On my last plane ride, I caught up on a paper I’ve been meaning to read, Junkyard Computing: Repurposing Discarded Smartphones to Minimize Carbon and it reinvigorated my efforts to breathe a second life into discarded chromebooks not only because they are dirt cheap (I paid $17 per machine last week), but because they are also a great carbon offset. However, my latest batch of 3 machines still had their write protect screws in place, which means they’re not immediately reusable as x86_64 Linux laptops without popping open the case and removing a tiny screw.

So I figured I might as well record my process, for my own sake and for the education of others following in my footsteps!