15 Feb 2026
Chromebook conversions in Hayward, California
(Previously: Alameda Linux Installfest)
Who: People interested in digital freedom on a budget
What: Chromebook conversion session
Where: StrayCap Multispace, 948 C St., Hayward, California
When: Saturday, February 21, 2026 noon-3pm
Why: A laptop that can be given away to people who need one? In this economy?
StrayCap Multispace is a new not-for-profit Makerspace in Hayward. They have hundreds of expired former school system Chromebooks. The hardware is working, but these laptops have passed their “Automatic Update Expiry” (AUE) date, and no longer receive Chrome OS updates.
Peter Mui from Fixit Clinic asks,
How can we best re-purpose these in our communities to improve digital literacy, digital sovereignty, digital inclusion, digital equity?
Depending on those use cases: which distro(s) work best?
How much can we automate the installation and post-installation process?
Attendees will be welcome to take an ex-Chromebook home to experiment with, or more if you need them.
What to bring:
Your normal installfest kit if you want
Tool kit (if you have an electric screwdriver with small bits it will help—these things have a lot of screws.)
USB drives with your favorite Linux distributions (x86-64)
RSVP so we can get a head count (select “2026-02-21 USA-CA-Hawyard ExChromebook Installfest at StrayCap Noon” from the pulldown menu.)
Why I’m optimistic about these
Most of the web sites that people really need to get to were designed when the hardware specs of these laptops were midrange. So these laptops will still work as laptops. LibreOffice hasn’t gotten any more resource-intensive, either. The cheat code to make these things useful, I think, will be to set them up to not run all the extra surveillance code that has built up since they were new.
Back in 2015, Georgios Kontaxis and Monica Chew found a 44% median
reduction in page load time and 39% reduction in data usage
when
turning on a Firefox tracking protection feature—Tracking Protection in Firefox
For Privacy and Performance—and the surveillance advertising
overhead has gotten
worse over the years since then.
With a little tweaking, I’m optimistic that I can double the effective specs of these machines by blocking the surveillance ads. Code that you choose not to run is the most efficient code. As a side effect, people who have a properly set up ad blocker are more engaged with the web, and are more satisfied with the products and services they buy, and happier in general. Yes, “engagement” can sometimes mean “mental rat hole” so I’m going to be sure to set these up with the cleaned-up version of YouTube so people can watch a video someone sends them without getting sucked into whatever The Algorithm wants to suck them into.
Most people aren’t going to be worried about ad blocking as free riding. Even everyone’s favorite subscription-based crossword puzzle site has ad blocker recommendations now. (More: B L O C K in the U S A)
Anyway, hope to see you in Hayward.
Bonus links
California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) Assists a Private Right of Action-Shah v. MyFitnessPal by Eric Goldman. (Some more good news from the California courts. Top-down privacy regulation isn’t enough. Juries have more common sense about surveilance norms than state bureaucrats do.)
Article: The
Fallen Apple by Matt Gemmell. Tim Cook is giving up his
reputation in order to preserve not the company or its people, but
rather the stock price. Is that noble? I’m sure that it’s seen as such
in the context of American capitalism, but Cook at this point is so
utterly contaminated and compromised that I think it’ll be as much of a
relief to the man himself as to Apple’s employees when he finally bows
out after weathering the remainder of this darkest chapter in modern US
history. If, indeed, that chapter does come to an end on schedule.
(When buying new IT products means supporting the autogolpe,
retrocomputing becomes a patriotic duty)