This is the story of a Friday night when all I wanted was to watch a film on my wife’s laptop, in the big bed with the whole family. Instead, the bloody streaming services won’t even start unless you’re up to date with the fucking betas of the fucking browsers, which must invariably be Google Chrome. Not Chromium, not Opera, not any of my weirder browsers like Falkon or Konqueror, and not Firefox either, mind you. Web standards and DRM, enabled and working, count for nothing. Because no, end of story. Don’t ask, mind your own business. And pay an ever higher subscription for an ever worse service, stuffed with series and films of questionable quality. That’ll be 50 euros, thanks.

So I decided to update the laptop, or rather, to migrate it. On a Friday night. I’ve learnt fuck all in 20 years of honourable service. Then I spent a Saturday morning putting back together, one piece at a time, everything I had inevitably broken, and along the way I learnt a whole lot about UEFI firmware that in all my years of Linux I had never needed to know (and that, to be honest, I’d happily have gone without finding out, especially like this).

In the end the laptop works again, with SELinux in enforcing and the F2 key opening the BIOS once more. And what gave me my BIOS back was a CRC32 hidden in a UEFI variable that in all likelihood you’ve never looked at either. Not even its own mother has ever looked at it. The Lenovo designer who didn’t think of a way to restore the BIOS must have taken one look at it and gone “well, would you look at that”.