Installing Gentoo on Raspberry Pi 4

Apr 06, 2021

Introduction If you remember Sakaki’s Gentoo images for the Raspberry Pi 4, they were great. It was one of the best performing distros for the Raspberry Pi 4. Since Sakaki no longer updates them they are effectively dead. Gentoo is one of my favorite Linux distros because of it’s insane level of customization and control, over just about everything. In the make.conf you have a lot of control over your installation.…

Linux troubles again...

Mar 21, 2021

Linux troubles again, this time it’s my audio that’s not working. I didn’t even realize it wasn’t working for a while. Then it randomly hit me, no audio. Obviously, this is not enough to convince me to switch to Windows, as I’m not a fan of that operating system. However it is really annoying so I’m gonna have to try and fix it. Diagnosing the problem Let’s see what shows up in /proc/asound/card0…

Tegra 3 unbricking notes

Feb 05, 2021

This is just a quick little post to keep notes for how I unbricked my ASUS MemoPad ME301T. Tegra 3 unbricking Using tegra 3 unbrick I managed to unbrick the MemoPad. Enter APX mode Different depending on device. Pwning the bootrom # ./fusee-launcher/fusee-launcher.py ./payload/uart_payload_n7.bin -P 7330 Is your BCT Good? If you don’t have a Nexus 7 or Ouya you’ll need a BCT. You can dump it with: # ./utils/nvflash_v1.13.87205 --getbct --bct BCT_READBACK_N7.…

I decided to install Gentoo

Dec 20, 2020

I rarely if ever update this blog, maybe once every few months. Anyways I might one day find the motivation to get back into blogging, who knows these days. Anyways I decided to write this post because I’m using Gentoo now, a source based Linux distro. Why Gentoo? I was using Arch for a while, then started looking into Gentoo. I liked the way it’s package management works, being source based.…

Make your own dotfiles repo today

Oct 31, 2020

Introduction Dotfiles, we all love them. If you’re anything like me and use the command line a lot you surely use dotfiles. Things like your vimrc, zshrc, tmux config, etc are all dotfiles. So why should you make a repo with your dotfiles? A github repo including all your dotfiles makes it easier to deploy them later, also makes it possible for other people to use them. I get asked occasionally, “how did you make your setup look like that?…

Working audio in Mac OS X 10.5 (or 10.4) PPC in QEMU

Aug 23, 2020

Introduction I’ve been interested in old operating systems in a while, especially Apple ones. I love QEMU because it lets me emulate different (and a lot of obscure) operating systems and architectures that I otherwise would not have access to. This includes PPC Mac OS X, however one problem is that audio has never worked for me, since QEMU doesn’t emulate a supported sound card. Passing through an audio device? Inconvenient, and I need to find one that is supported first.…

Need to use a different Linux distro? Just systemd-nspawn it!

Aug 22, 2020

I’ve been using Linux on my main computer for over a year and a half now, distro hopping because I always somehow find something wrong with the distro I’m using. Whether it be that I need to use a different version of the GCC compiler than the one in the distro’s repos or something else. I’ve been trying Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Gentoo, and some other ones like Fedora, Manjaro, openSUSE, Void Linux but none of them seemed to solve the problems I was having where I always need access to a package not in that distro’s repositories, Arch is the best right for me right now because it has the AUR (Arch User Repository) which has most stuff but not everything.…

Dumping SHSH and restoring 32bit iOS device

Jun 26, 2020

!This was one of my quick written guides so if you have any improvements feel free to pull request them in! Introduction Sometimes you might be in a situation where your 32bit iPhone is bootlooping, passcode locked, or you are unable to jailbreak it. You think all hope is lost and you must restore, updating to the latest supported iOS version. That’s not true. There’s a way to restore the iPhone without updating to the latest version of iOS, then you get to keep the currently installed iOS version and not have to worry about it ever again as long as you keep your SHSH.…

Operating systems to use on old computers in 2020

Jun 02, 2020

Introduction Here’s a hypothetical situation, imagine you are using your computer and suddenly it stops powering on. No apparent reason, it just simply doesn’t work anymore. However you do have a Pentium 4 computer sitting in your closet collecting dust. So being that it’s your only functional computer, you plug it in and power it up. It runs an operating system from many years ago, Windows XP or an old Linux distro probably.…

Taking a look at ReactOS, a real open source Windows XP replacement?

May 14, 2020

Introduction I got bored and decided to check out ReactOS, an open source alternative to Windows. It is the effort of a team who did some clean room reverse engineering of Windows and wrote their code from scratch . Impressions ReactOS is quite good for what it is, it is quite unstable and has poor hardware support but that is to be expected. I got it to boot on a couple computers laying around the house but I couldn’t get the drivers to install.…