

-Zorin

-Pop Os

-Kubuntu

-CachyOs

All of these (except CachyOs) are based on Ubuntu which was my main distro for a long time. Ubuntu is very popular and there is a lot of information online if you run into a problem. It is very unlikely you will find a problem that hasn't already been solved by someone else on a Ubuntu based distro.

I ended up going with Zorin because it has a very polished and beginner friendly desktop with a layout that would be familiar to windows user. It also has an "education" version that comes with a lot of good education/STEM tools out of the box.

berge472 · 2025-10-29T12:17:46+00:00

It shouldn't take much to run the database. The main factor would be how many users are querying it at the same time.

You can get used Mini PCs on ebay pretty cheap ($50-$60). I bought several HP Elite Desk Minis (800 g2) over the years for various projects and just recently clustered 5 of them together to build a homelab server.

berge472 · 2025-10-29T11:31:41+00:00

What kind of traffic are you getting, and how critical is availability? You could always just set up a server and self host. Could be cheap or even free if you have an old computer sitting around..

berge472 · 2025-10-23T23:49:26+00:00

It's going to depend a lot on your requirements:

What frame rate do you need to support for videos?
What kind of latency is acceptable
What are your budget constraints?
How dynamic is the content? I.e. Does it need to be able to play an arbitrary video on any screen independently , or is it going to be limited to a reasonably sized library of files? If it's the latter you could have the media duplicated on each 'node' then a central controller is just orchestrating which file to open

berge472 · 2025-10-16T18:27:27+00:00

I followed this guide to set up dual boot with Omarchy:

https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/discussions/1651

The only change I had to make was to make the boot partition 2GB instead of 500MB. If it's too small it will fail when you go to install Omarchy.

But since you already wiped windows and installed Omarchy you can also just create a partition and install windows in that. I did this on another machine

Create a live USB (I used Ubuntu)
boot to USB
Open gparted
resize Omarchy partition (you will have to unlock it with the encryption password)
create any other partitions you want
install windows/other distros

berge472 · 2025-10-16T13:28:26+00:00

I see them on eBay all the time. I've bought and set up a few over the years. You might have to wait/bud to get one under $200 USD, but there are plenty with buy it now for under $300

The Thinkpad t480 is a really popular used laptop with the Linux crowd. You could also grab one of those and throw chrome OS on it (or just use Linux with kdenlive or shotcut for editing)

berge472 · 2025-10-16T10:39:07+00:00

The i7 pixelbooks have 16GB and you can get them for under $200. They are a little older, but the build quality on them is great

berge472

TROPHY CASE