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Commander S'chn T'gai Spock
straddling a Gallus gallus domesticus
perched atop Dwayne Douglas Johnson
also did anyone get boo-ed this last week? is this new pyramid scheme where someone anonymously gives you a bag full of halloween stuff and forces you to put up a sign showing you've been boo-ed and also requests you boo two other households. I hate **** like that.
Intel's official position is that the ComputeStick (a $128 computer, with 2GB RAM, a 32GB SSD, and an Atom x5-Z8300 CPU) is locked down to the Win10-32 Home OS which they ship with it, and cannot be re-OSed. They have further gone to great lengths to prevent the internal SSD from being imaged with utilities such as Acronis, Ghost, etc.
Not only do I have Win10-64 Enterprise LTSB running on it, but Linux to the rescue! Turns out that a Clonezilla LiveUSB stick (AM64 alternate build, as we need UEFI for this device to work) can both read and write the internal SSD, and if you use GParted to shrink the primary Linux partition and create a secondary FAT32 partition on the stick after loading the initial ISO, you can even save the image itself on the same stick!
I can now mass-produce Computesticks with Win10-64 LTSB in about 10 minutes each. Just made two of them, and a third is burning in the photo above. And, with an Enterprise key, I don't even have to individually re-authorize each one.
No more bullshit updates. No more automatic reboots. No more bloatware. I can now actually deploy these cheap-*** little machines in mission-critical applications!
These little Computesticks are amazing. I purchase them by the case, and have been deploying them for about the past year to replace a bunch of aging full-size PCs, and to supplement the old analog Raritan KVM terminals so that they can access the new Dominion KX-III KVM-over-IP system during the transition.
I'll never forget the first time I got a call from one of my IT crew, asking where the such-and-such PC was, as they'd been asked to install a new app on it and couldn't find it. (He could have traced the mouse / keyboard cables back to their source, but did not.) I told him that the PC was stuck to the back of the monitor with velcro, and he thought I was bullshitting him:
These are not high-end PCs. I'd never put one on a terminal that's going to need to run Adobe Premiere or AutoCAD. But probably 90% of the user-facing machines in a typical TV station are just running one simple application (or, increasingly, one single web browser window), and these are just great for those applications. And since they're cheap as hell, I always have a pile of them on a cart in the storage room. A unit failed? **** trying to repair it. Toss it in the trash, grab another one off the shelf, slap from velcro on the back, and stick it in place. Boom- back in service in five minutes.
Sidebar: I love how, when Clonezilla asks you Y/N to perform a task which is potentially quite destructive, and you answer Y, it then says "Let me ask you again..." before actually proceeding. Programmer humor.
11-02-2018, 04:32 PM
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