Daily - March 8, 2026

Previously…

Today’s recap

A two dayer.

Honestly, there’s not much to say about today (Sunday). Did my chores, watched the NASCAR race, played around with another one of these Asus C100P Chromebooks (more on that below). My GERD and allergies are going crazy, so I’ve been in recovery mode all day.

Saturday is where all the fun happened.

Earlier in the week my buddy Mike messaged to ask if I was going to a repair cafe/fix-it fest that was happening in my little town. It was the first I heard of it, so peeked at the event website. It didn’t look like I could complete the volunteer requirements before the event, so I figured I would just show up and hang out with Mike.

If you don’t know, Mike is the creator of the Nixbook OS project and the founder of the Computer Upcycle Project. The Computer Upcycle Project takes donations of computers, cleans them, and installs Nixbook OS onto them, then gives them away for free to anyone that needs a computer. It is an amazing project and Mike has given away thousands of laptops. Mike is an awesome person and I’m lucky enough to have met him on Mastodon and we live in the same area. Occasionally I’ll hang out at his place and clean up laptops with him. Other times we just hang and talk nerd shit. When he messaged about the fix-it fair it was a chance to do both.

We met up about 10AM, grabbed coffee, and then went to the fair to get setup. He had volunteered to fix computers and even give some away, depending on who showed up. When I went it, they gave me a badge and I became an instant volunteer 😅. There were many other volunteers who all had amazing talents. Next to us was an electronic repair table, then woodworking and furniture repair. To the other side was tool repair and sharpening, then sewing, and bike repair.

In total it was a small turnout for the people requesting repairs and no on came in for computer help. But, I think that was because it wasn’t on the flier. The next event in April will have computer repair listed after we spoke to the organizer. Regardless, we had a blast. I worked on a busted table fan while Mike got busy with a typewriter. We both worked on a broken USB port on a Jackery power station. We were there for about 4 hours. I’m super glad he messaged and invited me to come, it was an awesome experience.

In between we talked Linux and laptops. He brought a small stack of these Asus C100P Flip Chromebooks, which can’t have Nixbook OS put on them because they are armv7 32-bit CPUs with only 16GB of eMMC storage. I took two to see what I can get running on them since the support for ChromeOS on them has expired.

Got home, hung out, dinner, and then Wife and I watched War Machine.

Projects

The last two days I’ve been working on getting PostmarketOS installed and configured on these Asus Chromebooks. I wrote and published a guide yesterday on all the steps needed to get them running PostmarketOS.

These are fun little devices. Imagine if you had a Raspberry Pi laptop or what it is like to use the Pinebook Pro. Its a quad core Rockchip processor with 4GB of RAM and a 10 inch screen. The real problem is the eMMC with only 16GB.

So far PostmarketOS has been running pretty good. I’m typing this post on it in the browser on my Nextcloud instance. I wouldn’t think of it as a full Linux laptop. Instead a proper Linux Chromebook. I have done this a few times with PostmarketOS, first with the Microsoft Surface RT and then a Lenovo Duet 3 Chromebook. I’ve been calling them “ChromarketOS” devices. Works just fine with a browser, Libreoffice, and the terminal. I can see clustering these together the same way you might with Raspberry Pi devices. It idles around 4 watts and has an SD card slot for extra storage.

It has been fun to these up and running. I have some wrinkles to iron out before I’d hand them off to anyone else, though. I do want to play with them as a server at some point. I doubt I can get Docker working, but I can see repurposing these laptops as cheap Raspberry Pi alternatives. Looking on eBay you can get one for like $20. Mike has a stack of about 50 of them 😆.

Daily gratitude

• Thankful for Mike.
• Thankful for the community members at PostmarketOS.
• Thankful for my little town and the opportunity to volunteer at the fix-it fest. I’ve been in such a funk lately it was nice to help others.

Tomorrow’s big thing(s)

Work. We are finishing that pond rebuild.

Loose thoughts

It is going to absolutely pour rain all next week. Work is gonna suck.

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