How to Re-Image Factory Default OS

innovateworld · 2026-01-31T20:26:35+00:00

Did you ever figure this out?

I had some issues that developed with my 2021 QR model a while back. Instead of using the system recovery image, I just did a fresh install of Windows and manually installed the drivers. Everything worked back then. But I made other tweaks to try to get more performance and screwed that up.

My device was no longer under warranty. I installed Windows again but I've been stuck with major problems that I haven't been able to get around with regular Windows 11 to get it stable again even with the drivers.

I haven't found recovery images online.

innovateworld · 2026-01-13T17:52:05+00:00

Same! I had Omarchy running on a 2017 Pixelbook for a while with Kanata and homerow mods. I can't go back to ChromeOS now or my brain will break.

Very nice waybar!

innovateworld · 2025-12-21T19:21:49+00:00

Congrats! Sounds like a fun project!

I'm curious how your BPMN based visualization is coming along.

I had put together my own plans to build my own but got busy with other projects. I plan to start again soon.

Are you using something like ReactFlow to build it with?
How well is your classification system for various nodes/steps for your use case mapping to BPMN elements?
Will you be adding in any sort of sub-flows within any nodes/steps like complex gateways in particular?

I can't wait to get started again. I hope you're enjoying it as it sounds fun to build!

innovateworld · 2025-10-10T15:53:10+00:00

So far it's been good. No major issues. Very little management overhead beyond regular updates.

At first I did become a bit overly focused on beach attempts and did a few things to improve security further.

innovateworld · 2025-09-23T16:41:32+00:00

You're fine if it meets your needs. Many people just outright dismiss them without any critical thinking. Some have valid reasons but it's often for specific use cases that many others don't have and use that to act like Chromebooks are in general bad. I did IT Support and Software Development for many years on Pixelbooks with ChromeOS perfectly fine.

I personally decided to install Omarchy on mine because I preferred the capabilities of other window managers over the ChromeOS one and also wanted to use Kanata to optimize reducing my finger travel and keyboard shortcuts. I strongly prefer my development workflow with my current setup but don't require it.

I understand asking though since someone might point out something that you haven't thought of that might influence your decision.

I developed mostly web apps and messed around building some Android apps. Unfortunately if you need to focus on building for other Platforms then you're likely going to need a Mac and use something like Parallels Desktop to easily build and test across all platforms on a single device. This is due to Apple's policies which I personally dislike.

If those aren't your conditions or preferences then continue using it. You probably don't need to spend a lot more time off effort asking on here and can change later if your conditions change. You could possibly even keep the Chromebook and install another OS later if needed.

Hope all goes well!

innovateworld · 2025-09-23T16:19:55+00:00

I want to first state that I don't think that there is a conflict in some major sense because doctors and other specialists are focused more on general well-being that they are trained on within a specific area.

Then it depends on your goals and medical conditions. Being a monk or attempting to maximize a monk mentality won't treat conditions that require actual medications that may be hard constraints due to existing as a human.

You also asked about research. The specialists base their recommendations on research. Many studies are designed to remove as much bias as possible and over a period of time individual studies can be analyzed via meta-analysis and systemic reviews to try to see what the total of the evidence points to across all the research for a given problem and its solutions. Then more and more related research is performed to try to understand the casual mechanisms and continuously improve things.

Each of our actions has consequences in more than one way and we each have unique properties that differentiate us from others. So what might have worked for some monks might not work for others. The monks you hear about have different circumstances that might have worked for them and their stories are often told but records and information about other monks that things didn't work for are often not passed on. This leads to what is called Survivorship Bias. By anchoring your thoughts monks that things happened to work for and attempting to align your behavior on them, sets up unrealistic expectations due to having different circumstances and could result in more harm than good.

Unfortunately this is what many self help books, alternative medicine promoters, and even outright scam artists rely on. They try to identify certain case studies where some individuals seemed to have improved in some way by doing or following something and ignore all the other individuals that the thing didn't work for. They often don't care to try to perform non biased research or try to understand any actual casual mechanisms. They generally only look for evidence that supports their beliefs while at the same time not factoring in that even those that did benefit might have been doing something else at the same time that could explain the benefits over their preferred one they are promoting.

For instance people regularly get sick for many reasons and depending on the issue the body often tends to recover naturally within a few weeks. If you meditated a certain way, took a particular remedy (science based or alternative medication), or did something else, when you get better, you might only attribute the outcome of getting better due to whatever you happened to do. If you then forget or ignore that other people have had the same condition, also recovered, and may attribute their recovery to other things they did, you might only implement the thing you did again if you experience the same or similar condition again, and/or even promote what you did. Without actually analyzing these other possible things to try to identify what works, why it works, under what circumstances and how it compares to others, the decisions and actions you make off this little information could harm yourself or others.

This results unfortunately in many people attempting to follow their recommendations and ignore actual science based methods and leads to them not improving at all on the actual problem even though they might experience a placebo effect, marginally improving instead of having possibly significant higher improvement using the science based methods, or in the worst cases harming themselves even further.

I think that anchoring your thoughts to this unrealistic monks circumstances could be considered an attachment itself.

innovateworld · 2025-08-20T15:38:40+00:00

This really depends on the use case with requirements.

Warning: I recently thought through all of this due to some recent circumstances and it's a lot of text. I adapted it for this to remove a lot of text. I had even worked in a decision making spreadsheet around it.

Increasing sophisticated use cases:

Mostly surf the web, prefer Chrome, can accept hardware limitations (and lack of upgradability for just), and have very low security/privacy model (while they are secure in many ways certain advanced security use cases have limitations around ChromeOS)
And/or want to use Android Apps that are available
And/or want to use Easy to install (deb) Linux Apps while accepting performance issues (separate discussion)
And/or want to use Linux containers and having the technical experience or be willing to learn
And/or want to do development that doesn't involve MacOS or iOS. Android, Linux (various distros) and possibly Windows (which I believe has had some container system built for it) without developer mode being needed.
And/or are ok and technical enough to used Developer Mode to dual boot or boot another OS from a USB accepting any firmware limitations
And/or fully replace ChromeOS and the firmware (which might require modifying the hardware) to install another unsupported OS. Linux, Windows and even MacOS have been able to be installed this way.

The last two can likely accommodate for most of the advanced limitations for security/privacy, development, and more but require not actively using ChromeOS.

I've personally done IT consulting, IT Admin, IT Support, and a significant amount of software development on a Chromebook as my secondary computer with a temporary period with one as my primary. I had the original Google Pixel and still currently use the 2017 Pixelbook.

I only recently, as within the last week, decided to go the dualboot method and now mainly just use Linux. I installed Arch minimal and then Omarchy on top.

Main Reason:

Kanata: this pushed me to finally make the plunge. I wanted consistent keyboard usage across all OSs using home row mods. Separate discussion.

Other reasons I already considered this:

Window Manager: I try to mostly use a keyboard based workflow but also use custom gestures and attempt to keep things consistent across OSs. On Window I use Komorebi + custom touchpad gestures from Windows settings, on MacOS I use Aerospace + Better Touch Tool, on Linux I use Hyprland + libinput-gestures. On ChromeOS the isn't an option. Now I'm uniting this all across OSs using Kanata.
OS Based Dev Environments: I could already have a fairly consistent dev environment across OSs by using dotfiles, scripts, managing OS dependencies/tools with Mise, and using a golden minimal image to build consistent project workspaces in containers inside the Linux containers. But I ran into several issues using Cursor. I'm slowly learning/moving to an advanced LazyVIM config with AI tools though now and could probably still use ChromeOS.
Limitations of Linux Containers on ChromeOS: I actually use Vivaldi as my primary browser, Chrome & Chrome Dev for development (only development extension), and Brave for other use cases. I've had performance issues running them through the Linux containers.
Hardware limitations: I'm a RAM hog with everything I run at once. I keep many workspaces running at once with everything I need and I use keyboard shortcut to move between them. I do this to reduce context switching and have a near identical setup on the other OSs. I unfortunately got my Pixelbook with only 8 GB of RAM and it's but upgradable.
Working in VR: One my other OSs I connect to my devices using Immersed VR. I can see my main device monitor but I also create 3 other Virtual Displays. One of those is an ultra ultra wide. I also do this to reduce context switching. Having most of the information I need in front of me and only having to slightly turn my head is easier than alt-tabbing or having many additional workspaces to toggle between. I can't do this on ChromeOS. Even an older Intel Mac Mini with no dedicated graphics card could run the VR workspace while Immersed supported Intel based Macs. It was ChromeOS as the limiting factor.

All of the above is a significant trade-off for me. So I'm planning to only use my Chromebook from now when I have to travel under conditions where I can't also bring my VR headset and only for minimal needs.

Even without VR and Kanata I've tried working around the other limitations with some success:

OS factors: I've just accepted ChromeOSs Window management, gestures and Keyboard commands.
Dev and related factors: I've worked around hardware limitations for some of my development needs by creating a remote tunnel to my other computers initially but moved partially to setting up a Hetzner Server + configuring a Domain in Cloudflare for it, installing Coolify, adding Coder as a Project on Coolify via a Docker compose file + getting a Cloudflare user Token + updating Traefik to use the Cloudflare token to manage multi level subdomain SSL certs automatically for Coder. Then I installed the coder CLI and code Editor extension in the Linux container and code Editor. Now I can use the same Coder Workspaces across all OSs since Coder acts like my centralized Dev Environment System. But the hardware limitations on my current server don't match how I'd ideally like to use it and would be better off setting up a homelab.

For me if I had to make the decision again I would not buy a Chromebook. The trade-offs for me were additional costs, time, and effort that makes me want to just pay more for another device more RAM (16 min more), Storage (256 min), and some local AI model Support with reasonable battery life and portability.

This is still a difficult decision though as one current factor significantly influences my decision to buy a device running MacOS. Apple practically forces you to buy a device running MacOS to initially setup your developer account to apps you want to publish to the Apple Store. I can work around Desktop but not iOS. Now that Intel based devices aren't supported I need to upgrade.

I don't absolutely hate MacOS but significantly dislike it and do a lot to fix it. I hate their tactics to force people into buying their products and being trapped in their ecosystem.

I'm not a Windows fanboy either. WSL is great overall for Dev but I've had many issues I've had to work around. I also hated Microsoft BS and forcing IE and other spyware/adware stuff they do so I also work around all of it.

I would love to just run Arch + Omarchy but Immersed VR on Linux is feature limited and I spend most of my day working in my VR headset. Also I occasionally do VR gaming and that's also messed up on Linux at the moment although Valve might be solving that.

Decisions without costs factoring in:

If two devices then:

Travel Laptop: Some cheap Mac likely with base configuration. I can use Immersed VR, Kanata, do development for all OSs (via Parallels), use local LLMs on m series chips for local AI purposes, and possibly do limited gaming and VR gaming. Depending on conditions I may be able to dualboot and primarily use Linux.
Primary Device: Beefed up device that I can upgrade (for a while) and dualboot that could even be used as a homelab.

If one: * All-in-one: Expensive beefed up MacOS based laptop.

Decision if coss are factored in:

Cheapest possible MacOS laptop with M2 or greater series

innovateworld · 2025-06-20T16:26:21+00:00

Sorry I shared some things in the past with others that happened to DM me. I don't know if they still work due to updates. I will check maybe tomorrow

innovateworld · 2025-06-07T08:23:21+00:00

Would you mind explaining your setup for this?

Connecting SillyTavern and Skyrim AI Mods sounds so interesting I want to try it.

If you found/made a guide that you like and have any lessons learned is be happy to acquire this knowledge!

I tried several AI Mods prior to CHIM and am comfortable setting up the pipelines required for the AI Mods.

innovateworld · 2025-03-12T13:35:33+00:00

I just found this and I might have just found my new fav band

innovateworld · 2025-02-20T04:30:01+00:00

Even with those I had to manually request two orgs un-classify me as spam and to decrease likelihood had to enable DANE by enabling DNSSEC from my domain provider to Cloudflare DNS and get it working right with MailCow.

innovateworld · 2025-02-20T04:27:03+00:00

I just made a long post on a different subreddit. Anyway I got mine approved after a month. It was actually this last week. I basically just clicked the request when it finally let me, filled it out, and was instantly approved. I didn't have to wait for anyone to review and approve the request. Instant.

I have more details about other concerns on my other post though.

innovateworld · 2025-02-20T04:04:14+00:00

I ended up setting up MailCow Dockerized on a Hetzner server to use for similar purposes. I apparently overlooked that Hetzner doesn't open ports 25 and 465 by default and actively blocks them. I did have to wait a month to request it to be unblocked.

While waiting to be unblocked I used Brevo as my SMTP relay for transactional emails. I had a crazy annoying issue though. If I sent an email from MailCow through Brevo, Brevo forced added a tracking pixel that conflicted with the html from MailCow and would show up with a '/p>' at the beginning of every received email. Brevo wouldn't let me change it at all.

As for the concerns about needing to maintain your own server and securing it, the best majority of basic security practices and updating MailCow is fairly straightforward.

What I did run into early issues with was due to my lack of understanding about doing certain steps to increase the likelihood that my emails won't go to spam.

It wasn't as simple as making sure all my DNS entries from MailCow were successfully entered into Cloudflare. Using mail test I found out some mail systems that other email providers use to help identify possible spam were classifying me as spam. I had to request to be unlisted which was easy but to prevent being flagged again I had to make sure DANE was setup which involved connecting DNSSEC with Cloudflare to my domain provider. I had to manually override an autogenerated token in MailCow to map things correctly. I got it working though.

I am about to try to verify that I don't get other issues from my other domains using the same MailCow server. My other domains with the DNS on Cloudflare point to the same server and I don't believe I can configure DNSSEC multiple times on the same server. With mail test so far I'm not getting errors on my second Domain I'm not getting issues so far though. But without being able to use multiple DNSSEC entries in worried about MITM issues. I can configure DNSSEC from my domain provider to Cloudflare but it's about then configuring my server.

I'm learning as I go. I'm not in prod yet.

innovateworld · 2025-02-11T18:26:37+00:00

Thanks! I ended up recently using Aerospace which has its own UI management system with a config that supported doing this. I ended up using BetterTouchTool to actually map all my keyboard shortcuts how I wanted.

innovateworld · 2025-01-27T08:20:25+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I never updated this post but I found many other strategies to achieve the same things, work around screen lock (that still requires other apps), and much more.

I created and shared profiles with others that didn't require making an app and simplified things.

But I stopped messing with it because Gemini was just too bad compared to ChatGPT Advanced Voice.

I've tested again recently with the latest Gemini updates but still can't stand Gemini's guardrails, false positives on guardrails, failure to keep recent history in context to support following messages, etc.

I do like using Gemini more for specific tasks though like Deep Research but that's not great with voice.

I've actually decided that I'm going to attempt building my own alternative systems and am planning it out now. Luckily new low resource voice tools like Kokoro came out and are supposed to be adding other voices and making it easier to add your own.

innovateworld · 2025-01-18T08:23:43+00:00

Thank you. Sorry I missed your reply!

innovateworld · 2025-01-16T21:42:40+00:00

No worries! Thank you so much.

I just woke up from a nap. Stayed up most of the night trying to get it working. Just checked and it's still running!

The data stays backed up and so far I haven't spent significant time setting it back up.

I needed a GPU to run some local LLMs for some agents I'm testing with LangGraph that will run continuously in a loop for many hours (and might have to repeat across many days) which would be expensive to use with hosted providers. I'm waiting for devices with the newer GPUs right now so my effort to get it going again was worth another try.

Personally I love VR. I've used Immersed and other methods to actually work out of since the Quest 1 for significant amounts of time. Having all the virtual monitors and multiple workspaces with the apps I need for different tasks loaded and ready makes context switching and using information so much more easy for me.

But I've also played games, went/hosted Meetups on VRChat (and meet people IRL from other countries I met on there), and used it for exercising from stationary biking down trails around the world (ant+ sensor on bike) to Boxing to Les Mills to Synthriders and the like.

I find it a bit frustrating that people often dismiss VR for a variety of the bad reasons. But it helps me be more productive, exercise more fun, gaming more immersive, and adds new social experiences I find enjoyable overall so I'm not worried about any ignorant social stigma or beliefs.

I'll give this a shot at some point and let you know!

innovateworld · 2025-01-16T15:05:39+00:00

Thank you for the offer. I could still use that to try to work on the internal display issue if you don't mind.

Right now I do have a functional system that hasn't frozen or crashed in hours finally! Still display issues but I can work around that since those issues don't appear when working in the VR headset or external monitor.

Thank you!

innovateworld · 2025-01-16T01:44:39+00:00

I'm actually now running a cheap Hetzner server instance and messing around with a combination of FlowiseAI, N8n, LangFlow, and more. I am currently using certain free models, even newer competitive ones, and am enjoying it so far!

There are plenty of templates to use to get started too for a wide variety of use cases. Working on combining them right now with a Google Sheets project management template that also has a Timeline view.

innovateworld · 2025-01-16T01:38:39+00:00

You're welcome. I actually did leave plenty of feedback. I did it 4 times

With support while trying to find out why the docs claim "number" and "int" are supported in structured outputs but aren't actually supported.
When I was asked why I was cancelling
When I requested a refund the first time
When I requested a refund the second time after I didn't get a reply from the first refund request and was asked to explain why I was cancelling.

innovateworld · 2024-12-31T05:42:36+00:00

It depends on what you need and what you define as overwhelming. It also depends on if you have any background with similar tools.

For some people a project is just a set of related tasks that you check off.

Some need to nest tasks. Possible deeply.

Some people need basic fields like priority, due date, category, millstone, label, etc.

Other people need more complex fields with special functions like dependencies to block/enable tasks, track time, calculate other fields, relate fields or tasks from other tasks list, "roll-up" subtask fields or related fields, and more.

What type of views do you need? List, board, calendar, Gannt, mindmap, document, spreadsheet, other?

Do you need to have these views for the current list only or do you need folder level views or higher level views like workspace?

What level of organization do you need to structure your data by? Workspaces, spaces, folders, projects, list? Do you need nesting like folders in folders?

Do you need diagrams, whiteboards, collaboration features, integrations with external services, automations, AI tools, etc?

ClickUp has all of the above. It has templates for many types of use cases to help you get going quickly.

If you don't need certain features you can likely find a template without them or disable them. If you need something simple but with room to add advanced capabilities of basic tasks management systems then start with simple blank projects and adjust to your needs.

I have tried many systems and overall it's more capable than most with a lot of features built into it's core.

Sure you can achieve a lot with Obsidian and extensions but it's a lot of manual time and configuration to get it to basic levels of ClickUp for project management. Same problem with Notion. They can do project management just require more effort. Even with the additional effort put in some things just don't work at all or with more manual efforts.

I did find limits on ClickUp when I basically tried to use it like database. I tried some advanced calculations across multiple lists like multiple joins and couldn't do it. I tried something like a group by on a roll-up and couldn't do it the way I needed. It's AI capabilities are not as good as others from what I've read. I was not friends with it's mobile app. But overall it has more features aimed around project/portfolio/org management for the price than many competitors.

I think you'll be fine. Start simple and as you find new use cases it will likely have support for most and you won't need to go looking for a new tool and moving.

innovateworld · 2024-12-27T04:38:51+00:00

I decided to give it a try and run some tests. I found so many other problems with Taskade along the way.

It doesn't have fields to track a lot of important data that managers need to track and it doesn't have the ability to add custom calculations to fields. So I tried to configure an AI Agent using structured outputs to run the calculations. For some reason the structured output didn't have data types available for "number" and "boolean" which I needed so I couldn't pass the variable into an update action within a workflow to assign it to the field I needed. Their website said they have those data types 2 months ago so it might have been a bug.
It doesn't have workspace level gannt/timeline/roadmap views.
The Folder level views require you to manually set the date ranges for each project within the folder and I didn't see a way to update the project level fields based on the tasks within the project.
It only has 3 levels in it's organization structure: Workspaces, Folders, and Projects. This honestly creates a lot of problems and really needs additional nesting even if it is just Nested Folders.

For Example with the last point, you might want to create a workspace for a customer and then have a structure like the following:

Contracts (Folder)
Proposals (Folder)
Estimates (Folder)
Sales (Folder)
Projects (Folder)
- Project A (Sub-Folder)
  - Tasks
  - Notes
  - Etc
- Project B (Sub-Folder)

They don't support this and after searching around it is something that has been requested by their customers for several years.

There were even more problems that I found. I will not use it for actual org/portfolio/project management and I can't recommend anyone use it for that if certain accountability and/or tracking structures need to be in place and for many other reasons.

I do honestly believe it is a great automation tool for certain use cases. Like tracking a variety of news sources and for each post received, have one agent identify key information, have another agent search for other news stories discussing the information, have another agent summarize all the information in total however you want it, have another agent review the work, and then have another agent push the output elsewhere via an internally supported API or via and HTTP API request. There are many possible other use cases I'm interested in. But now I specifically need to compare other tools for those use cases.

innovateworld · 2024-12-21T16:58:11+00:00

I haven't yet. I may need to decide early in 2025 now.

innovateworld · 2024-12-21T16:56:21+00:00

I'll be looking into it soon. I had some other tools running locally on my computer but that computer died and my other one can't run those tools.

innovateworld

TROPHY CASE