Some reviews:
  • the keyboard is kind of crap. Notably the key "a" is very hard to press!!
  • the lack of a sleep state indication LED and "I'm powering on LED" compared to Lenovo is really sad
  • it gets way too hot doing work (Monero bootstrap) with lid closed, likely brought system down
OPSEC: will run only cryptocurrency wallets and nothing else. Will connect to Internet, but never ever to a non clean USB flash drive.
The OPSEC for this machine supposes:
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.
Inner source by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
If you are going to do closed source, at least do it like this.
Basically the opposite of need to know for software.
feathers-chat-react by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Last updated 2018 as of 2021, but still just worked.
Also uses webpack which is fantastic.
Gotta run github.com/feathersjs/feathers-chat first: github.com/feathersjs-ecosystem/feathers-chat-react/issues/5, then it worked:
git clone https://github.com/feathersjs/feathers-chat
cd feathers-chat
git checkout fd729a47c57f9e6170cc1fa23cee0c84a004feb5
npm install
npm start
and on the other terminal:
git clone https://github.com/feathersjs-ecosystem/feathers-chat-react
cd feathers-chat-react
git checkout 36d56cbe80bbd5596f6a108b1de9db343b33dac3
npm install
npm start
then visit localhost:3000/ and you can create an account and login, tested on Ubuntu 20.10. Data is stored on persistently.
TODO how to merge those two repos into a single repo.
If you disable JavaScript on Chromium, it stops working completely. There is a section on how to solve that at: docs.feathersjs.com/cookbook/express/view-engine.html but it does not cover React specifically. Codaisseur/feathersjs-react-redux-ssr might be good to look into.
python/sphinx by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
To run each example and see the output run:
./build.sh
xdg-open out/index.html
One of the Holiest age old debugging techniques!
The cool thing about bisection is that it is a brainless process: unlike when using a debugger, you don't have to understand anything about the system, and it incredibly narrows down the problem cause for you. Not having to think is great!
Snap (package manager) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
merlijn.sebrechts.be/blog/2020-08-02-why-one-snap-store/ has some very good comments on how snap is more closed than Flatpak.
Snap's permission system is extremely annoying, notably restricting access to home files. They need a popup that says "permission required by app, accept?" urgently!!!

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!
We have two killer features:
  1. 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-calculus
    Articles 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/derivative
  2. 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.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    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.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
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