How I bricked my 13 days old Thinkpad

… and switched back to my 5 year old macbook!

Here a step-by-step instruction:

• buy a Thinkpad T530 with a Quadcore CPU
• create an EFI partition with GPT layout
• compile a 3.8.1 kernel with EFI stub
• add it to your EFI bootorder; that was something like:

   echo "initrd=\arch\initrd-3.8.1.img root=/dev/mapper/root cryptdevice=/dev/sda3:root:allow-discards | iconf -f ascii -t ucs2 | efibootmgr -c -l \arch\kernel-3.8.1.efi -L "Arch (3.8.1)" --append-binary-args -" 

• reboot
• linux kernel: an error occurred: cannot find initrd
• reboot
• congratulations: you’ve bricked a thinkpad

Most probably it’s an EFI bug, because:

1. thinkpads and those samsung laptops with EFI problems both use Phoenix bios
2. in an article (c’t 6/13) the authors described there has to be a kernel error before your machine becomes unusable
3. Matthew Garrett (the Linux EFI god ;)) “heard a couple of indications” (https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/307262466516197376)

Why do I use wordpress.com?

There is a simple answer for that.

I would have to write a blog engine – I haven’t found a good one

• written in perl, c or go
• create a static blog
• able to highlight source code
• I would need a domain, but I don’t like whois; so there are to-domains, but they’re not cheap, especially if you don’t buy them directly at tonic
• If I buy such a second level domain, I’d need a dns server (and a backup dns server) to fulfill the dns requests
• bind is hard to handle, therefore I would prefer to write my own dns server; but to do so, I first need my own datastructure library

I have visualized this problem with graphviz: