High school sucked, and I’m gonna talk about a time where I was able to use a Chromebook to slack off in ways that most students could only dream of.
Like I said above, high school sucked ass in many, many, many, many, many ways. This was an alarming amount of ass suckage - I was bored out of my mind most days attempting to stay awake while I was in a place for a third of a full day sitting in on things that I had little to no interest in learning. That’s not to say that I don’t like learning or that high school is just a pointless endeavor, quite the contrary actually. The problem in my case is that my interests lied firmly in technology, and this was a school that had almost zero curricular activities for exactly what I wanted, technology.
While I couldn’t take solace in learning about technology in school, I could still take solace in using it. Back in the 7th grade, I was well acquainted with the computers at middle school. Even better yet, I got a teacher that cared less what I did on those computers. The ones I were using were decently powerful, specifically the Dell Optiplex 3010 or similar. Like emulators? I was bank rolling an external hard drive that I loaded with Dolphin Emulator and a bunch of GameCube games, and I would shoot the shit on those computers! Made me stop caring about being in school, even moreso when I took it a step further and started running Windows XP virutal machines on the portable version of Virtualbox. Even if I didn’t have admin access, I could still run programs like that because I didn’t have to install anything directly (I eventually got the admin password from the teacher that didn’t care either lol).
Alas, I didn’t come here to reminisce on 7th grade, I came here to reminisce on high school. Lets talk about Chromebooks. What do Chromebooks do that Windows machines don’t? Be absolutely locked down unusuable pieces of garbage whos only claim to fame is being a front for Google Chrome in the same way that a seafood resturaunt would be a front for a Chinese Triad organization. I’m being sarcastic of course; Chromebooks can actually be pretty useful if you’re just trying to renovate an old computer (Chrome OS Flex!) or get work done without having to worry about malware or unnessecarily complicated setup. Most apps in the modern age are on the cloud anyway, so it just turns out to be functionally the same.
Not for me. Obviously, our school Chromebooks were locked down in high school and I couldn’t do most things that the average high school slacker would want to do. Games sites were proxied off, you couldn’t download apps from the Google Play Store, and best of all, teachers and staff were constantly monitoring your usage. Still remember GoGuardian, still hate it to this day. Alas, one day when I’m about to log-in, I decide that I’m just gonna do something for the hell of it and try to use my peronal Google account.
Now, common logic would dictate that they’d obviously lock down the Chromebooks to only use accounts locked down to the school’s own domain, and you’d be right - that’s how it was for these things for virtually all the time in high school. I already tried this before, to no avail. Until this once.
When I entered in my email, I got a login prompt, and when I entered in my password, I was in. Oh shit. Immediately I was freed from the shackles of boring ass schooling and released into the graceful arms of the non-school-board computer wallpaper! Now, me being the tinkerer that I was, I immediately thought of many things to do on this thing, and all of them were goofy as the last. Let’s go over what exactly I was trying to do.
- Breaking the School Proxy - VPN TIME
We all know VPNs. Do we all love VPNs? I’m not sure, because I don’t think most people need the advertised versions of VPNs like NordVPN, but that’s a different story. I needed to bypass the proxy that was preventing me from accessing anything that was actually cool, and to do this, I needed to get a VPN. With my new personal account on the Chromebook, I could simply just access the Google Play Store and download any app that I wanted at will, and for this instance I chose ProtonVPN. It worked, did its job, and I broke through the proxy.
- Gaming Time
I love Coolmath Games and the other 50 bootleg sites.google.com unblocked games websites, but this was beyond that territory. This was real man’s territory now, with the appliation access to back it. Again, the Google Play Store was at hand, and I downloaded Retroarch as a simple solution to be able to play my games times in class where we could just use our laptops in peace. Was also nice being able to be up against the wall, considering the chances of the teacher seeing you doing anything on the Chromebook was basically null. Ultimately, I was able to test up to PS1 games on this thing, and they ran fine! You wouldn’t think a garbage Celeron processor would be able to do that, but it was after all. I think I got about 5 hours into Final Fantasy VII before I got bored of this prospect and went onto the next one.
- Computering Time
I’m using virtualization to run this website, and I was a virtualization nut in high school and before too. For this, I was able to download Bochs off of the Google Play Store, and after many hours of jankiness, tinkering, and Virtualbox CLI tools, I was able to get Windows 98 working on the Chromebook in Safe Mode via virtualization. Probably the coolest thing I’ve done to a school mandated Chromebook to an extent, even though the novelty didn’t last long itself.
So what happened to throw everything off the rails? Me, being the student that I was, went around and started showing this trick off to peers and demonstrating how I was able to have fun and they weren’t. Well, as expected, eventually I had to stop using my personal account out of suspicion. Nothing happened, and regardless of not having access to the things I did before, I still slacked off in class. Thanks YouTube! Thanks online emulators!
