There’s one thing I really don’t like about many popular ARM SBCs (Single Board Computers) that for some reason has been deemed acceptable and that is the lack of on-board flash for storing the bootloader. This means that the bootloader (most often u-boot) needs to be written to a specific location on the SD card or eMMC (if available). Generally distributions for such boards offer an image for download that can be written as is to the boot medium, including the bootloader, requiring such images to be created for each supported SBC. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just pop in a generic installer USB stick where we can partition the drive as needed before installing, like is done with generic x86 computers?

Recently I bought a new laptop with the intention of running Linux with Sway as my WM. This is the setup I run on my workstation where I have a 60% keyboard on which I use caps lock as a function key for a second layer. Because muscle memory is a thing I have been using Karabiner Elements to remap the keyboard on my work macbook pro but I could not find a suitable alternative for Linux when using a Wayland compositor.

I have an old whitebox server sporting a Xeon E5 (v1) that I’d like to get rid of. It’s running a handful of VMs on Proxmox. Most of them I can get rid of by moving their services to Kubernetes, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my NAS VM and Plex server. The latter you can easily run in Kubernetes but I’m not planning on having particularly powerful nodes and I need transcoding.

I’ve always found Raspberry Pi cases and the Pi’s connector locations to be rather aesthetically unpleasing, with the power connector coming out from the side and the ethernet from the back (or vice versa). Imagine my excitement when I was browsing the github mirror of Linux (as you do) and I ran into a dts for an Android TV box called Tanix TX3 Mini.