HP bricked my printer.

Written by vidarlo on 20220301 in english and hardware and rants with no comments.

Some years back I bought a Samsung CLX-3300 printer. It worksworked great. Most of the time it was plugged into a RPi that was handling the spooling with cups, and I used third party toner without any issues. Recently the SD card of the RPi died, so that option was not available to me any […]

Kodachi Linux: A brief Security Review

Written by vidarlo on 20211024 in english and Linux and privacy and security with 16 comments.

I was recently made aware of Kodachi Linux, which according to it’s website has gotten critical acclaim. This is a superficial attemt to look at the distribution – if it’s even fair to call it that. Off the bat, it doesn’t start well: Confusing documentation For best security results (Email – Banking – Cryptocurrency): ISP […]

A fake USB3 hub

Written by vidarlo on 20210217 in english and hardware and rants with one comment.

I recently bought a 7-port USB3 hub from eBay. That’s a somewhat interesting experience. It turns out that’s it’s not a 7-port USB3 hub. It’s a four port USB3 hub, and a three port USB2-hub, which happens to be mounted on the same board. Inside, it contains two major IC’s: One of them, the VL815, […]

Install Apache2 on Ubuntu 16.04

Written by vidarlo on 20180226 in english and Linux and software and tutorials with no comments.

I assume that you have a running Ubuntu installation. This is written with 16.04 in mind but should work with some adaptions on other versions as well. example.org is used as an example (D’oh) in this post, and should be changed to suit your installation. Installing Apache2, PHP, MariaDB and so forth $ sudo apt […]

COAP endpoints on IKEA Trådfri

Written by vidarlo on 20170401 in english and hardware and software with 18 comments.

So, I’m talking to the Trådfri GW. It turns out that my initial research was correct. It is talking coaps. I used californium.tools/ to talk to it, requesting coaps://10.0.3.25/.well-known/core. It actually seems to implement the standard rather well 🙂 I had to use -psk and enter the security key, printed on a label under the […]

Ikea Trådfri zigbee lights

Written by vidarlo on 20170331 in english and hardware and software with one comment.

So, Ikea has released Trådfri seemingly worldwide. This is a series of Zigbee enabled lights, which looks quite neat. I bought the starter kit, with a gateway, two bulbs, and a remote control. First a couple of sentences about the remote control. It has on/off, dim up and down, and change color temperature. Nothing too […]

Installing Debian on x86 readyNAS.

Written by vidarlo on 20160307 in english and hardware and Linux and software and Uncategorized with no comments.

The Netgear readynas is essentially a x86 computer, with a handy Serial TTL interface at the back. However, it’s not entirely straight forward. Unetbootin-created usb-media did not boot, but the debian netboot iso appears to boot. However, it doesn’t support serial console out of the box. After remastering the netboot image with settings for console, […]

Raspberry Pi as cheap media player.

Written by vidarlo on 20140108 in english and hardware and Linux and software with no comments.

As you may’ve guessed from some previous blog posts, I have been expirementing with Raspberry Pi as media player. The setup was not entirely straight forward, as it was to be located at my girlfriends place, with access to the media I have at home. I was looking at OpenVPN as solution, tying the networks […]

Xbian vs. Raspbmc

Written by vidarlo on 20140104 in english and hardware and Linux and software with no comments.

I’ve recently tested Xbian and Raspbmc. Xbian seems to be based of raspbmc, with a few changes, for example a quite sleek setup plugin. Raspbmc, in turn, are based on Debian, the well known Linux-distro, with apt and all the snacks. Both are painless to setup, and works quite fine for playing media files. However, […]

The M570 Trackball

Written by vidarlo on 20131120 in english and hardware and rants with no comments.

The Logitech M570 trackball is good. If I use a normal mouse, I’ll get a stiff shoulder after a couple of days. What I can use is an clitoris or trackball. My x220 has a clitoris, which I don’t like in games. The trackball, however, works fine in openTTD. I’ve used various trackballs before, but […]