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Philips 438P1 43″ 4K Monitor

I have just returned a Philips 438P1 43″ 4K Monitor [1] and gone back to my Samsung 28″ 4K monitor model LU28E590DS/XY AKA UE590.

The main listed differences are the size and the fact that the Samsung is TN but the Philips is IPS. Here’s a comparison of TN and IPS technologies [2]. Generally I […]

Links May 2022

dontkillmyapp.com is a web site about Android phone vendors who make their phones kill your apps when you don’t want them to [1]. One of the many reasons why Pine and Purism offer the promise of better phones.

This blog post about the Librem 5 camera is interesting [2]. Currently the Librem 5 camera isn’t […]

Elon and Free Speech

Elon Musk has made the news for spending billions to buy a share of Twitter for the alleged purpose of providing free speech. The problem with this claim is that having any company controlling a large portion of the world’s communication is inherently bad for free speech. The same applies for Facebook, but that’s not […]

PIN for Login

Windows 10 added a new “PIN” login method, which is an optional login method instead of an Internet based password through Microsoft or a Domain password through Active Directory. Here is a web page explaining some of the technology (don’t watch the YouTube video) [1]. There are three issues here, whether a PIN is any […]

Got Covid

I’ve currently got Covid, I believe I caught it on the 11th of April (my first flight since the pandemic started) with a runny nose on the 13th and a positive RAT on the evening of the 14th. I got an official PCR test on the 16th with a positive result returned on the 17th. […]

Joplin Notes

In response to my post about Android phones without Google Play [1] I received an email recommending Joplin for notes on Android [2].

Joplin supports storing notes on a number of protocols including Nextcloud and WebDAV. I setup WebDAV because it’s easiest, here is Digital Ocean instructions for WebDAV on Apache [3]. That basically works. […]

Android Without Play

A while ago I was given a few reasonably high-end Android phones to give away. I gave two very nice phones to someone who looks after refugees so a couple of refugee families could make video calls to relatives. The third phone is a Huawei Nova 7i [1] which doesn’t have the Google Play Store. […]

Converting to UEFI

When I got my HP ML110 Gen9 working as a workstation I initially was under the impression that boot wasn’t supported on NVMe and booted it from USB. I found USB booting with legacy boot to be unreliable so decided to try EFI booting and noticed that the NVMe devices were boot candidates with UEFI. […]

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 […]