hammer time: thinkpad

From firesales I got a cheap 80GB intel SSD. Put it in my ThinkPad X60s and basically saw jesus and allah doing the funky chicken. Everybody says it, but until you see it, you will underestimate the impact of a ~no latency disk drive. That old core duo suddenly boots in 5 seconds top. BIOS, Grub, two lcd blinks, and then desktop.

A few weeks later, actively procrastinating, I want to fix the laptop status LED at the bottom of the LCD. I found out it was probably the LCD cable, which doubles as LED driver, that might be partially failing. Having a x61 with a bricked motherboard on a shelf, I want to see if I can leverage its LCD cable, in the case it's compatible, which I don't know.

Reaching for this cable costs time since it requires to disassemble almost everything, but I'm going for it. I start with the x61 LCD block. Then remove the keyboard on my x60s to access the LCD cable socket on the motherboard. At that point I'm only testing compatibility on this side of the cable. I boot the x60s and the LCD works fine (it's badly shattered on 30% of the surface, but the panel is ok everywhere else, so I'm able to see the BIOS splash screen). #cool

Now I have to dismantle the panel from the lid etc etc, on both laptops. Only when everything is in pieces I realize, the cables are electrically compatible, meaning both sides are the same sockets and wires. But. But... the LCD panels are build upside down. One has the controller circuit at the bottom, the other at the top. The cables are built specifically for one kind, no way to stretch or fold it back, it's too short. #fail

Time to rollback. I rewire the old panel, ~difficultly. Plug cables and power supply, not the case screws since time taught me to screw things only after testing. No backlight on the LCD. I can see shades meaning pixels are drawn but no light. I unplugged the inverter cable a bit (with free scary static noise) while installing it in the lid. Easy to fix. 2nd boot, now the backlight works fine, so fine I can see a ~10pixel wide black band in the middle. It's regular and small so I try to poke around to see if the cable is not seated properly. No luck. I discover that below the LCD are running to very thin, very dense cables called 'tab bonds' which are the final panel data feeders. Indeed, fiddling with them fix the fringe of the black band, but it's not stable.

some links:

http://www.justanswer.com/tv-repair/73km2-2008-toshiba-lcd-v52xv545u-need-repair-when.html
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=25371
http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2012/03/thinkpad-x61-tablet-lcd-bubbles/
http://vimeo.com/3933798

The laptop works fine but that weird strip is too distracting. And that laptop was a little too slow, and 1.5GB of RAM too short. I have that other x61 c2d/4GB lying around. Let's retire the x60s, even though I love this little crippled bastard, he took everything I through at him. #soldier.

I plug the ssd in the x61, boot my old 32bit system. But I wanna try 64bit, because I don't like only having access to 3GB when there are 4. Also I noticed that software behaved a little differently in 64bit, so I format / reinstall everything.

To try things early I dont install xmonad/haskell, only wmii. It's a very small and ~limited window manager. But I realize it does what xmonad did, and the basic paradigm of stacked window titles is very easy on my mind. Much easier than the 2d split of xmonad (surely xmonad can emulate wmii but I'm not in the mood for writing haskell #noob).

So that's a first. I'm not missing xmonad in the slightest for my usage.

I also tried fish. I may not program in it, but it's light and ergonomically heaven compared to bash and even zsh.

Final note:

arch
base-devel (gcc, make...)
python3, guile ...
emacs
chromium
alsa, cmus, mpv

2.5GB (including pacman and chromium caches, so more ~2GB).

Pretty slick.

I splought (when you choke to avoid coughing but end up spiting twice more with a now open mouth) on my keyboard. Some of it got under the keys. Fortunately I have spare parts, especially keyboards (touchtypist/IBM keyboard feel fetish) so I swap to let this one dry. After a little bit of tissue and a few minutes I plug it back, and I witness something for the first time : a keyboard bug. Pairs of adjacent keys are now influencing each others lines, typing 's' echo 'sa'. '1' echo '21'. 'tab' echo 'tab[invisible caps lock]' which means now it's FREE LISP STYLE. Before I toss it to the garbage I try remove the key support tryptic. It's a set of 3 fragile and tiny plastic parts: a bottom frame, and two crossing hooks forming a X supporting a little rectangle pushing over a latex cushion. I don't know what degree you need to do that, it's all so tiny and weak yet when plugged together its stable and sturdy. Plus it's very very easy to unmount/remount. At least when you figured it out. Anyway, it's amazing, and now that they're all off the keyboard plane, I can spill a little bit of isopropylic alcohol in the hope that it will improve things. It's unbelievably dirty here, full of 0.1mm breadcrumbs, and also lots of cat hair stuck in every possible way...
Time to plug it back for good, just after a quick keyless test (the key are just providing pressure for the board layers to connect, so your finger will do just fine) showing everything got back to order. Reassembling the 10~ keys and their X support is quite fun. And here I am typing this.