My review of the System76 Oryx Pro (oryp10)
I am an odd duck when it comes to taste, laptops included. So it is unlikely this review will be helpful for many people. Do all the following apply to you?
- You love the slick hardware design of Apple-like products
- You love the solid hardware⇄software integration of Apple-like products
- You can’t go back to non-“Retina”-quality displays
- You are willing to spend extra money to have everything work out-of-the-box
- You abhor the locked down, untinkerable nature of Apple products, and spyware-laden Windows installs
If so, read on.
Updated Jekyll Pages
Heads up: I intend to start posting more low-effot content here, more frequently.
This site was long ago a Github Pages site, but a while back I migrated it to over to old-school web hosting. The magic that makes it happen is a set of scripts I created, called jekyll-pages. Entropy took its toll in the intervening 4 years since I created it and it was due for a refresh.
Make Your Commit Messages Inversely Proportional To Diff Length
You’d think based on the title that this post is about commit messages. It’s not. At least, not really.
What I want to reflect on is how we go about grouping changes into a commit history. It is my opinion that some styles are better than others. And if you agree with my style, you too might find that your commit messages are inversely proportional to the length of the commit diff.
Unit Testing: A Black Box?
The beauty of declarative programming—regexs, SQL, CSS selectors—is that you don’t have to think about the execution model, at least not most of the time. Yet… somewhere along the journey to mastery you will be forced to understand the execution model if you want to progress.
If you’ll allow the analogy, I think the same pattern occurs with unit testing. When you start, it’s a thing of beauty that you can treat the code under test as a black box. But as you progress, well…
Install LineageOS On OnePlus 6
This guide will walk you through installing LineageOS 16 on the OnePlus 6 phone. There are official installation instructions, but they don’t explain the nuances of working with an A/B phone like ours. Let me help you avoid hard bricking your phone like I did. And if it happens anyway, don’t worry—I can show you how to fix that too.
No previous Android experience is necessary. Everything you need to know will be explained here, or covered by a link to the relevant page elsewhere. Having command line experience will be helpful. However, if you don’t know it, you can probably figure it out.
You will need a computer to be able to complete all the steps. With one exception, everything in this guide should work regardless of whether you are on Linux, OS X, or Windows.
Update 2019/11/5: it has come to my attention that there is an issue with this guide. It works great for installing LineageOS on your phone. However, if you follow the exact steps outlined here you may run into issues when updating LineageOS to a newer version. I believe the issue occurs if you don’t have the latest stock ROM flashed to both slots. When I have more time I would like to update the steps in this guide to ensure that updates will work. In the meanwhile, you have been warned.
tl;dr
- Update Your Phone To The Latest Version (Optional)
- Unlock the bootloader
- Transfer ROM files to the phone
- Boot TWRP with FastBoot
- Flash the latest, stock OxygenOS ROM
- Swap slots
- Wipe the system partition
- Perform a factory reset
- Swap slots
- Flash the LineageOS zip file
- Flash TWRP
- Reboot into Recovery
- Install GApps (Optional)
- Install Root (Optional)
- Reboot into the system
Yes, that is an intimidating list. But the list is actually complete. And many of the steps are repeats, so once you get the hang of it the process will go quickly.