etbe - Russell Coker

Links September 2024

CNA Insider has an insightful documentary series about Chinese illegal immigrants to the US [1]. They should migrate to Australia, easier to get in and a better place to live.

Linus tech tips has an informative video about using Windows on Snapdragon ARM64 laptops. [2]. Maybe I should get one for running Linux. They are quite expensive on ebay now which is presumably a good sign about their quality.

A web site for comparing monospace fonts so you can find the one that best suits yuor coding [3]. Roboto works well for me.

Noema has an interesting article about nationhood comparing the attitudes towards European colonisation in Africa and Russian colonisation in Ukraine [4].

Insightful lecture by Grace Hopper (then Captain) about the future of computers [5]. The second part is linked from the first part. Published by the NSA.

Tony Hoare gave an insightful lecture titled “The Billion Dollar Mistake” about his work on designing the Algol language in 1965 [6]. The lecture was recorded in about 2005. But it still has a lot of relevance to computer science.

Jascha Sohl-Dickstein wrote an interesting blog post about Goodhart’s law, Machine Learning models, and how to try and mitigate problems in society [7].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article on the Marshmallow test and long term thinking [8]. The rich fail this test badly.

Insightful interview with Justice Breyer about interpreting the US constitution and the problems with “textualism” and “originalism” [9].

Cory Doctorow wrote an informative article about Google’s practices of deleting Gmail accounts for no apparent reason and denying people access to their data [10]. We need more laws like the Digital Markets Act in the EU and we need them to apply to eBay/PayPal and AWS/Amazon.

Hardware

I have just setup a PiKVM, here’s the Amazon link for the KVM hardware (case and Pi hat etc) and here’s an Amazon link for a Pi4 to match.

The PiKVM web site has good documentation [1] and they have a YouTube channel with videos showing how to assemble the devices [2]. It’s really convenient being able to change the playback speed from low speeds like 1/4 original speed) to double speed when watching such a video. One thing to note is that there are some revisions to the hardware that aren’t covered in the videos, the device I received had some improvements that made it easier to assemble which weren’t in the video.

When you buy the device and Pi you need to also get a SD card of at least 4G in size, a CR1220 battery for real-time clock, and a USB-2/3 to USB-C cable for keyboard/mouse MUST NOT BE USB-C to USB-C! When I first tried using it I used a USB-C to USB-C cable for keyboard and mouse and it didn’t work for reasons I don’t understand (I welcome comments with theories about this). You also need a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable to get video output if you want to set it up without having to find the IP address and ssh to it.

The system has a bright OLED display to show the IP address and some other information which is very handy.

The hardware is easy enough for a 12yo to setup. The construction of the parts are solid and well engineered with everything fitting together nicely. It has a PCI/PCIe slot adaptor for controlling power and sending LED status over the connection which I didn’t test. I definitely recommend this.

Software

This is the download link for the RaspberryPi images for the PiKVM [3]. The “v3” image matches the hardware from the Amazon link I provided.

The default username/password is root/root. Connect it to a HDMI monitor and USB keyboard to change the password etc. If you control the DHCP server you can find the IP address it’s using and ssh to it to change the password (it is configured to allow ssh as root with password authentication).

If you get the kit to assemble it (as opposed to buying a completed unit already assembled) then you need to run the following commands as root to enable the OLED display. This means that after assembling it you can’t get the IP address without plugging in a monitor with a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable or having access to the DHCP server logs.

rw
systemctl enable --now kvmd-oled kvmd-oled-reboot kvmd-oled-shutdown
systemctl enable --now kvmd-fan
ro

The default webadmin username/password is admin/admin.

To change the passwords run the following commands:

rw
kvmd-htpasswd set admin
passwd root
ro

It is configured to have the root filesystem mounted read-only which is something I thought had gone out of fashion decades ago. I don’t think that modern versions of the Ext3/4 drivers are going to corrupt your filesystem if you have it mounted read-write when you reboot.

By default it uses a self-signed SSL certificate so with a Chrome based browser you get an error when you connect where you have to select “advanced” and then tell it to proceed regardless. I presume you could use the DNS method of Certbot authentication to get a SSL certificate to use on an internal view of your DNS to make it work normally with SSL.

The web based software has all the features you expect from a KVM. It shows the screen in any resolution up to 1920*1080 and proxies keyboard and mouse. Strangely “lsusb” on the machine being managed only reports a single USB device entry for it which covers both keyboard and mouse.

Managing Computers

For a tower PC disconnect any regular monitor(s) and connect a HDMI port to the HDMI input on the KVM. Connect a regular USB port (not USB-C) to the “OTG” port on the KVM, then it should all just work.

For a laptop connect the HDMI port to the HDMI input on the KVM. Connect a regular USB port (not USB-C) to the “OTG” port on the KVM. Then boot it up and press Fn-F8 for Dell, Fn-F7 for Lenovo or whatever the vendor code is to switch display output to HDMI during the BIOS initialisation, then Linux will follow the BIOS and send all output to the HDMI port for the early stages of booting. Apparently Lenovo systems have the Fn key mapped in the BIOS so an external keyboard could be used to switch between display outputs, but the PiKVM software doesn’t appear to support that. For other systems (probably including the Dell laptops that interest me) the Fn key apparently can’t be simulated externally. So for using this to work on laptops in another city I need to have someone local press Fn-F8 at the right time to allow me to change BIOS settings.

It is possible to configure the Linux kernel to mirror display to external HDMI and an internal laptop screen. But this doesn’t seem useful to me as the use cases for this device don’t require that. If you are using it for a server that doesn’t have iDRAC/ILO or other management hardware there will be no other “monitor” and all the output will go through the only connected HDMI device. My main use for it in the near future will be for supporting remote laptops, when Linux has a problem on boot as an easier option than talking someone through Linux commands and for such use it will be a temporary thing and not something that is desired all the time.

For the gdm3 login program you can copy the .config/monitors.xml file from a GNOME user session to the gdm home directory to keep the monitor settings. This configuration option is decent for the case where a fixed set of monitors are used but not so great if your requirement is “display a login screen on anything that’s available”. Is there an xdm type program in Debian/Ubuntu that supports this by default or with easy reconfiguration?

Conclusion

The PiKVM is a well engineered and designed product that does what’s expected at a low price. There are lots of minor issues with using it which aren’t the fault of the developers but are due to historical decisions in the design of BIOS and Linux software. We need to change the Linux software in question and lobby hardware vendors for BIOS improvements.

The feature for connecting to an ATX PSU was unexpected and could be really handy for some people, it’s not something I have an immediate use for but is something I could possibly use in future. I like the way they shipped the hardware for it as part of the package giving the user choices about how they use it, many vendors would make it an optional extra that costs another $100. This gives the PiKVM more functionality than many devices that are much more expensive.

The web UI wasn’t as user friendly as it might have been, but it’s a lot better than iDRAC so I don’t have a serious complaint about it. It would be nice if there was an option for creating macros for keyboard scancodes so I could try and emulate the Fn options and keys for volume control on systems that support it.

Kogan AX1800 Wifi6 Mesh

I previously blogged about the difficulties in getting a good Wifi mesh network setup [1].

I bought the Kogan AX1800 Wifi6 Mesh with 3 nodes for $140, the price has now dropped to $130. It’s only Wifi 6 (not 6E which has the extra 6GHz frequency) because all the 6E ones were more expensive than I felt like paying.

I’ve got it running and it’s working really well. One of my laptops has a damaged wire connecting to it’s Wifi device which decreased the signal to a degree that I could usually only connect to wifi when in the computer room (and then walk with it to another room once connected). Now I can connect that laptop to wifi in any part of my home. I can now get decent wifi access in my car in front of my home which covers the important corner case of walking to my car and then immediately asking Google maps for directions. Previously my phone would be deciding whether to switch away from wifi due to poor signal and that would delay getting directions, now I get directions quickly on Google Maps.

I’ve done tests with the Speedtest.net Android app and now get speeds of about 52Mbit/17Mbit in all parts of my home which is limited only by the speed of my NBN connection (one of the many reasons for hating conservatives is giving us expensive slow Internet). As my main reason for buying the devices is for Internet access they have clearly met my reason for purchase and probably meet the requirements for most people as well. Getting that speed is not trivial, my neighbours have lots of Wifi APs and bandwidth is congested. My Kogan 4K Android TV now plays 4K Netflix without pausing even though it only supports 2.4GHz wifi, so having a wifi mesh node next to the TV seems to help it.

I did some tests with the Olive Tree FTP server on a Galaxy Note 9 phone running the stock Samsung Android and got over 10MByte (80Mbit) upload and 8Mbyte (64Mbit) download speeds. This might be limited by the Android app or might be limited by the older version of Android. But it still gives higher speeds than my home Internet connection and much higher speeds than I need from an Android device.

Running iperf on Linux laptops talking to a Linux workstation that’s wired to the main mesh node I get speeds of 27.5Mbit from an old laptop on 2.4GHz wifi, 398Mbit from a new Wifi5 laptop when near the main mesh node, and 91Mbit from the same laptop when at the far end of my home. So not as fast as I’d like but still acceptable speeds.

The claims about Wifi 6 vs Wifi 5 speeds are that 6 will be about 3* faster. That would be 20% faster than the Gigabit ethernet ports on the wifi nodes. So while 2.5Gbit ethernet on Wifi 6 APs would be a good feature to have it seems that it might provide a 20% benefit at some future time when I have laptops with Wifi 6. At this time all the devices with 2.5Gbit ethernet cost more than I wanted to pay so I’m happy with this. It will probably be quite a while before laptops with Wifi 6 are in the price range I feel like paying.

For Wifi 6E it seems that anything less than 2.5Gbit ethernet will be a significant bottleneck. But I expect that by the time I buy a Wifi 6E mesh they will all have 2.5Gbit ethernet as standard.

The configuration of this device was quite easy via the built in web pages, everything worked pretty much as I expected and I hardly had to look at the manual. The mesh nodes are supposed to connect to each other when you press hardware buttons but that didn’t work for me so I used the web admin page to tell them to connect which worked perfectly. The admin of this seemed to be about as good as it gets.

Conclusion

The performance of this mesh hardware is quite decent. I can’t know for sure if it’s good or bad because performance really depends on what interference there is. But using this means that for me the Internet connection is now the main bottleneck for all parts of my home and I think it’s quite likely that most people in Australia who buy it will find the same result.

So for everyone in Australia who doesn’t have fiber to their home this seems like an ideal set of mesh hardware. It’s cheap, easy to setup, has no cloud stuff to break your configuration, gives quite adequate speed, and generally just does the job.

[1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/08/24/wifi-6e-mesh/

Links August 2024

Bruce Schneier and Kim Córdova wrote an insightful article about the changes that corporations make to culture as technical debt [1]. We need anti-trust laws to be enforced before it’s too late!

Bruce Schneier posted the transcript of an insightful lecture he gave on rethinking democracy for the age of AI [2].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful blog post about companies that are “too big to care” [3]. We need to break up those monopolies.

Science Alert has an interesting article on plans to get renewable energy by drilling into the magma chamber of an active volcano [4]. What I want to know is whether using the energy could reduce the power of an eruption or even prevent it from happening.

Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting article about Crowdstrike and the market incentives for brittle systems [5]. Also we need to have more formally proven software and more use of systems like seL4.

Dave’s Garage on YouTube has an interesting video about modern Mainframes [6]. Their IO capacity dwarfs the memory bandwidth of most PC servers.

Framework has an interesting YouTube video about the process of developing a RISC-V motherboard for their laptops [7].

The documentary series Who Broke Britain by ABC news gives a good insight into the harm caused by austerity policies [8].

Rolling Stone has an interesting story about the consequences of being a CIA agent in al Quaeda [9].

Wifi 6E Mesh

I am looking into getting a Wifi mesh network. The aim is to use it for providing access to devices through my home especially for devices on the congested 2.4GHz frequency. Ideally I want 6GHz Wifi6E for the communication between mesh nodes as well as for talking to the few devices that are new enough to support it (I like buying cheap second hand devices). 2.5Gbit ethernet connections on all mesh nodes would be good too.

Wifi 7 is semi-released, you can buy devices even though the specs aren’t entirely finalised. I expect that next year when Wifi 7 devices are more common the second hand prices of Wifi 6E will drop. Currently Wifi 6E devices are somewhat expensive.

One major problem at the moment is “cloud configuration”. Here is a 41 page forum thread of TP-Link customers asking in vain for non-cloud configuration [1]. The problems with cloud configuration are that it doesn’t allow configuration without Internet access (so no fixing things when internet breaks and no use for a private network without Internet), it relies on a proprietary phone app (so a problem with your phone breaks everything), and it adds a dependency on an unpaid service that TP-Link might decide to turn off at some future time. The TP -Link Deco X55 AX3000 looks like a good set of devices, it currently costs $328 for a set of three Wifi 6 (not 6E) devices is a good deal, pity that the poor software options let it down.

TP-Link also seems to be scanning web traffic and sending the analysis to an external site [2], it seems to be operating as malware. The TP-Link software seems to be most accurately described as malware.

There is the OpenWrt project for open firmware on Wifi APs which is a great project [3] but it doesn’t seem to support any Wifi 6 mesh systems yet. If most Wifi hardware requires malware for operation it seems that running a VPN over Wifi is the way to go. A hostile party being able to sniff your home network is much worse than a hostile party sniffing public Internet traffic.

The Google Nest mesh devices have good specs and price, $359 for a three node Wifi 6E mesh that has 2.5Gbit ethernet. But they can only be configured with a Google app for Android or iOS and require a Gmail account. Giving Google the ability to shut down all my stuff by deleting my gmail account is not acceptable. Also Google is well known for cancelling services [4]. A mitigating factor is that there should be enough of those devices sold to make them a good target for an OpenWRT port.

As an aside it looks like the TailScale mesh VPN system could be a solution to the security issues related to malware on Wifi APs problem [5]. There is also HeadScale which is the fully open source variant of that [6]. Even when the vendor isn’t overtly hostile they can make mistakes so encryption is good.

Kogan is selling an own-brand Wifi 6 mesh network package that comes with 1/2/3 devices for $70/$120/$140. It doesn’t do Wifi 6E but supports the better encoding methods of Wifi 6 over Wifi 5 and will be good for bridging a LAN in one part of a house to a Wifi 2.4GHz or Ethernet connected device in another part. They also support up to 7 nodes so you could buy two of the 3 device packages and run one network with 2 and another with 4. The pricing is very competitive and they support web based administration!

I’ve just ordered the $140 Wifi 6 pack from Kogan. If it doesn’t do what I want then I can find someone else who will be happy with whatever functionality it gives and $140 is an amount I can risk without concern. If it works well then I might upgrade to Wifi 6E or Wifi 7 next year and deploy the Wifi 6 one for a relative. It seems that for my needs a cheap and OK Wifi 6 device is better than an expensive Wifi 6E device.

Is Secure Boot Worth Using?

With news like this one cited by Bruce Schneier [1] people are asking whether it’s worth using Secure Boot.

Regarding the specific news article, this is always a risk with distributed public key encryption systems. Lose control of one private key and attackers can do bad things. That doesn’t make it bad it just makes it less valuable. If you want to setup a system for a government agency, bank, or other high value target then it’s quite reasonable to expect an adversary to purchase systems of the same make and model to verify that their attacks will work. If you want to make your home PC a little harder to attack then you can expect that the likely adversaries won’t bother with such things. You don’t need security to be perfect, making a particular attack slightly more difficult than other potential attacks gives a large part of the benefit.

The purpose of Secure Boot is to verify the boot loader with a public key signature and then have the boot loader verify the kernel. Microsoft signs the “shim” that is used by each Linux distribution to load GRUB (or another boot loader). So when I configure a Debian system with Secure Boot enabled that doesn’t stop anyone from booting Ubuntu. From the signatures on the boot loader etc there is no difference from my Debian installation and a rescue image from Debian, Ubuntu, or another distribution booted by a hostile party to do things against my interests. The difference between the legitimate OS image and malware is a matter of who boots it and the reason for booting it.

It is possible to deconfigure Microsoft keys from UEFI to only boot from your own key, this document describes what is necessary to do that [2]. Basically if you boot without using any “option ROMs” (which among other things means the ROM from your video card) then you can disable the MS keys.

If it’s impossible to disable the MS keys that doesn’t make it impossible to gain a benefit from the Secure Boot process. You can use a block device decryption process that involves a signature of the kernel and the BIOS being used as part of the decryption for the device. So if a system is booted with the wrong kernel and the user doesn’t recognise it then they will find that they can’t unlock the device with the password. I think it’s possible on some systems to run the Secure Boot functionality in a non-enforcing mode such that it will use a bootloader without a valid signature but still use the hash for TPM calculations, that appears impossible on my Thinkpad Yoga Gen3 which only has enabled and disabled as options but should work on Dell laptops which have an option to run Secure Boot in permissive mode.

I believe that the way of the future is to use something like EFIStub [3] to create unified kernel images with a signed kernel, initrd, and command-line parameters in a single bundle which can be loaded directly by the UEFI BIOS. From the perspective of a distribution developer it’s good to have many people using the current standard functionality of shim and GRUB for EFI as a step towards that goal.

CloudFlare has a good blog post about Linux kernel hardening [4]. In that post they cover the benefits of a full secure boot setup (which is difficult at the current time) and the way that secure boot enables the lockdown module for kernel integrity. When Secure Boot is detected by the kernel it automatically enables lockdown=integrity functionality (see this blog post for an explanation of lockdown [5]). It is possible to enable this by putting “lockdown=integrity” on the kernel command line or “lockdown=confidentiality” if you want even more protection, but it happens by default with Secure Boot. Secure Boot is something you can set to get a selection of security features enabled and get a known minimum level of integrity even if the signatures aren’t used for anything useful, restricting a system to only boot kernels from MS, Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc is not useful.

For most users I think that Secure Boot is a small increase in security but testing it on a large number of systems allows increasing the overall security of operating systems which benefits the world. Also I think that having features like EFIStub usable for a large portion of the users (possibly the majority of users) is something that can be expected to happen in the lifetime of hardware being purchased now. So ensuring that Secure Boot works with GRUB now will facilitate using EFIStub etc in future years.

The Secure Boot page on the Debian wiki is worth reading, and also worth updating for people who want to contribute [6].

PineTime Status

Since my last blog post about the PineTime [1] I haven’t done anything exciting with it. I’ve been wearing it every day and it’s working reasonably well for me. It’s been working better since I changed to a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 as my main phone [2], so it seems that the Huawei Mate 10 Pro has some issues with Bluetooth that were making it unreliable.

A relative also has one which is working well for them but which had some problems, I only discovered that holding the button down for a long time (longer than usual for device reset) makes a PineTime reboot because of their issues. I also once had their device get into a bad state where the only thing I could do was flash a newer firmware which fortunately fixed the problem.

My latest issue is the battery life. Recently it has been taking ages to get above about 90% charge when charging and the time taken to go down to ~70% when I charge it seems to be decreasing. Yesterday it suddenly went to 13% after being 73% the previous night. Then it stayed at 13% all day. It seems quite inaccurate. But also it doesn’t seem to be lasting as long as before.

Generally it seems to me that Pine64 products are almost great. I won’t rule out the possibility of a newer firmware for the PineTime alleviating the battery issues (or at least reporting the status accurately) and making Bluetooth connectivity more reliable (even on older phones). For the PinePhonePro an update to Mobian could reduce power wasting from user space (there’s an issue that I have reported in Plasma Mobile but no-one is interested on working on this before KDE 6), and a kernel update could improve things. But I don’t think there’s a possibility of it ever having the battery last a day while polling Matrix and Jabber servers which is something that every Android phone can do without problems.

Links July 2024

Interesting Scientific American article about the way that language shapes thought processes and how it was demonstrated in eye tracking experiments with people who have Aboriginal languages as their first language [1].

David Brin wrote an interesting article “Do We Really Want Immortality” [2]. I disagree with his conclusions about the politics though. Better manufacturing technology should allow decreasing the retirement age while funding schools well.

Scientific American has a surprising article about the differences between Chimp and Bonobo parenting [3]. I’d never have expected Chimp moms to be protective.

Sam Varghese wrote an insightful and informative article about the corruption in Indian politics and the attempts to silence Australian journalist Avani Dias [4].

WorksInProgress has an insightful article about the world’s first around the world solo yacht race [5]. It has some interesting ideas about engineering.

Htwo has an interesting video about adverts for fake games [6]. It’s surprising how they apparently make money from advertising games that don’t exist.

Elena Hashman wrote an insightful blog post about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome [7]. I hope they make some progress on curing it soon. The fact that it seems similar to “long Covid” which is quite common suggests that a lot of research will be applied to that sort of thing.

Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post about the risks of MS Copilot [8].

Krebs has an interesting article about how Apple does Wifi AP based geo-location and how that can be abused for tracking APs in warzones etc. Bad Apple! [9].

Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post on How AI Will Change Democracy [10].

Charles Stross wrote an amusing and insightful post about MS Recall titled Is Microsoft Trying to Commit Suicide [11].

Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post about seeing the world as a data structure [12].

Luke Miani has an informative YouTube video about eBay scammers selling overprices MacBooks [13].

The Yorkshire Ranter has an insightful article about Ronald Coase and the problems with outsourcing big development contracts as an array of contracts without any overall control [14].

[1] https://tinyurl.com/ytwvpary
[2] https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/immortality.html
[3] https://tinyurl.com/26czjpjl
[4] https://sams-blog.com/?p=5615
[5] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-maintenance-race/
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhajAqI66nU
[7] https://hashman.ca/me-cfs/
[8] https://tinyurl.com/29b4h5oz
[9] https://tinyurl.com/24sz7lwa
[10] https://tinyurl.com/2c6dx8d4
[11] https://tinyurl.com/26e3xxmn
[12] https://tinyurl.com/26ykzgn4
[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V6Pez_Dbzs
[14] https://tinyurl.com/27h5urv9

More About Kogan 5120*2160 Monitor

On the 18th of May I blogged about my new 5120*2160 monitor [1]. One thing I noted was that one Netflix movie had run in an aspect ratio that used all space on the monitor. I still don’t know if the movie in question was cropped in a letterbox manner but other Netflix shows in “full screen” mode don’t extend to both edges. Also one movie I downloaded as in 3840*1608 resolution which is almost exactly the same aspect ratio as my monitor. I wonder if some company is using 5120*2160 screens for TVs, 4K and FullHD are rumoured to be cheaper than most other resolutions partly due to TV technology being used for monitors. There is the Anamorphic Format of between 2.35:1 and 2.40:1 [2] which is a close match for the 2.37:1 of my new monitor.

I tried out the HDMI audio on a Dell laptop and my Thinkpad Yoga Gen3 and found it to be of poor quality, it seemed limited to 2560*1440, at this time I’m not sure how much of the fault is due to the laptops and how much is due to the monitor. The monitor docs state that it needs HDMI version 2.1 which was released in 2017 and my Thinkpad Yoga Gen3 was released in 2018 so probably doesn’t have that. The HDMI cable in question did 4K resolution on my previous monitor so it should all work at a minimum of 4K resolution.

The switching between inputs is a problem. If I switch between DisplayPort for my PC and HDMI for a laptop the monitor will usually timeout before the laptop establishes a connection and then switch back to the DisplayPort input. So far I have had to physically disconnect the input source I don’t want to use. The DisplayPort switch that I’ve used doesn’t seem designed to work with resolutions higher than 4K.

I’ve bought a new USB-C dock which is described as doing 8K which means that as my Thinkpad is described as supporting 5120×2880@60Hz over USB-C I should be able to get 5120*2160 without any problems, however for unknown reasons I only get 4K. For work I’m using a Dell Latitude 7400 2in1 that’s apparently only capable of 4096*2304 @24 Hz which is less pixels than 5120*2160 and it will also only do 4K resolution. But for both those cases it’s still a significant improvement over 2560*1440. I tested with a Dell Latitude 7440 which gave the full 5120*2160 resolution, I was unable to find specs on what the maximum resolution of the 7440 is. I also have bought DisplayPort switch rated at 8K resolution. I got a switch that doesn’t also do USB because the ones that do 8K resolution and USB are about $70. The only KVM switch I saw for 8K resolution at a reasonable price was one designed for switching between two laptops and there doesn’t seem to be any adaptors to convert from regular DisplayPort to USB-C alternative mode so that wasn’t viable. Currently I have the old KVM switch used for USB only (for keyboard and mouse) and the new switch which only does DisplayPort. So I have two buttons to push when switching between input sources which isn’t too bad.

It seems that for PCs resolutions with more pixels than 4K are as difficult and inconvenient now as 4K was 6 years ago when I started doing it. If you want higher than 4K resolution to just work at this time then you need Apple hardware.

The monitor has a series of modes for different types of output, I’ve found “standard” to be good for text and “movie” to be good for watching movies/TV and for playing RTS games. I previously wrote about how to use ddcutil to use a monitor as a KVM switch [3], unfortunately I can’t do this with the new monitor as the time that the monitor waits for a good signal on a new input after changing is shorter than the time taken for Linux on the laptops I’m using to enable HDMI output. I’ve found the following commands to do the basics.

# get display mode
ddcutil getvcp DC
# set standard mode
ddcutil setvcp DC 0
# set movie mode
ddcutil setvcp DC 03

Now that I have that going the next thing I want to do is to have it switch between “standard” and “movie” modes when I switch keyboard focus.

Blog Comments

The Akismet WordPress anti-spam plugin has changed it’s policy to not run on sites that have adverts which includes mine. Without it I get an average of about 1 spam comment per hour and the interface for removing spam takes more mouse actions than desired. For email spam it’s about the same volume half of which is messages with SpamAssassin scores high enough to go into the MaybeSpam folder (that I go through every few weeks) and half of which goes straight to my inbox. But fortunately moving spam to a folder where I can later use it to train Bayesian classification is a much faster option on PC and is also something I can do from my phone MUA.

As an experiment I have configured my blog to only take comments from registered users. It will be interesting to see how many spammers make it through that and to also see feedback from genuine people. People who can’t comment can tell me about it via the contact methods listed here [1].

I previously wrote about other ways of dealing with hostile comments [2]. Blogging seems to be less popular nowadays so a Planet specific forum doesn’t seem a viable option. It’s a pity, I think that YouTube and Facebook have taken over from blogs and that’s not a good thing.

etbe – Russell Coker

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