Tag Archives: firmware

Clobbering my Dual-Boot Laptop

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I clobbered my dual-boot laptop. I ought to have clobbered it long ago, so it was uni-boot Linux, but that whole secure-boot UEFI firmware business scared me too much to do that without knowing more, and who has time to learn more, or a test-bed on which to make mistakes.

I was running Ubuntu 17.10 for awhile, but [I made, over a period of two months, a long list of trivial changes that made me decide the simplest thing would be if] I decided to reinstall the OS. And that didn’t work. Or, it sorta kinda worked once or twice, then quit working completely.

Did I run into the Ubuntu BIOS bug? I don’t know. But I was installing Ubuntu and I couldn’t get past the BIOS. So maybe I did. But I don’t know.

For the time being, I’m using my Macs and some older (pre-UEFI Secure Boot) hardware. Here’s an article about how to fix the Ubuntu BIOS bug. Here’s some more about the provenance of the bug.

Updating the Kindle Touch

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I got a Kindle Touch for my birthday last year, although it didn’t arrive until around Thanksgiving. It has been something of a disappointment. My one child got a Barnes & Noble Nook about the same time, and it is by far the better product. (I’m not alone in that assessment.) (While I’m sure about the Nook, I’m not sure about Barnes & Noble. I chose the Amazon product to access the Amazon market. If ebook readers used a common industry-wide format, the Nook would be a no-brainer.)

Anyway, the Kindle Touch is a few grams too heavy to be comfortable, and the user interface is … well, there’s no way to sugarcoat this: it stinks. You never know where to press because sometimes you press in the invisible right-hand zone to move forward. Sometimes you “flick” things up from the bottom. To go forward you tap the right side. To go backward you flick the left. And so on.

But I see there is a new firmware update for the Touch. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it can hardly be any worse. I’m installing it as I type this. I’ll let you know how it works out.