Hardware

Solaar is software for more than just pairing wireless keyboards and mice Back on April 8th, 2025 I wrote about Using Logitech unifying devices with Linux in which I discussed how to use Solaar under Linux Mint, or Xubuntu, to pair Logitech unifying wireless devices. My goal with that article was just to provide simple instructions for people looking to pair their Logitech wireless unifying devices, but it turns our Solaar has other functions depending on the device. ...

I tried AI on my Lenovo ThinkPad T430s under Xubuntu Linux and it did something shocking! Yes, the heading above makes this seem like zoo of bad artificial intelligence videos on Youtube, but I was actually shocked at what happened when I tried to install Ollama on my ThinkPad T430s running Xubuntu Linux 24.04.2. Entertain me for a second and let me briefly explain why I was surprised: I’ve installed Ollama a bunch of times on hardware several years newer than my laptop. Ollama will run if you don’t have a modern graphics card (which sounds a bit strange since it’s mostly text based, but having a decent, modern Nvidia graphics card can really boost Ollama’s performance). ...

Logitech unifying, but needs configuration Logitech’s unifying system is nice for a few reasons: Any device with the Logitech unifying symbol should work with a unifying dongle. Up to 6 devices can attach to one unifying dongle. There are plenty of Logitech devices that are part of the unifying ecosystem. If you buy a new Logitech wireless keyboard direct from a retailer, chances are you can just plug the dongle into your computer, turn on your wireless keyboard, and work. But if you buy Logitech devices used, and/or they don’t come with the unifying dongle, a little work might be needed to get the device paired with the dongle. ...

Don’t physically remove a USB key without unmounting or ejecting it first I have destroyed my fair share of USB keys in the past by prematurely removing the key before it was safe to do so. I remember being particularly irked when my $70CDN 1GB Kingston flash drive stopped working. I think at the time I swore I’d never buy Kingston crap again, but I’m not so sure it was ever Kingston’s fault (to be fair, USB keys were fairly new on the market back then). Like a lot of people, I assumed you could just save a document, or copy your files over, and then pull the USB drive out. Maybe this was just a bad habit I picked up from my days of removing floppy disks (they never got corrupted either)? ...

Debian package over flatpak, but get it from Steam Moving from Xubuntu to Linux Mint XFCE was not as seemless as I’d hoped it would be. The last time I gave Linux Mint serious consideration was over 13 years ago when the Computer Recycling Project at The Working Centre was looking for a replacement for Ubuntu 10.04 (the next version would include the Unity desktop which wouldn’t run on a lot of our laptops at the time). ...

Initial look at artificial intelligence We might be a bit late to the game, but I’ve started looking at what we need at the Computer Recycling Project to run artificial intelligence models locally (on the machine, versus on the server) under Linux. The Ollama project makes it very easy to install a number of artificial intelligence models under Linux. Once ollama is installed you can download a model by typing: ollama pull <model name> So if you wanted to pull Llama 3.2 you would type: ...

Suspend doesn’t work on some Linux distributions – Lenovo Yoga S1 Our experience with Linux Mint XFCE has been pretty good so far at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project, but we recently ran into an issue where a couple of Lenovo Yoga S1 laptops refused to suspend when the suspend button was clicked. Now before someone goes on about Linux, I want to point out a couple of things: ...

It lives, it dies! Our new TrueNAS server is up, and all the hardware is working, but not without some hiccups on the way. After taking a lot longer to build than expect, I was so happy the other evening when I posted about the successful Power On Self Test (POST), and the new RAM (32GB) being properly detected. Exhausted at the end of the day I left the drives disconnected and the video card out. ...

Most of the hardware is assembled The past few weeks have been extremely busy, so I knew last night would probably be the only time I would get this week to work on the NAS. I’m glad I started building the NAS last night as it took much longer than anticipated. I finally finished the build at 10pm last night (and it’s still not quite complete). Fig 1. I used an Intel Core i3-7100 CPU for lower power consumption ...

Past Isopropyl is a great way to clean up a lot of plastic, but I found that while it’s helpful for removing grime, caked on stickers (Goo Gone), and other crud, it doesn’t always leave a nice finish. A few years back a volunteer at the Computer Recycling Project mentioned interning at a small computer store where they used Mr. Clean Magic Erasers to clean-up the top of ThinkPads. True to what he said, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers do seem to be a pretty good job on the top of ThinkPads. ...