The Acer C720 is sold.
I was originally planning to restore Chrome OS on it, but the buyer wanted me to install Ubuntu 14.04 for him instead, and gave me a username and password: username chromebook, password 123456.
That saved me a lot of hassle, because I’d just finished setting up Ubuntu 14.04 on this thing — only with my own username and my own password.
Why even play this game?
Because I’m a seiyuu nerd, and there’s no way I could look at that cast list and not react.
Ui Yuuki, Uehara Aoi, Kotori Yuka, Tohno Soyogi, Tashiro Ina… fine, Shimizu Ai. For me there’s no lineup more stacked than this, except it’s missing Kiritani Hana.
As for the game itself, who the hell cares… though after finishing it I was still stunned.
Yeah, it’s a cliché, and I know I shouldn’t write it this way, but before I get to the game I want to talk about some older stuff first. After all, it’s only when you tie it to your own life that the game’s content really hits you.
Let’s start with the eyes…
Come to think of it, there’s a certain look in a woman’s eyes I’ve never been able to forget in my entire life. One I’d count is the look a certain classmate of mine gave me back in elementary school.
I was a straight-A student in elementary school. The really obnoxious kind, too. Honestly I don’t even know why I was one — I just figured the stuff they taught in class was obviously something you were supposed to know, that running long distances in PE was obviously something you were supposed to be able to do at that speed, that speaking and giving speeches was obviously just like that.
I can’t understand it, and I can’t grasp it — how hard it is for other people to do the things that come so “naturally” to me.
I don’t treat anyone as an enemy, but there’s always someone willing to treat me as a challenge.
After one particular final exam, a girl came bouncing up to me, looked me dead in the eye with this resolute expression, and said:
“Remember what I said. Next exam, I’m taking first place. I’ll beat you.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, the girl turned and ran.
So come the next final exam, the girl really did take first place—and I ended up second because I got one math problem wrong. Honestly I didn’t care much about that, because soon enough, on the very next exam, I was first again. And that girl was still staring at me with that same utterly determined… maybe even slightly resentful look in her eyes.
“Why does she look at me like I’m her enemy?” I couldn’t understand it. It was years later by the time I did, and the resonance of that feeling has only grown deeper and more obvious as the years have worn on…
My Acer C720 runs Ubuntu Linux, but every boot I have to manually pick SeaBIOS to start from the SSD.
So I usually just close the lid and let it sleep. But as the saying goes, if you keep doing dumb shit, dumb shit happens—and that’s exactly what happened. Opened it today and SeaBIOS was gone. Hit Ctrl + L after boot, the machine beeped twice and then nothing.
Looked it up: Chromebook BIOS settings are kept alive by battery power. Once the battery is completely dead, my SeaBIOS legacy boot option reverts to default, and I’m locked out.
Is there a fix? Yep. Reflash ChromeOS, reinstall Ubuntu Linux, and remember not to let the battery die again.
Want a permanent fix? Sure—you have to open the thing up and defeat the hardware write protection.
Thought about it and it’s too much hassle. Disassembly also hurts my chances of selling this thing later, so I’ll just set up normal boot for now and flash SeaBIOS when I have time.
For the longest time I ran TP-Link routers, until I got sick of rebooting them all the time and bought a Linksys E4200 in 2011, paired with an RE1000 to cover the house.
Then came four-plus years of peace. Honestly, apart from power outages, I basically never touched either of them, and they almost never froze up — the only thing I ever did was reseat the WAN port a few times when it came loose.
But a few days ago I found out the router was finally done for. First the ports wouldn’t come up, then the config wouldn’t save, and a reset didn’t fix it either. Flashing firmware threw an error. That’s when it hit me: this thing might be kaput.
If it’s dead, it’s dead. Linksys hasn’t been part of Cisco for years now, but I still had a good impression of them, so I picked up a Linksys WRT1900AC + RE4000w combo to replace the E4200 + RE1000.
Last year I bought the first-gen Moto 360, swapped the band later, and it felt pretty good. I wore it for a solid year, and honestly this thing changed my life more than a little. Now the upgraded Moto 360 2nd is here, bringing redesigned lugs, better battery life, more customization options, and a mainland China release.
I wasn’t really unhappy with my first-gen Moto 360. Battery life was enough. The 2nd gen’s “a bit over a day” is kind of neither here nor there — you’re charging it at night anyway…
But my biggest reason for buying the Moto 360 2nd was… looks. I hated the black first-gen Moto 360. A lot of people said it looked like plastic. So while I was kicking myself for not buying the silver one, I kept refreshing the Google Store until the silver version came back in stock. Placed the order, used a forwarding service, and it arrived without a hitch.
My memory is bad in some ways. Lately I’ve been wanting to work on my foreign languages — English and Japanese — so I needed a notebook I could carry around and jot down the new words I run into. I’d been using an ordinary leather-bound notebook, wrote plenty in it, and then I lost the damn thing a while back…
When I was about to get a new one, I happened to see on YouTube that Sharp makes this thing called an “electronic notebook” (電子ノート), that it’s already several generations in, and that the newest WG-30 was about to go on sale in mid-October. So I kept an eye on it. On release day I ordered from Amazon Japan, had Tenso forward it, and it came out to about 1000 RMB all told.
My first NAS was an HP N40L, so I’ve got a soft spot for that little chassis. Then the motherboard died on me…
So I threw together my own case and stuffed some drives in as a NAS, installed OMV, and set up a janky storage layout — RAID 1 on garbage drives, then RAID 0 on top of that, then another RAID 0 on top of that. It ran for over a year without incident, but the pitiful 3 TB filled up fast, so I started looking at a new NAS.
I like small cases like the HP N40L, and then I saw the HP MicroServer Gen 8 on sale again at some German site, so I figured I’d do the German import thing. After ordering I assumed it wouldn’t arrive until late November, but it showed up surprisingly fast — 12 days to my door, no customs duty.
My beard grows back pretty fast, but I’d been using my dad’s ancient Philips shaver the whole time, and for a while now it just hasn’t been getting the job done. Figured I’d buy one from overseas.
Settled on the Braun Series 5 5030s, wanted it under 400 RMB after everything, used Tensou.com for the forwarding.
My Acer C720 running Ubuntu has never given me any trouble — it’s just been a terminal netbook for configuring switches and servers. But recently I figured it’d been a while since I updated, so I got the itch and ran an update. Which is when I hit this.
“The file list of package XXX contains an empty filename”
No idea why this happens. From poking around some Debian docs, it’s probably from a flaky connection pulling down an incomplete package or list and then force-installing it.