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		<title>Preparing for the worst &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2015/05-May/29.xhtml&gt;</title>
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			<h1>Preparing for the worst</h1>
			<p>Day 00083: Friday, 2015 May 29</p>
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<blockquote>
	<p>
		Day 18:
	</p>
	<p>
		Tomorrow at noon, I will find out from my coworker if he is able to repair my laptop.
		I decided to spend today preparing for the worst.
		I shopped around online for Linux laptops.
		Some websites that supposedly sold Linux laptops didn&apos;t seem to have product listing pages or order options.
		Others were unnavigable by mobile web browser, due to horridly-designed pages that were not very accessible.
		One site seem to offer the most decent price available, but seemed to be at least two years out of date, judging by the fact that it thought that Debian 6 was still the latest stable version.
		Another site seemed to offer military-grade durable Linux laptops, but even their lowest-priced option that was not so durable was higher-priced than what was available elsewhere.
		I settled on three options.
	</p>
	<p>
		The first option was a laptop from Think Penguin.
		This machine would have the advantage of modern hardware, out of the box Debian support, and a large penguin logo on the back.
		While a bit superficial, anyone with any idea what Linux is would not mistake my laptop for being a Windows machine.
		There also shouldn&apos;t be any hardware difficulties.
		I would upgrade the hard drive to the optional full terabyte hard drive because I need room to expand, and upgrade the amount of <abbr title="random-access memory">RAM</abbr> to the optional 16 gigabytes.
		I probably do not need that much <abbr title="random-access memory">RAM</abbr>, but it would be nice having an ultra-fast machine.
	</p>
	<p>
		The second option was a laptop from ZaReason.
		I don&apos;t know why, but I somehow get a better vibe from ZaReason than I do from Think Penguin.
		ZaReason&apos;s laptop is higher priced then Think Penguin&apos;s.
		It too has option for upgrading the hard drive to a full terabyte and the <abbr title="random-access memory">RAM</abbr> to 16 gigabytes.
		It additionally has the option of upgrading the processor, but I don&apos;t know what I&apos;m doing is far as processors.
		I don&apos;t know what upgrading processor will be worth it and it would raise the price even further.
		Again, modern hardware and out of the box Debian support would be the advantages of this laptop.
	</p>
	<p>
		The final option is a refurbished machine from Gluglug.
		I did not look into the pricing of this, but if my past experience with this company is any indication, the laptop would be less expensive than other options, but still very expensive because of a combination of factors.
		First, a lot of effort is put into the refurbishing process.
		These machines are not brought back to the original state, instead they are made compatible with a free operating system and the <abbr title="Basic Input/Output System">BIOS</abbr> is completely removed, being replaced with Libreboot and <abbr title="Grand Unified Bootloader">GRUB</abbr>.
		The main advantage of this choice is the lack of a proprietary <abbr title="Basic Input/Output System">BIOS</abbr>.
		However, if Gluglug&apos;s new laptop option is anything like their last, there are still replaceable proprietary firmwares in the laptop that the <abbr title="Free Software Foundation">FSF</abbr> and Gluglug deem too unimportant to be worth replacing.
		They market it as fully free, but it isn&apos;t really.
		If my system can&apos;t be fully free anyway, it might be worth getting newer hardware so I will have less problems.
		Buying from Gluglug also means buying from the United Kingdom.
		Last time I bought a machine from Gluglug, the <abbr title="National Security Agency">NSA</abbr> detained the laptop for a period.
		If I avoid buying from overseas, perhaps the <abbr title="National Security Agency">NSA</abbr> will leave my new laptop alone.
		Having a free boot stack has been nice in the past though, and without one, it will probably be impossible to completely encrypt the hard drive.
	</p>
	<p>
		I should wait until tomorrow when I find out about my current laptop before making any real decisions.
		I do hope my laptop is okay.
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
	I couldn&apos;t update my <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> today, as I was cut off from my Web/ssh server.
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