Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

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Reducing T420s Power Consumption under KDE/Linux

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

If you own a Lenovo ThinkPad T420s (or any recent-generation notebook with a Sandy Bridge CPU) with Intel HD 3000 Graphics, this information may help you to reduce the power consumption under KDE/Linux:

  • Intel HD 3000 Power-Saving: Enable the following Kernel command-line options: i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1
  • Force ASPM: Enable the pcie_aspm=force Kernel command-line option
  • In KDE, go to “System Settings” | “Desktop Effects” | “Advanced” and set the “Scale method” to “Crisp”.

Overall, this brings my T420s’s power consumption down below 9 W. For best results, use a recent Linux 3.1-rc pre-release.

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Posted in KDE, Linux, OSS, Tech, Ubuntu by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | 2 Comments »

Current NVIDIA Drivers for Ubuntu Natty

Sunday, July 31st, 2011

If you are looking for current NVIDIA drivers for Ubuntu Natty (11.04), my new PPA may be of interest to you. It hosts an Ubuntu port of the current release version 275.21 of the NVIDIA Linux driver.

To install:

sudo apt-add-repository \
ppa:thilo.ginkel/nvidia-graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Caution: There are some reports on the nvnews.net forums that this driver version breaks Gnome / GTK applications under certain circumstances, which I can neither confirm nor deny as I am using KDE (but GTK apps work correctly for me). You have been warned, use at your own risk.

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Posted in OSS, Tech, Ubuntu by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Swissvoice Eurit 4000 Headset-Kompatibilität

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

Vor kurzem bin ich von meinem betagten Ascom Eurit 40 auf ein Swissvoice Eurit 4000 umgestiegen und war dabei recht naiv der Meinung, mein Plantronics-H141N-Headset einfach weiterverwenden zu können. Dem war leider nicht so, d.h., nach Anschluss des Headsets an das Eurit 4000 tat sich akustisch erstmal gar nichts.

Die Lösung war aber schlussendlich so simpel, dass ich sie hier dokumentieren möchte: Offenbar hat der Höreranschluss des Eurit 40 gegenüber dem Eurit 4000 eine andere Pin-Belegung. Ein passendes Kabel aus dem Zubehör, im Falle des Eurit 4000 ist das die Plantronics-P/N 27190-01, hat das Problem in Nullzeit gelöst.

Posted in Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | 1 Comment »

World IPv6 Day

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Today is World IPv6 Day and as my hosting provider has been offering IPv6 support for some time, I took the opportunity to enable IPv6 support for most services offered under the ginkel.com domain.

Let’s see whether there will be any IPv6-based requests (except for my own ones thanks to the excellent SixXS service).

Welcome to the next evolutionary stage of the Internet! ;-)

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Posted in Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Kindle SSID Trouble

Friday, April 29th, 2011

Today, I unboxed my new Amazon Kindle (Wi-Fi). As it turned out, getting it to talk to my wireless router (an AVM FRITZ!Box 7270) was a little more difficult than expected. When connecting, all I got was a rather generic error message “Unable to connect to Wi-Fi network” despite correct settings and credentials. As it turned out later after fiddling around with my router settings, the Kindle does not like special characters in the SSID (in my case that was probably a slash or colon character – yes, I was using a URL as my SSID ;-) ). After stripping them, everything started working flawlessly.

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Posted in Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Secure Hard Disk Erasure

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Before setting up dm-crypt, one is supposed to overwrite the hard disk with random data. As it turns out, this is harder to do than initially expected. Using /dev/random or /dev/urandom as a data source to overwrite the disk will take ages (multiple days) for a hard disk drive of typical size. The same applies to using the wipe command.

Fortunately, there is an alternative available by means of the badblocks command:

badblocks -c 10240 -s -w -v -t random /dev/<device>

This takes approximately four hours per terabyte of data (YMMV).

Source: http://chakra-project.org/wiki/index.php/LUKS_for_dm-crypt

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Posted in Security, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Minor Asterisk for FRITZ!Box Update

Sunday, February 6th, 2011

I am a little short on time, so I will keep this post short.

In brief: If you had trouble compiling Asterisk against the current Freetz development branch or an Asterisk version built against an older version was regularly crashing when establishing a new connection, this update is for you.

The updated version is available for download at http://github.com/ginkel/asterisk-freetz-build/tarball/v0.5. As usual, code contributions are welcome. The source code is available on GitHub.

Confused? ;-) This post tells you what this is all about.

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Posted in Hacking, OSS, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | 2 Comments »

Upgrading Cassandra 0.6.x to 0.7.0

Friday, January 14th, 2011

Just a brief recap of what manual steps are needed to upgrade Cassandra from 0.6.x to 0.7.0 using Debian packages:

  • Convert /etc/cassandra/storage-config.xml to /etc/cassandra/cassandra.yaml using the config-converter script. This currently does not seem to be included in the 0.7.0 .debs, so just grab a binary distribution to get hold of the script.
  • chown -R cassandra.cassandra /var/lib/cassandra/
  • Start Cassandra (typically using /etc/init.d/cassandra start)
  • Fire up jconsole, connect to localhost:8080 (or whatever JMX port you chose instead) and execute org.apache.cassandra.db -> StorageService -> Operations -> loadSchemaFromYAML

Enjoy!

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Posted in Java, OSS, Tech, Ubuntu by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Hash It! 1.3.0: Master Key Caching, Private Key Support and Improved Usability

Saturday, December 25th, 2010

Many people seem to get a productivity boost during the holiday season – open source projects all over the world are pushing out new releases these days. Hash It! is not an exception, so I am proud to announce the availability of Hash It! 1.3.0 for Android, a major feature release.

Most new features introduced with this release improve Hash It!’s usability, such as (optionally) caching the entered master key for a configurable amount of time, so that you don’t have to type it again and again as you hash passwords for multiple web sites. Another usability improvement causes Hash It! to automatically return to your web browser once you have hashed the password without the need to manually hit the back button. Of course, this is also configurable.

While previous Hash It! releases covered the functionality of the original Password Hasher Firefox extension, the Password Hasher Plus extension for Google Chrome introduced a new feature to improve the password strength using a private key. Hash It! 1.3.0 puts in support for this feature and should now again be fully compatible with Password Hasher Plus.

Last, but not least a few bugs fell by the wayside. Sorry, guys… ;-)

Hash It! 1.3.0 is available via the Android Market. Details are also available at: http://android.ginkel.com/

Merry Christmas & have fun using Hash It!, your friendly password memorization brain extension! ;-)

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Posted in Android, Java, OSS, Security, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Kurztest: EIZO FlexScan S2243WFS-BK

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Es begab sich erst kürzlich, dass mir mal wieder bewusst wurde, wie beengt der Platz auf meinem aktuellen Monitor doch ist. Anfang des Jahres hatte ich bereits zwei Anläufe unternommen, dies zu ändern, die aber nicht von dauerhaftem Erfolg gekrönt waren.

Nun hatte es mir nach Beratung mit einem Kollegen der EIZO FlexScan S2243WFS-BK angetan. Der Monitor bietet auf einer Diagonale von 22″ die Auflösung eines 24″-Monitors, d.h., 1920×1200 Pixel. Dabei kommt ein S-PVA-Panel zum Einsatz, dessen Technologie ich bereits von meinem aktuellen Samsung SyncMaster 171P zu schätzen weiß.

Vor einer Woche bestellt, heute geliefert, fristete der EIZO-Monitor allerdings nur ein recht kurzes Dasein auf meinem Schreibtisch. (more…)

Posted in Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | 3 Comments »

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