Pearls before AIs

There's an interesting phenomenon I've noticed and I'm not sure I have a good word for it.

One has various ideas jumping around in their head. Some of them are little pearls, beliefs big and small that seem significant and some of which may be quite old. They are all... cherished.

Many such ideas are about work so a programmer will have many software ideas. But you could have an idea about a great location for a new bridge in town or the idea that what your region really misses is some craft cider.

What AI really does well is implement many of these software ideas, quite decently. So you are put in the situation of seeing that precious nugget in your head materialize and finding it less impressive in reality.

The truth is that software is often much prettier when conceptualized than in reality.

But these ideas are important. It kinda hurts.

We can assume some implementations are really poor and thus do no justice to the great idea behind them. Maybe even manage to ruin the enthusiasm for that idea in the future. Which is a shame.

Though some implementations surely are decent.

I think some of these ideas were just supposed to be forever admired. When small, they are a sort of ego nugget. When big, they are a sort of muse, a guiding light.

"But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." (Yeats)

A recent OS on the old Asus C201P

There are people that easily sell and swap computers. I get somewhat attached to them, which explains why I have a growing collection of old gear. Even my first beige PC with a Cyrix CPU has been restored and boots!

The Asus C201P is special because it came from the US via a friend. Because Chromebooks were a niche product and you could barely find them 10 years ago. Kinda like today.

It is a very old machine now and can barely browse the web because there are no ChromeOS updates for it anymore. But... it's a functional laptop with a working battery!

So it needed a Linux on it.

There are quite a few blogs and articles about getting this to work and if you would open it up you could even flash Libreboot on it easily (with the risk of bricking it).

For starters, booting from an SDCard seems sufficient and thus I went about getting proper Debian to work on this little fellow.

The main problem has been that the Chromebook wants a specific partition layout and a modern kernel with all the modules wouldn't fit in the small boot partition. The other problem is that the kernel needs to be signed, so a kernel update on the Linux side would break unless you re-sign it.

My solution to this was to sign an U-Boot bootloader and then launch Linux. This way Debian kernel updates don't need any work.

Of course, this does break the security chain the Chromebooks had. Which is not a big problem for an old laptop and it's comparable with a normal PC.

So, here it is: https://github.com/emilianbold/c201p . A very small project that builds the signed U-Boot as well as the ARM Debian 13 image.

This makes the C201P a normal computer again. There's Firefox and a terminal and everything one needs works.

Interestingly, the machine has a Hantro G1 Video Processing Unit (VPU) which supports some video formats. But out of the box, neither Firefox (for Youtube) nor VLC use it. Decoding is all done on CPU and a normal video uses about 70% of it.

This VPU does have a working driver though and I could find a gstreamer command that explicitly uses the right hardware based decoder. With this decoder, a video playback is only 10% CPU and the VPU takes care of the rest.

Which goes to show how important dedicated hardware is and how little we use of it.

PS: While I could put Libreboot on it, it turns out just toggling some flags helps a whole lot `/usr/share/vboot/bin/set_gbb_flags.sh 0x19`

- DEV_SCREEN_SHORT_DELAY 0x01 Cuts screen delay from 30 seconds to 2
- FORCE_DEV_SWITCH_ON 0x08 Forces developer mode on
- FORCE_DEV_BOOT_USB 0x10 Allows booting from an external disk in developer mode even if dev_boot_usb=0

Findus and the Christmas Tomte

Sven Nordqvist's Pettson and Findus series is beloved for its cozy portrayal of rural Swedish life. An eccentric old farmer, his talking cat in striped trousers, helpful (if gossipy) neighbors, and illustrations dense with hidden mucklas. Books like Pancakes for Findus and Findus at Christmas resolve warmly, with community support and simple pleasures winning the day.

Findus and the Christmas Tomte (originally Tomtemaskinen) is different. Longer, stranger, and darker, it stands apart from the rest of the series, and not in a good way.

The Fun Parts

The book has its moments. Pettson's frustration when the mucklas steal his screws, and his urge to smash the floor in rage, is genuinely funny. The expedition to find a Christmas tree has the cozy adventure feel of the best Pettson stories. And the scene where Findus meets the magical postman is delightful: both of them trying to talk while stuffing their mouths with sausages.

But these bright spots are scattered through a much longer, stranger narrative.

Every Adult Is Broken

The most striking thing about this book is the parade of dysfunctional humans Pettson encounters. Every single one of them is struggling, lost, or trapped.

Kerstin, the shopkeeper, casually locks her loud, burping husband Henrik in a box and looks relieved. "Stay in there and relax a while, pet," she tells him. "You can come out tonight." Later she confesses: "I've had enough. I want to run away to Africa and be a lion tamer."

Fisher is a former fisherman now working as a forester, completely adrift in his new role. He thinks a tree might get "trampled by a bear" and can't tell crows from magpies. He dreams of sitting on a mountain peak playing fiddle with his family, nowhere near where he actually is.

The postman, a whimsical figure, trained for 27 years at a postal academy only to quit on his very first delivery. "I am an ex-postman now," he announces. "I might get eaten by bears; I don't want to spend my final hours delivering parcels!"

As Pettson works on his Yule Tomte machine that evening, he reflects: "Some people lose their way in life, that's for sure."

In most Pettson books, neighbors like the Gustavson appear as ordinary people. Flawed, perhaps gossipy, but fundamentally normal and sometimes genuinely kind. Here, the familiar community is almost entirely absent, replaced by lost souls.

The sole exception is Signild, a kindly neighbor who briefly visits Pettson for normal conversation. She feels like a remnant of the original "universe," straightforward and grounded. But even her presence is undermined: Findus demands all the attention, derailing the interaction into chaos. She's less a source of relief and more a reminder of the warmth this book otherwise lacks.

Darker Undercurrents

Beyond the broken adults, the book contains genuinely unsettling moments rarely seen in the series:

• Pettson has a vivid nightmare where the inventor Polhem accuses him with flashing eyes and a booming voice
• A mysterious salesman disappears but leaves Pettson feeling he's "still there"
• A beard appears mysteriously in the attic, accompanied by sounds of something moving
• Dreams seem to leave physical traces, scribbled notes in a "mechanical alphabet"
• Findus is genuinely frightened in the attic, hearing something "bigger than him"
• Pettson and Findus nearly get lost in darkening woods and deep snow

The magic in Pettson books is usually contained. Findus talks, mucklas hide in corners. Here it bleeds outward in ways that feel less whimsical and more unsettling.

The Santa Problem

In some translations, "Tomte" becomes "Santa Claus." This creates an awkward issue: Pettson repeatedly states that Santa Claus doesn't exist, and his whole reason for building the machine is to avoid disappointing Findus. In the original Swedish, this works fine. The Yule Tomte is a folkloric figure, and Pettson doubting whether one will visit a cat is reasonable. But when translated as Santa, it turns Pettson into an adult explicitly telling young readers that Santa isn't real, multiple times throughout the book.

Not Really Recommended

Findus and the Christmas Tomte is an outlier in the series. The darkness and dysfunction that pervade it are virtually absent from the other books. If you're looking for a holiday read featuring Pettson and Findus, Findus at Christmas is far better: shorter, warmer, and full of the neighborly goodwill and cozy mishaps the series does well.

This one is for completionists only.