halz

This echos of Google's strategy with Chromium.

Ditto on having services expressed in more portable/cross distro containers. With NixOS in particular, I've found the best of both worlds by using podman quadlets via this flake in particular https://github.com/SEIAROTg/quadlet-nix

This "NixOS & Flakes Book" https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world was posted to HN some years ago and is still a good/relevant read.

On a whim, there is a nuanced situation with some Realtek (RTL8671B) bluetooth firmware on Linux that is 'solved' by downgrading firmware version. This random gist has a nice thread https://gist.github.com/peteristhegreat/b48da772167f86f43dec... ..and this fellow Nix wizard has the downgrade expressed in a nix config: https://github.com/Arroquw/nixos-config/commit/9d90d7d659e74...

I too was experiencing odd/erratic pairing issues with DualSense controllers and this RTL8671B based dongle, and using the older firmware entirely fixed it. Now four controllers can be connected simultaneously without issue.

I've wondered if that's to make dealing with full disk backup/forensic collections/retention legal hold/etc easier: keep the official amount of end-user device storage to a minimum. And/or it forces the endpoint to depend on network/cloud storage, giving better business intelligence on what data is "hot".

Somewhat reminds me of a project out of IBM some years back: "Billy Goat" https://dominoweb.draco.res.ibm.com/reports/rz3609_revised.p... (bummer looks the site certificate expired a few days ago.. sign of the times for IBM, eh).

Another rough take with some orchestra music from Stellaris, of all things. Start the SpaceX video and 'Towards Utopia' at around the 2:21 mark https://youtu.be/887f76RXvdE?t=141

I replaced the Slack client with wee-slack [https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack]. It brings a much more "zen" experience to using Slack and better compliments my keyboard-centric desktop/workflow (e.g. clear all unread channel notifications? keybind! Jump between all the high priority/@mentioned notifications? keybind!) It also helps if you're expected to be available via Slack, since it can keep you showing "green" while you've actually been ignoring it.

It appears the short 'magic link' was along the lines of https://www[.]klm[.]nl/s/AbCdEf

Looks like support for S3 Express was merged in with version 1.30 just a few hours ago https://github.com/awslabs/mountpoint-s3/pull/642

If you're on a distro which has migrated to pipewire+wireplumber, the available and active bluetooth profiles can be discovered with something like:

  pw-dump | jq -r '.[] | select(.type == "PipeWire:Interface:Device" and .info.props."device.bus" == "bluetooth") | .info.params.Props, .info.params.PropInfo'

I experienced a similar sounding issue, but was able to decipher the blocked emerge output from portage to find that app-crypt/tpm2-tss-engine was blocking the whole system from getting onto openssl-3. Once I dropped tpm2-tss-engine, things went forward swimmingly. No other unmasking/masking of anything was needed.

Ooooh yes.. Fond memories of attending a few events that were hosted by Hurricane Electric on folding tables in some conference room annex of their data center. And the marvel of finally having an Ethernet connection to the Internet instead of dialup! I'm not sure I balanced "game time" with "download-all-the-things time" well enough.

Definitely lower battery consumption than Alacritty, at least while this is still an unresolved issue https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3108

Perhaps tpm2-pkcs11 and its ptool are approachable enough? https://github.com/tpm2-software/tpm2-pkcs11/blob/master/doc...

I am reminded of an article some years ago about a group that claimed to detect/track the F-35 via this sort of passive radar technique. https://archive.is/1t5eT and/or https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/sensors/2019/09/30/ste...

It may be worth checking the fzf plugin you're using with Fish. There is a more recent+maintained effort[0] that brings an even more delightful feature set, particularly with Ctrl+R/_fzf_search_history

[0] https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish/wiki/Prior-Art

There is a pretty well updated cli for Slack built on top of WeeChat (hailing from IRC heritage) https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

When browser managed credentials are synchronized across devices, an attacker may be able to move laterally into an enterprise by compromising the personally managed device or personally managed account (since it may be without 2FA, or may use a shared/guessable/weak password thats shared across dozens of compromised websites, or be far behind on app/OS patches, etc..)

Really depends on the role of the system. Will it be multi-user/single-user? Hosting containers? Hosting virtual machines? Running as a virtual machine? Doing network magic? Each of these classifications will take hardening in different directions.

You can get a rough feel for the enthusiasm of your distro's desire to do 'hardened things' by checking its kernel config. Heres one such script that has consolidated some hardening guides; https://github.com/a13xp0p0v/kconfig-hardened-check and also spot check with http://kernsec.org/wiki/index.php/Kernel_Self_Protection_Pro...

Then can also see if the distro is doing things to harden the binaries (relro, nx, canaries, aslr, pie, etc) ; https://www.trapkit.de/tools/checksec/ Also! you may be surprised to find which distros are comfortable with allowing unprivileged user namespaces (kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1)

Would only suggest using the Pi's HDMI output to an "HDMI audio extractor", feeding out toslink/spdif to something else, and avoid having the Pi DAC involved with it's 3.5mm output. Keep the signal digital across the cheap components until it gets to a high quality DAC that feeds the speakers.

There is some rough functionality for operations with wlroots via wlrctl https://git.sr.ht/~brocellous/wlrctl and more generically (via uinput) ydotool https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

Some vendors may only 'test' as far as getting the compiler to produce something without errors. So, first thing an end-user/consumer/enterprise customer can do when encountering a new platform is to run the platform through https://uefi.org/testtools, in particular the FWTS/Firmware Test Suite and SCT/ACPI Self-Certification Test, and hold the vendor accountable. Chances are the vendor already has a member on the board of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum.

The Lexend group was formed out of research on second grade students (US) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777945/] that lead them to a font design [https://design.google/library/lexend-readability/] that apparently showed improved reading proficiency. A 'world-script' version of the font family is also published as Readex Pro [https://github.com/ThomasJockin/readexpro]

The "Planned Obsolescence" documentary is (infuriatingly) great on how goods have degraded in quality over the years.

https://youtu.be/wzJI8gfpu5Y

I think a great deal of success with this laptop and Linux is owed to the stewardship provided by Mario Limonciello while he was with Dell [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell-Mar...]. Hopefully Dell can continue to carry the torch. Being able to use fwupd to keep platform firmware (including the docking station) up-to-date has been a treat. "It just works", even.

But for this Precision line specifically, there are only a handful of laptops that can run linux with (nearly) full platform functionality _and_ be outfitted with ECC memory.

Sure! This old one from GamersNexus runs through some pretty good detail and even arrives at the same "20C temperature reduction" conclusion I experienced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d42PSM0CN8g Best will be to youtube for your specific model laptop to see if there are any connectors to be particularly careful of when opening. The hardest part will be finding all of the screws to remove the bottom of the laptop. In addition to the x10 around the perimeter, my Dell has a little flap which hides two easy-to-miss screws.

And bonus, here is a bit of a theatrical conclusion to changing thermal pads on an Nvidia GPU https://youtu.be/-kPUq-q8tT8?t=410 (observed memory temperatures dropped from 110C to 70C, 40C reduction, and overall GPU performance doubled)

As thermal budgets get pushed with more power in smaller packages, replacing the OEM thermal paste/pad is almost becoming a standard operation. Recent AMD/Nvidia GPUs have experienced thermal throttling issues due to poor or outright missing application of the thermal interface material on RAM and GPU components.

At some point after warranty expiration, as a "hail mary", I replaced the OEM thermal paste in my Precision laptop and saw peak temperatures plummet around 20C, where it was previously bouncing off the CPU thermal throttle limits with the fans on max.

A helpful utility to run before you get too deep into trying to run Linux on some hardware is the 'Firmware Test Suite'; https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FirmwareTestSuite

It runs an impressively large suite of checks and can help identify areas of platform insanity, such as regions of ACPI tables that are wholesale missing or otherwise don't make sense per the specs. Ideally while your laptop is under a premium support care package, you can relay this report output to the vendor and keep after them to fix things. If you do not have support or the device is older, you may have some success with back-porting sections of ACPI tables from similar platforms (e.g. the XPS and Precision lines are very similar).

In some cases the Intel ACPI Source Language (`iasl` ) compiler used in Firmware Test Suite will have false-positives/negatives if the ACPI table was initially compiled by Microsoft tooling. You'll see mention of `MSFT` in the ACPI table dump during boot (via dmesg).

Context: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/...

Writes to arbitrary MSR are still allowed by linux, but it'll squawk a warning with the PID from what poked the MSR. What has been preventing writing to MSR is microcode updates (loaded via Linux via initram/firmware, or via the vendor in a BIOS update), such as the one(s) in response to plundervolt https://plundervolt.com/ Writing to the plundervolt-related MSR was particularly helpful to undervolt a thermal-throttled laptop. So! Can either downgrade the BIOS and/or rollback the microcode that your distro is loading during boot.