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Interrupted personal computing
Jul. 20th, 2023 03:03 pmI have had an eventful few days after spilling coffee on my laptop computer. As a rule, I try to keep drinks separately from, and preferably lower, than the computer, but I violated it thoughtlessly. After drying my computer out, opening, inspecting, cleaning, experimenting, it responds to input if the SSD hard drive is not inserted. With the drive in, it freezes at the BIOS welcome screen. The drive is unreadable in a USB enclosure so, although the drive is on the opposite side of the motherboard from the coffee impact, it appears to have been catastrophically destroyed by the incident.
Through further faults of mine, I am behind on both noting more recent passwords in some written form and on backing up my laptop. With all the moving house and catching up with other deferred chores, especially given now being in a small flat, my personal computing remains in disarray. So, I screwed up in a few ways at once. Fortunately, a path remained to make these mistakes far less consequential than they could have been. While moving house and setting up the new flat, at least I had made encrypted remote backups of some of the more critical items.
My data is linked by a varied and idiosyncratic arrangement of memorized descrambling algorithms, of keys, passwords and passphrases, and of variously encrypted archives of various things in various places. I got around to unpacking the hardware that allows me to read the old backup (and make new ones!) and finally worked out a half-remembered descrambling algorithm and, between them, they bootstrapped a chain of each step unlocking the next as I regained access to things, including those more up-to-date critical items.
I also used all this, another computer, and Docker, to create a virtual environment that lets me do the more important things for which I had used my original laptop; one puzzle there was in discovering
Through further faults of mine, I am behind on both noting more recent passwords in some written form and on backing up my laptop. With all the moving house and catching up with other deferred chores, especially given now being in a small flat, my personal computing remains in disarray. So, I screwed up in a few ways at once. Fortunately, a path remained to make these mistakes far less consequential than they could have been. While moving house and setting up the new flat, at least I had made encrypted remote backups of some of the more critical items.
My data is linked by a varied and idiosyncratic arrangement of memorized descrambling algorithms, of keys, passwords and passphrases, and of variously encrypted archives of various things in various places. I got around to unpacking the hardware that allows me to read the old backup (and make new ones!) and finally worked out a half-remembered descrambling algorithm and, between them, they bootstrapped a chain of each step unlocking the next as I regained access to things, including those more up-to-date critical items.
I also used all this, another computer, and Docker, to create a virtual environment that lets me do the more important things for which I had used my original laptop; one puzzle there was in discovering
X11UseLocalhost. In due course, I shall put a new hard drive into the real laptop computer and gladly get back to using that one instead.
