Category: Computer bits

One of the monitors on my desktop is about to bite the dust. It does this rapid on-off blinking thing for a while, and sometimes it will turn on, somtimes it’s just a blank screen. Hitting the source button starts it over again, and eventually it will stay on.

I will have much sadness when I have to go to two mis-matched monitors, or back to just one monitor.

The charging adapter for my Transformer Prime decided to stop working last night. Plugged in the tablet, but no charging was happening. Uh oh.

Put the volt meter on it and saw that it was providing 5V USB power. There are 5 other contacts that I’m guessing provide the actual charging voltage for the batteries, which I think are rated at something like 7.2V and thus won’t charge using regular USB power. I wasn’t able to easily access them with the probes on my volt meter, and it was late at night so I didn’t feel like futzing around with it too much. The cable seemed fine, since the tablet recognized that I had plugged it into a computer USB port. That meant either the charger was bad or the port on the tablet was bad. 

It was off to Amazon.com to see how much a replacement would be. In the one of the reviews for the ASUS charger, the reviewer suggested putting it in the freezer could help fix a charger gone bad. I thought it probably wouldn’t hurt to try, so I stuck it in a Ziploc freezer bag and left it in the freezer overnight.

Took it out of the freezer the next day and left it on the desk for a few hours to let it come back up to room temperature. When I plugged it into the power squid and connected the tablet, it started charging again! Freezing the charger actually worked, much to my surprise. Not sure what exactly the freezing did, but whatever it was seems to have worked. Hopefully it stays that way.

A conversation on IRC about 6502 assembly led me on a trip down memory lane. It made me start thinking about playing with the Apple ][+ and //e back in the day. Remembering typing in programs from Nibble magazine prompted me to search the interwebs a bit, and I found www.nibblemagazine.net, a complete collection of 12 1/2 years worth of Nibble Magazine, from the very same person who originally published Nibble. Made me wish I still had my collection of Nibble magazines

And then to go along with it, someone in another IRC channel posted a link to a government surplus auction site for a late model Apple //e with dual disk drives (no monitor) with a $10 starting bid. No info on if it was working or not. To say I was very tempted would be an understatement.

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux).

For the longest time, I’ve always considered SELinux a bit of a PITA, in large part because I didn’t take the time to learn anything about it. It was always spitting out these annoying error messages, and keeping things from working properly. Anytime I installed/reinstalled Fedora on a machine, disabling SELinux was usually the first thing I did.

I decided it was about time I changed that and learned how to use SELinux properly.

At Flock to Fedora this past weekend, two of the talks were on SELinux: SELinux for Mere Mortals and What’s New in SELinux. On top of the smattering I picked up on my own by following the troubleshooting prompts provided by sealert(1), it was enough to make the light bulb in my head start to glow dimly. Still lots more to figure out, but it’s starting to make a little more sense to me now.

Maybe if I learn enough about it, I can give a blurb about it at BarcampCHS, or at a CHUUG meeting.

Since the stock email client doesn’t have any facility to import or export a key from a key server, getting keys in or out of the phone is kind of a manual process. I’ve never had much success getting my phone to connect to my workstation via USB, so I used the sneakernet method using the microSD card to move things back and forth.

I wasn’t able to get the stock mail client to use any of my existing keys that I imported, so I generated a new key to experiment with. Unfortunately, the new key is pretty much useless until it’s pulled off the phone manually and uploaded to a key server (or distributed in some other fashion) so that other people can import it into their keyrings. Sure, you can sign messages with it, but nobody can verify the signature, and forget about encrypting anything. The same goes for other public keys. There doesn’t appear to be any way of querying key servers for other keys either, so verifying or decrypting messages can’t be done until their public key is put onto the phone in some other fashion and then imported into mail client.

Here’s one way that the process could be done:

1. Export your public key
2. Use some app to open the .asc file containing the key and copy it
3. Open up the website for your favourite key server and submit the key

Now your public key is out there for consumption. Kind of a cumbersome process. This is what I was doing:

1. Export public key. Copy to microSD card.
2. Unmount microSD card, remove from phone, mount on desktop.
3. Import key into my regular keyring.
4. Sign new key.
5. Upload key to key server.
6. Export ASCII armoured keyring to microSD card (if you’re using GnuPG, make sure to specify the --openpgp flag).
7. Unmount microSD card, put it back into the phone, remount microSD card.
8. Import keyring into mail client.

Yeah, cumbersome. Repeat for any subsequent public keys you need to have on the phone.

Next up, let’s see how the signing and encrypting parts work.