I rebooted to the installation media to try another install. It was black too.
I assume you've probably already checked, but in case not, is the boot order correct? What happens if you remove the SSD entirely and try to reboot to the USB without it?
Also, does the SSD boot in another computer?
If you can't get anything to boot on the tablet, I'd RMA it.
I have a few of those, and while the ones I bought have worked out fine so far, I think it's worth cautioning people that they are annoyingly loud doing basic operations.
I tried booting an old Surface off a USB stick with stock Ubuntu once -- probably either 20.04 or 22.04. (I tried this in June 2022 but didn't make a note of the versions in my journal, unfortunately.) I was able to get it to boot, but I couldn't get touch/pen controls working so I decided against replacing the OS. I didn't have enough enthusiasm to bother experimenting with it further -- I assume it probably needed the custom kernel.
kbin.social has been totally down for a while. I don't think your posts are actually federating when you post into a kbin.social magazine right now; the votes you are getting are probably from other lemmy.world users only.
Now imagine if to buy a car you had to tolerate cameras and other forms of tracking your telemetry just to get to work and feed yourself.
Sorry to be the bearer of depressing news, but that's basically already happening in new cars.
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/car-spying-insurance-surveillance-data/
I wonder what cuil things it will say if you start asking questions about hamburgers instead...
I ran into an example of the thumbnail issue again today -- this time on a post from kbin: https://old.reddthat.com/post/19193476
The thumbnail looks like this in the HTML:
<div class="thumb">
<a class="url"
href="https://media.kbin.social/media/60/a4/60a45b8ff88b1b2e3a0f77b701feb323c5bbfb7ceeb75154ea7df5d6eea15ef8.jpg"
>
<div style="background-image: url(https://media.kbin.social/media/60/a4/60a45b8ff88b1b2e3a0f77b701feb323c5bbfb7ceeb75154ea7df5d6eea15ef8.jpg?format=jpg&thumbnail=96)"></div>
</a>
</div>
Note that it's making a request to kbin.social with ?format=jpg&thumbnail=96 parameters in the CSS -- which results in the full image being loaded since kbin doesn't run pictrs.
The versions in use on reddthat (according to the settings page) are:
lemmy: 0.19.4-beta.7
mlmym: 0.0.44
Mrs Bighead?!
...
*hangs up the phone*
Personally, I prefer it when people do one of the following:
PeerTube is also a reasonable choice -- although I don't like its UI very much.
I'm having trouble finding an example of the thumbnail issue again right now but I was seeing the pictrs conversion parameters passed to URLs from catbox.moe, i.postimg.cc, and other sources in the CSS for the thumbnail when I reported the issue to Tiff ~3 weeks ago. It's possible that it got fixed/suppressed by another change since then though. (0.0.44 was deployed a few hours ago and I think there may have also been a beta patch bump for the lemmy backend at some point since I reported the issue originally in our local support community.)
I'll let you know if I see it pop up again.
For the text handling issue, I was seeing text like " by in " (i.e. "<thread title> by <username> in <community>" if it still happens) getting misinterpreted as raw HTML instead of being escaped. (i.e. <!-- raw HTML omitted --> was showing up in the HTML output for the page.)
You may recognize that text as the pattern for a recently fixed bug in the user profiles; I found the text handling issue while trying to explain the other issue to Tiff a few weeks ago.
Will edit this comment immediately after posting to let you know if I still see the text issue.
EDIT: I still see the text issue show up in this comment. https://old.reddthat.com/comment/10370610
It's a sanity check to help you rule out things like unintentionally booting from the wrong device. Can't boot from hardware that's not there! If the USB does work with it removed, then something you believe about how the device boots is false and you can then try to figure out what. A lot of BIOSes will "helpfully" try the next device in the sequence if it can't successfully boot from the first one -- which can be really confusing when debugging.
Some other thoughts for things to check: does the device confirm that it can actually see the USB drive in some way? Does a USB keyboard work in the port you're using? If there's more than one USB port, have you tried a different port? Do your USB drives work in another computer?