Did you ever wonder how the tolerances of resistors influence a voltage divider? What happens if you put two components in parallel — does the effective tolerance increase or decrease?

I had some very wrong assumptions about the answers to these two questions and am glad I looked deeper in to the topic. Some very suprising, yet satisfying and reassuring insights into error boundaries and propagation lie ahead. So buckle up and get ready for some math! (I enabled $\LaTeX$ on my blog for this, hihi)

Do you find yourself with a piece a computer hardware that is locked via the BIOS with an unchangeable secure boot setting, but you want run a non-Microsoft-approved Linux on it? Then you found the right place, because that’s exactly what this is about.

This piece is a cautionary tale about security and ‘if there’s a will there’s a way’. It is explicitly not about hacking, since no reverse engineering or exploits have been used to perform this parasitic (software) transmutation. However, first things first.

Recently, I got my hands on an old Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF Micro. I plan on setting it up as server for home brewing things like backup, file sharing, NAS and maybe even hosting my own git forge instance. Electricity is pretty expensive in Germany. Therefor, my main focus is to reduce the power draw in idle state, since that’s the one it’s gonna be in most of the time.