Projects
MediaCow Touch 2
Documentation for MediaCow Touch 2 was moved to the MediaCow Touch 2 (mct2) repository. This was done to have all planning and documentation for the project in one place. I symlinked the documentation directory to /pages/blog/mct2/ in the website root so it would be included when the website is built.
I finally started to make the block diagram for the board design of MediaCow Touch 2 Lite "Curitiba".
Personal
This week was mostly shaped by my return to 2nd Life Inc. and recent mental health treatment changes.
2nd Life Inc.
On July 9, 2025, I returned to employment at 2nd Life Inc. in Richmond, Virginia after leaving on April 7, 2023. This was done since I have been running out of money for a while now though I really needed the social interaction and just something to do.
Currently I do three out of five days of the workweek to get used to the work environment. While computer-oriented, this is physically taxing work and doing this for three out of five days of the week is enough for now. I do plan on eventually going for five out of five days of the week when I get more used to the workload.
Day 1 - July 9, 2025
On the first day, we were tasked to clean and inspect Dell Latitude 3380 laptops. We finished the shipment of 3380s a day early, having me work on various systems from another quote that included more modern laptops.
I used a method that significantly sped up the process of servicing these laptops: Once the Ubuntu live USB booted, I immediately hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal and do various things to get system specifications, test the webcam and clear the partition table on the hard drive.
What I used for commands to do such is: - Get CPU model, which was always Intel Core i5-7200U: lscpu - Check if the webcam is present: lsusb - Test webcam: sudo cheese - Get memory size: either checking total memory in top or get module info lshw -C MEMORY - Get disk size: lsblk - Clear partition table: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=512 && sync
There was one case that an SSD was installed instead of a hard drive, which I suspected as I heard none of the characteristic clicking sounds when the hard drive shuts off when rebooting. In this case, I used GNOME Disks to verify this.
From the live USB welcome screen, cheese seemed to fail without sudo for reasons I currently do not know.
Day 2 - July 10, 2025
This day felt like a scramble to do something productive and profitable. During this time, I worked on the first Ryzen system I saw at 2nd Life Inc., being a Lenovo ThinkPad E15 (2020) with a Ryzen 5 4500U.
Day 3 - July 11, 2025
On this day, due to finishing the Dell Latitude 3380 units a day early, we moved on to cleaning and giving quick inspections to Lenovo ThinkVision monitors mostly from 2018 with some late 2017 units mixed in.
None of these monitors were added to the inventory management system (IMS) yet so all we did was just sort them out by quality: B for clean working units, C for units with dark/light spots and/or scuffs and Scrap (S) for units with broken panels.