Idlier's Tech Craze

      With Windows 10 end of support on 14 Oct 2025, there is a trend of unsupported Windows 11 upgrade laptops users likely throw or choose alternative operating system such as Linux. The newest Windows 11 theme AndurinOS Linux distribution is developed by a China Chinese guy working for Microsoft. The desktop environment is using GNOME desktop and is based on Ubuntu Linux distribution.  AnduinOS on my HP Envy 13 laptop      I came across this Linux distribution when I was looking at YouTube videos. I forgot the guy who was introducing this Linux distribution but I got curious and when to look at it. It looks promising and as it is a pretty new Linux distribution but it got quite a lot of people looking and reviewing it made me even more curious. It is then I decided to give it a try.      AnduinOS Linux distribution is developed by a single Chinese software developer working in Microsoft. Since he is into developing .NET applications, ...

      I managed to dumpster dive a HP Eny  13-d065tu laptop. This is the lightest laptop that I have found and has reasonable hardware specs to run a normal Linux distribution. However, I noticed that the laptop is unable to charge the battery anymore and also there are times when the power will be cut off and cause the laptop to be shutdown or power off unintentionally. This problem actually prevents me from wanting to use this laptop. Only recently I decided to remove the problematic battery from the laptop and see if it fixes the power issue and it really did. I was right that the power cut mechanism is due to protect the battery from overcharging but is causing issue to the laptop. I do not intend to buy a battery replacement since I do not want to spend money upgrading anything on the dumpster dived laptops.  Image from HP.com HP Envy laptop specs: Product name: HP ENVY Notebook - 13-d065tu Microprocessor: Intel® Core™ i5-6200U with Intel® HD Graphics ...

** I have gave away this refurbished laptop to a community volunteer uncle whose laptop has screen issues. His basic usage is normal surfing the Internet and writing chinese using pinyin so this laptop basically meets his needs after I changed the default language to Simplified Chinese and enable pinyin write method on this laptop.       Recently I have dumpster dived 2 ACER laptop. One of which is the Acer Aspire-V3-471G (Gold). It is quite a heavy laptop but when I realized the specifications are not too shabby and also the battery is still able to hold more than charge for more than 50%, I decided to refurbish the laptop for Linux Lite and becomes a spare laptop for my laptop collection. My first task was upgrading the RAM from 4GB to 8GB since I have quite a lot of spare RAMs. I did not upgrade to 256GB SSD since I prefer to have larger capacity compared to speed whenever possible.   Image from https://cdn.rios.hu/dl/cnt/2012-07/88012/pic/acer...

Perfect Viewer is fastest image, comic viewer on android. This software is mainly design for read comic from SD card. — sourceforge.net This is an android app that can still be supported on Android 4.4.2. I have been downloading mangas using HakuNeko downloader and transferring the mangas to the tablet's SD card. Since my Huawei tablet () is running on an unsupported Android OS, with this app, I am still able to read my mangas on this tablet. The only slight inconvenience is having to manually go to the next directory to read the next chapter but other than that, I have no complaints.  In Perfect Viewer, there is a "bookshelf" display (need to locate the path first in settings). I prefer to use this view as it shows what are the available mangas that is available on the SD card. 

  MX Linux logo from https://linuxiac.com/mx-linux/      Recently I have successfully installed MX Linux Fluxbox on my Acer Aspire One 725 (AO725) netbook. I initially wanted to install Bodhi Linux onto my AO725 netbook, but failed. Finally I tried MX Linux Fluxbox, after trying Anti-X linux and some other ultra-lightweight Linux. MX Linux Fluxbox is suppose to be a lightweight Linux for low-powered laptops such as netbooks or very old laptops. Upon bootup, it only takes 337MB of RAM (438MB for Thinkpad X200) before you load any apps. With 4GB RAM, it is still a lot of RAM for for most apps, like the browser but the CPU utilization is close to 100% after running a Chromium broswer and DeadBeef music player. Things likely be slow... after this point from my observation but I have not tried to do anything more than those common things that I usually need to do.      Since I managed to install MX Linux Fluxbox, I initially did not bother to use the A...

     2ndLife series is a blog journal of the electronic gadgets that I have dumpster dived and refurnishing process (update apps, reinstall operating system like Linux) to make them usable for my simple needs, mainly watching and downloading Youtube videos, reading mangas and running torrents.      Since I have been dumpster diving and come across  gadgets  such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones, I decided to write on how I actually refurbish these  gadgets  and giving them a second life to be useful, hopefully until hardware breakdown (quite unlikely since most that I have refurbished actually lasted longer than hardware failures, except when I find that I have too many and decided to throw away to make space for newer gadgets.      For laptops, I have currently Asus, Acer, Dell, Lenovo and Apple laptops. Only the Lenovo laptop was given to me and I purchased the Asus as a desktop replacement (15 inch). Most of the ...

    I just managed to dumpster dive an old 2013 Macbook Air laptop. I like its thin and sleek built with the picture below. Specifications Codename: MacBook Air. Processor Speed: 1.3 GHz Boost Speed: 2.6 GHz. Processor Architecture: 64-bit. Processor type: Core i5 (3427U) “Ivy Bridge”. Iterations: Core i7 (4650U) “Haswell”; i5 (4260U) “Haswell”. Processor upgrade: soldered. Cores: 2. Graphics core: Yes. On-Board RAM: 4 GB, DDR3 1600 MHz. Max. RAM: non-upgradeable. Display: 13.3-inch LED-backlit TFT active matrix IPS, 16:10 widescreen, 1440 x 900 pixels max resolution. Webcam: FaceTime 720p resolution. Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 5000 graphics with 1.5 GB of shared DDR3 memory. Storage: 256 GB SSD. Early-2014 version – upgradable to 512GB from 256GB at the time of purchase. Fusion Drive: No. Input\Output: 2 x USB 3.0, analog audio out, SDXS card slot and Thunderbolt. Power Connector: MagSafe 2. Battery: inbuilt lithium-ion polymer, 54-watt-hour. Internet \ Wireless...