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AMT/MEBX on Debian

I’ve just been playing with Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) [1] which is also known as Management Engine Bios Extension (MEBX).

Firstly a disclaimer, using this sort of technology gives remote access to your system at a level that allows in some ways overriding the OS. If this gets broken then you have big problems. […]

Links March 2022

Anarcat wrote a great blog post about switching from OpenNTP to Chrony which gives a good overview of how NTP works and how accurate the different versions are [1].

Bleeping Computer has an amusing article about criminals who copied a lot of data from NVidia servers including specs of their latest products [2], they are […]

Feedburner Seems to be Dying

Many years ago Feedburner was a useful service. It proxied the RSS feed of your blog and gave you analytics of what happened with it. Now feeds using Feedburner randomly give HTTP error 404s. The Feedburner Twitter account is inactive and recommends that people Tweet at Google instead. It seems that Google wants to get […]

Hangouts Replacement

Google is currently in the process of killing Hangouts. Last year Hangouts was quite a nice IM system with integrated video chat and voice calling. Now they have decided to kill it and replace it with “Google Chat” and “Google Meet” both of which are integrated with the Gmail app on Android. To start getting […]

Reading Glasses

About 4 years ago at a routine eye check the optometrist recommended that I get reading glasses. Apparently I’m old enough that my eyes are losing their ability to focus at different distances to having different glasses for close and remote objects (EG reading and driving) is necessary for good vision.

The optometrist asked me […]

Wayland

The Wayland protocol [1] is designed to be more secure than X, when X was designed there wasn’t much thought given to the possibility of programs with different access levels displaying on the same desktop. The Xephyr nested X server [2] is good for running an entire session from a remote untrusted host on a […]

More About the Librem 5

I concluded my previous post about the Purism Librem 5 [1] with the phone working as a Debian/GNOME system with SSH access over the LAN. Before I published that post I managed to render it unbootable, making a new computer unbootable on the first day of owning it isn’t uncommon for me. In this case […]

Librem 5 First Impression

I just received the Purism Librem 5 that I paid for years ago (I think it was 2018). The process of getting the basic setup done was typical (choosing keyboard language, connecting to wifi, etc). Then I tried doing things. One thing I did was update to the latest PureOS release which gave me a […]

SAGE (ITPA) Spam

In 2008 I joined SAGE (the System Administrators’ Guild of Australia). It was a professional society for people doing sysadmin work (running computer servers). I quit when I found that the level of clue was lower than hoped and that members used the code of ethics as nothing but a way to score points in […]

Mouse and Teflon

I had a problem with my mouse. The slippery plastic bits on the bottom weren’t glued on well and came off, which then gave more friction when moving on the desk. After asking advice on a mailing list the best suggestion was Teflon sticky tape. I bought a few meters of such tape (a lifetime […]