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Computer people are hereby banned from naming software projects ever again. UNIX = Uniplexed Information and Computing Service GNU = GNU’s Not UNIX GIMP = GNU Image Manipulation Program GTK = GIMP Tool Kit GLib = GTK (C) Library GObject = GLib Object GIR = GObject Introspection Repository GNU is not Uniplexed Information and Computing Service Image Manipulation Program Tool Kit Library…
I bought a smart power plug for €6,49 at the Action today. Lots of home automation stuff assumes you want to use Home Assistant. I do not want Home Assistant, I just want to use a bunch of simple and industry standard tools like curl, jq and rrdtool. These are the steps I ultimately followed after consulting multiple sources and are mostly some notes for myself with the hope that it will inspire…
Continue reading for the good story behind the Karl-Marx-Stadt magnet. I went on a trip through Germany together with a long time friend, Rik. We wanted to visit some cities of the former East Germany (DDR) and look at what had remained from that era in the present day. “large-panel-system building” aka Plattenbau in Germany is still quite widespread in existence. And visit some…
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it. Big centralized social networks run on big iron. Those have cool aspects and can be challenging to maintain, but ultimately I find them boring: you just throw a lot of VC money at the problem, and then it ‘works’. On the fediverse, people run instances of the software in the most ridiculous possible configurations, just for fun. On…
These kind of commands command are useful if you want it now and not any later time, unless you explicitly run the command. You wouldn’t be the first person to discover they have been running a random daemon draining their laptop battery for the past half a year. The most commonly known is python3 -m http.server which is built-in, but there is also a Python library for an FTP server which is…
Yesterday I saw on the Dutch second hand website Marktplaats a new listing for a Microsoft Touch. It’s a touch-tone telephone made by Ascom Zelcom AG as the OEM. It came with 3 floppies and I really wonder what those were used for, because it does not look like to have any connection to a computer. It still had the original box and I really wanted to have it for my telephone collection, but…
I bought a second hand Cisco IR829 in a thrift store for 25€ without a power supply. On the bottom it says that it runs on 12-24 volts and draws 6 amps max. I soldered a 20 volts USB-C PD trigger board to the P4 connector of an old ATX power supply and added a heatshrink. It can at most deliver 3.25 amps. With my power meter it measures 15 Watts idle, which is around 0.
When talking about scalability in the context of software, it is always about being able to handle more: users, data, network traffic, etcetera. That might not be without trade-offs: it is important to consider scalability to any size, so including smaller sizes. It is also important to keep a reasonable middle ground. Some projects are going too far with their minimalism (and end up externalizing…
I was nerdsniped by some post on StackExchange that claimed it is impossible to disable HTTPS for a single hostname if you have other HTTPS hosts on that server. But this is possible! If you have a modern version of nginx, you can use the following: server { listen *:443 ssl default_server http2; listen [::]:443 ssl default_server http2; server_name _; ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;…
One my favorite computers ever manufactured is the Canon Notejet, manufacted by the Canon subsidiary Canon Computer Systems, Inc. in a collaboration with IBM. Today I found out that Computer Chronicles gave the Canon NoteJet IIIcx (also branded as ‘BN 200’) some attention and wanted to highlight that here: Your browser does not support the video tag. It is a part from the “Small…
This is a rather short article, but I hope it will be useful to someone who is Googling their problem. Sometimes, my Lenovo ThinkPad T480 has an empty main battery on Fedora Linux and just shuts down non-gracefullly at the moment I try to resume. I have experienced it a few times that it then is impossible to turn it on again. When connecting the power supply, the power button led blinks three…
Setting up a virtual machine (VM) on Linux using open source software is the standard way of doing things, but on macOS it usually involves VMware Fusion or Boot Camp. QEMU is my favorite hypervisor and wanted to use it when I have to use macOS as well. First, install a package manager like brew, then run brew install qemu. On Linux, QEMU is typically used in conjunction with the KVM framework.
I got a second hand IBM ThinkPad 365XD from Marktplaats, the local version of eBay in The Netherlands. It contained a very old installation of SuSE Linux, but with a corrupt ext3 filesystem. Adding a different disk required entering a supervisor password, which I didn’t have. IBM wrote on their manual: “How to Disable the Power-On Password: This information is not available in this HMM…
Since Karsten Nohl and his colleagues from SRLabs has presented the attack he named “BadUSB” back in July 2014, I’ve seen some media reports about those attacks in the wild. But do they actually implement the attack that SRLabs demonstrated? There have been dedicated USB programmable ‘keyboards’ in the form factor of a thumb drive on the market years before the BadUSB…
In recent years, partly due to the so called “Snowden effect”, a lot of sites have added HTTPS support, while most of them even made it mandatory. I believe this is largely a good thing because it enhances user privacy, but that it is implemented in such a way that it needlessly breaks backwards compatibility with older software (and therefore hardware that does not receive software…
I got an old analog Bang & Olufsen phone with a quite nice 80s design. I wanted to make the device compatible with the digital phone network of today. The website beoworld.org has more background information about the phone itself. A goal of this project is doing this without damaging the original hardware, so the phone can be restored to its original state without problems. First I cleaned the…
This page is just a dump of some information and work in progress. I have a lot of IBM ThinkPads from the 90s, of which most don’t have built-in Ethernet. How do you connect those to the internet? Through dial-up! ISPs don’t provide it anymore these days, so you have to build your own ISP. Existing projects First I investigated various existing projects. Doge Microsystems has already…
I disassembled a so called “next-generation firewall” which has been produced by the Swedish company Clavister. It’s basically an x86 machine with quite some Ethernet ports. They seem quite expensive, even a discounted version of the W30 costs an equivalent of 1500 US dollars on some webshop. I got one for free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Hardware The W30 model is based on an Intel Atom C2558,…
I regularily mount disk images on some machine, but I always forget the sequence of commands. In Debian based distros, the losetup utility is part of the mount package which should be installed by default. Some GUI tools seem to have been developed, but they all seem badly maintained and/or packaged, so this is my preferred method. To check what is the first usable loop device, run losetup -f…
Note, this guide only works on the following ThinkPad models: 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2613, 2623, 2637 The ThinkPad T60 contains a PCI whitelist in the BIOS firmware that restricts the usage of WiFi cards to those that were authorized by IBM. It is possible to remove this by flashing coreboot, but internally flashing is unreliable based on personal experience (which…
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TL;DR Linux works, default GPU is slow, Broadcom accelerator support has been dropped from various apps, kernel driver is maintained out-of-tree Note that only the first generation of the Apple TV is known to run Linux. Later version run on Apple A series ARM SoCs with a PowerVR SGX (and later A10X Fusion). Because there aren’t any free drivers for this GPU, this isn’t very useful for…
It seems that networking equipment vendors have some tradition of using display connectors for other purposes. HP, Dell and Netgear use HDMI cables for stacking networking switches. According to this Serverfault answer, a HDMI 1.3 or 1.4 compliant cable is needed for achieving the near 10Gbit theoretical throughput on Netgear hardware. The HDMI spec has specified the HDMI Ethernet Channel (HEC),…
Hardware I’m not an expert on Sun hardware, and the online availbable documentation is somewhat sparse. There has been some effort in the past of getting datasheets from Sun for various hardware parts, which have been collected here. Processor The Sun SPARCstation 10 has two types of buses: the MBus and the SBus. The MBus is for high-speed interconnects and the SBus for the slower…
There are a lot of historical ARM architecture versions, but this article focuses on ARMv6 and newer. Armhf Floating point units in ARM are called “vector floating point”, abbreviated as VFP. VFPv2 is used optionally in ARMv6 VFPv3 is used in ARMv7 This comment in Android source code has some more details. Most Linux distribtions like Debian have “armhf” builds. This means…
My dad got a Doogee S60 Lite which has an annoying Power Saving Mode app installed that turns agressive power saving on after a while, even though power saving is manually disabled within the app. This causes it to turn off the screen after 10 seconds of inactivity. To permanently remove the app, enable developer settings by pressing multiple times on the build number in the “about”…
Recently, I bought a ThinkPad 240 for my collection of old ThinkPads. The graphics chip is a NeoMagic MagicGraph 128XD, which I would like to us to display my desktop environment accelerated. Simplified, X.org previously contained two methods for 2D acceleration. At first, they had the XAA method inherited from XFree86. Later, they rewrote the modules to the newer EXA method. However, some old…
When using the HDMI input on this display, the maximum resolution is 1920x1080, although the panel supports 2560x1440 with 60Hz through DisplayPort. It can, however, support the same resolution with a 30Hz refresh rate over HDMI. Add the following to /etc/X11/xorg.conf, assuming your external screen is HDMI-2 which you can check with xrandr Section 'Monitor' Identifier 'HDMI-2' DisplaySize 2560…
Currently, attempts are being made to encrypt the DNS traffic end users are sending to their resolvers. In most cases, the solution is going to be DNS over HTTPS, or DoH for short. Browser vendors are implementing this by setting their default DNS resolver to Cloudflare. With Mozilla Firefox, this is happening only for US users, not worldwide. So, the question arises: how can we improve DNS…