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Ubuntu on the Samsung Series 7
My Late 2008 MacBook was getting a little slow, so I went laptop shopping. I ended up with the Samsung Chronos 7 (NP700Z5CH). Under my budget, but met my spec in every way.
Installing Ubuntu was a minor trial, but it works, and has preserved the Win 8 (blecch!) dual-boot. If it helps anyone, the procedure I followed was:
- Updated the BIOS, made a recovery DVD and shrank the Windows partition using the DISKPART app (which reminds me so much of the old VMS admin tools).
- Broadly following the UEFI instructions, I got the 64-bit Linux-Secure-Remix ISO and wrote it to a USB stick with UNetbootin.
- In the BIOS (F2 when the Samsung logo shows), I disabled Secure Boot and Fast Boot, but kept EFI on, as Win8 won’t work without it. I also disabled (temporarily, with Shift+1) the HD and Windows Boot Manager from the boot sequence, moving USB boot up to first place.
- After trying Ubuntu from the LiveUSB, I installed it. Once it had finished and rebooted, I re-enabled HD and Windows Boot Manager in the BIOS.
- Ubuntu would work fine from here, but to restore Win8 to a usable (?) state, I had to reboot with the LiveUSB image and run Boot-Repair as suggested in the UEFI documentation.
The fan maybe runs a little more than it should, but everything I’ve tried works. There’s clearly been a lot of work done on Samsung/UEFI support recently, as any of the web tutorials I found from even 8 months ago recommended really arcane stuff I didn’t actually need.
(abstracted from my Reddit query: Linux-friendly future-proof MacBook replacement [13-15″, CA, $1600] : SuggestALaptop)
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A better image rollover with Ultimate TinyMCE
Probably best to retire my ad hoc image rollover in wordpress, as Ultimate TinyMCE has it covered. Sure, it’s a plugin, but it makes it so much easier. After uploading your two images, select an image and put the two URLs into the Mouse Over/Out fields:
Easy! And no digging into the page source, either.
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Wind Power, 1940s style
This is how wind turbines were supposed to look, at least in the 1940s. It’s the experimental Smith-Putnam 1.25 MW unit than ran for a short while on a hill near Rutland, VT. The picture’s from a rather falling-apart copy of Large Horizontal-axis Wind Turbines (Thresher, R. W., & Solar Energy Research Institute. (1982). Large horizontal-axis wind turbines: Proceedings of a workshop held in Cleveland, Ohio, July 28-30, 1981. Golden, Colo: Solar Energy Research Institute) that I rescued from Jim‘s recycling years ago.The first part of these proceedings has a historical review of the Smith-Putnam turbine, including an excerpt from the S. Morgan Smith Company’s house organ on the project. As the rest of the book is pretty much all about the MOD series of turbines, it’s of less interest. I’ve scanned the bits about the Smith-Putnam turbine, and put them here: NASA_DOE-1981-large_horizontal_axis_wind_turbines-excerpt. If anyone wants the book, let me know. It’s very ratty, but readable.
I’ve written about this turbine before, but in relation to a packet of crayons. More awesome turbine pictures from Paul Gipe: Smith-Putnam Industrial Photos.
