Ansuz

Installing Slackware on a Dell Inspiron i3162-2040

My venerable Asus eeePC netbook finally gave up the ghost, and I replaced it with a Dell Inspiron i3162-2040. Here are some notes on what I had to do to get it up and running with Slackware Linux, both for my own future reference if I ever have to reinstall from scratch, and to help others who may be facing a similar adventure.

Begin Primary Ignition

I'm very close to officially launching the North Coast Synthesis Web storefront. I have stock for the first product ready to sell. All that remains to do is file a few more sales tax registrations, and I expect to sort that out this coming week. I'm aiming for August 1 as the launch date. If you're reading this on my Web site you'll note I've replaced the long-running Chessudoku ad with one for my new store.

North Coast May update

It's been a while since I posted an update on where things are going with the synthesizer business, so here are some notes.

Panels and testing

It's been about a month since my last update on North Coast and my life in general, so here are some notes on how things have been going.

Dongguan Wizbang

Here's another update on what's up with my new life and new business. In general, there's progress being made, but I'm still facing a lot of annoying delays.

Introducing North Coast Synthesis Ltd.

The synthesizer project has reached an important milestone: my business is now incorporated, under the name North Coast Synthesis Ltd. The Web site will be at northcoastsynthesis.com, which currently just redirects to a password-locked Shopify storefront, but will become public and have some real content in the near future. Watch this space, that site, or my Twitter account, for further updates as they happen.

Photo gallery of 2014 synthesizer projects

Here's a photo gallery (salvaged from my old gallery software in August 2020) of the work I did in 2020 refinishing the end cheeks of a Pittsburgh Modular Cell case and constructing a "universal host" Eurorack module based on an ODROID single-board computer.

LCD monitor adventures

I haven't had very good luck with computer hardware, nor operating systems, in the last few months. I lost a hard drive in my main desktop computer at home, and had to replace that (no data loss because it waS RAIDed); the latest Arch Linux "upgrade" made my computer unbootable because the maintainers decided they had to move everything from /lib into /usr/lib and the documented procedure for doing the upgrade safely didn't cover oddball configuration cases like having GCC installed (because who would have that?); and now my LCD monitor is dying.

More fun with technology

Looks like my home computer has stopped working. Most likely it's some kind of thermal-related hardware flakiness, and it'll be basically okay once rebooted. But since I am literally on the other side of the world from the machine in question, and it's not accepting network connections, there's not really anything that can be done about this situation until I return to Canada almost two weeks from now. Fortunately, I have enough other computing resources elsewhere on the Net that I can still do my email and Web log updates and the other things I really need to do during my trip; and all the data was backed up before I left, so even if the machine is dead in some more spectacular and permanent way, there'll be little if any really permanent damage. Some reference information that would be nice to have access to, is locked up on that computer and inaccessible with it not accepting network connections. Axel, sorry, but it looks unlikely that the astro charts will work until I'm back in Canada.

I sure don't seem to be having good luck with technology these last few days.