Bought May 2024 to be my clean crypto-only computer. Searched for cheapest 1 TB disk 16 GB RAM not too old on Amazon with Ubuntu certification, and that was it at £479.00.
Some reviews:
OPSEC: will run only cryptocurrency wallets and nothing else. Will connect to Internet, but never ever to a non clean USB flash drive.
Bootstrap OPSEC:It must have taken about one week running full time to sync the Monero blockchain which at the time was at about 3.1M blocks! I checked on system explorer, and CPU and internet usage was never maxed out, suggesting simply slow network. But the computer still overheated quite a bit and froze a few times.
- turn on from factory, start Windows 11 Home 23H2 build 22631.2715, connect to home Wifi during setup process. Considered skipping WiFi, but I'll want to download the Ubuntu ISO later on anyways answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/bypass-lets-connect-you-to-a-network/2ce188f6-1b28-45a0-97d2-bfccfa3c9188. Don't sign in to online Windows account, and turn off all spyware requests.
- on preinstalled Edge browser, download Ubuntu 24.04 ISO from ubuntu.com, check sha256 with
Get-FileHashon powershell even though that is pointless security.stackexchange.com/questions/1687/does-hashing-a-file-from-an-unsigned-website-give-a-false-sense-of-security, download balenaEtcher portable from etcher.balena.io/ (currently recommended burner at ubuntu.com/download/desktop#how-to-install) from etc, and burn Ubuntu into a SanDisk Ultra Flair 64 GB - install Ubuntu from USB flash. No internet connection initially, default everything.
- notice that Ubuntu 24.04 is too broken, install Ubuntu 22.04.4 on the previously used USB from Ubuntu, and then install 22.04 instead... minimal installation, encrypted ZFS
- Ubuntu 24.04 "The application files has closed unexpectedly". This likely terminated uncompression of the bz2 halfway, and led to a corrupted monerod...
- askubuntu.com/questions/15520/how-can-i-tell-ubuntu-to-do-nothing-when-i-close-my-laptop-lid fix the eternal laptop lid issue without GUI solution...
- copy view only wallet private key by takinga picture of the QR code with Android cell phone. This gives it to the CIA immediately, but that's fine as we're going to publish it publicly.
github.com/CovertLab/WholeCellEcoliRelease is a whole cell simulation model created by Covert Lab and other collaborators.
The project is written in Python, hurray!
But according to te README, it seems to be the use a code drop model with on-request access to master. Ciro Santilli asked at rationale on GitHub discussion, and they confirmed as expected that it is to:
- to prevent their publication ideas from being stolen. Who would steal publication ideas with public proof in an issue tracker without crediting original authors? Academia is broken. Academia should be the most open form of knowledge sharing. But instead we get this silly competition for publication points.
- to prevent noise from non-collaborators. But they only get like 2 issues as year on such a meganiche subject... Did you know that you can ignore people, and even block them if they are particularly annoying? Much more likely is that no one will every hear about your project and that it will die with its last graduate student slave.
The project is a followup to the earlier M. genitalium whole cell model by Covert lab which modelled Mycoplasma genitalium. E. Coli has 8x more genes (500 vs 4k), but it the undisputed bacterial model organism and as such has been studied much more thoroughly. It also reproduces faster than Mycoplasma (20 minutes vs a few hours), which is a huge advantages for validation/exploratory experiments.
The project has a partial dependency on the proprietary optimization software CPLEX which is freeware, for students, not sure what it is used for exactly, from the comment in the
requirements.txt the dependency is only partial.This project makes Ciro Santilli think of the E. Coli as an optimization problem. Given such external nutrient/temperature condition, which DNA sequence makes the cell grow the fastest? Balancing metabolites feels like designing a Factorio speedrun.
There is one major thing missing thing in the current model: promoters/transcription factor interactions are not modelled due to lack/low quality of experimental data: github.com/CovertLab/WholeCellEcoliRelease/issues/21. They just have a magic direct "transcription factor to gene" relationship, encoded at reconstruction/ecoli/flat/foldChanges.tsv in terms of type "if this is present, such protein is expressed 10x more". Transcription units are not implemented at all it appears.
Everything in this section refers to version 7e4cc9e57de76752df0f4e32eca95fb653ea64e4, the code drop from November 2020, and was tested on Ubuntu 21.04 with a docker install of
docker.pkg.github.com/covertlab/wholecellecolirelease/wcm-full with image id 502c3e604265, unless otherwise noted.- www.varsity.co.uk/features/24648 ‘It felt impossibly romantic’: the nightclimbers of Cambridge by Varsity (2022)
Their only undergraduate courses that matter:
Autonomous agents research group of the University of Edinburgh by 
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16Things actually have gotten more and more closed, e.g. of stuff getting paywalled with time:
It appears that things got really bad starting in 2017, possibly when WebLearn was introduced. When things migrated to Canvas, they were closed by default, apparently with any mechanism to publish publicly.
Therefore, they managed to make things more closed than when teachers would just upload to good old
ox.ac.uk/~name static websites!!Ciro Santilli has also heard that some people in the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford opposed to moving away from their Moodle instance precisely because the new options did not support open publishing, so kudos to those people. But most teachers likely don't care and just do whatever is the best internally supported default.
Their "open" video material: podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ A somewhat small part is Creative Commons, but most proprietary. Despite the name "podcasts", they do contain video, it is just a relic.
podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open contains actual Creative Commons only it seems.
It does however appear that professors own their lecture notes, so there some hope maybe: governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/statute-xvi-property-contracts-and-trusts#collapse1383636
Talks: talks.ox.ac.uk/. Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences (MPLS) subset: talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/department/id/oxpoints:23232639
University of Oxford documentary by the British Council (1941)
Source. E-learning system of the University of Oxford. Closed by default to non-students of course. It might not be possible at all to publish things publicly?
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact