Just donated to the effort to improve sound quality on the #Librem5 when using #pipewire: https://opencollective.com/dephcom/projects/pipewire-echo

I'd be even more happy about the approach of sponsoring development through the community if this donation would be accepted as being for an official non-profit organization accepted as such in Germany.

Giving for #OpenSource should be respected as a a benefit to the public and appreciated by the government by whatever means they do this for other purposes (in Germany it's possible to declare such donations for reducing taxes to pay).

Hey #MobileLinux community - if everybody gives a little there'll be a fair pay for someone doing this work.

the assertion of freedom of will also asserts the right to the future tense as a condition of a fully human life

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
by Shoshana Zuboff

#SurveillanceCapitalism #privacy

Just trying #nextcloud #memories with #recognize to tag pictures using #ki: combs in an old casing for power electrics are interpreted as a #keyboard

“Knowing the real-time emotional state can help businesses to sell their product and thereby increase revenue.”88

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
by Shoshana Zuboff

#SurveillanceCapitalism #privacy

Hey @joeycastillo@mastodon.social,

thanks for the #SensorWatchPro update on #Crowdsupply!

When I read about screen flickering for transferring data to the watch I thought "whoa, what has been that product during the 90s last century which used the crt flickering to transfer data?". I didn't remember, yet, but maybe someone can help my memory...

Anyway this is a really cool feature and at least for me feels like timetravel back to the future .

I'd have some questions about #nextcloud. I'm running a nextcloud on my internal net (no direct internet access) and am wondering is it still the right solution to migrate onto a new hardware?

I'm asking, because I'm not feeling very comfortable with it, because I'm not really understanding it. I'm more a unix like person - keep it simple.

I'm using so far these nextcloud-like services:

• contacts and calendar integrated into linux and android clients
• lufi for filesharing
• occasionally file syncing, but I'm also using #syncthing (the nextcloud client on android sometimes does not work like I'd expect)
• am trying atm #memories which seems to have all features I'd like to have to migrate our families pictures from a synology nas

So for me it seems that it is #calendar, #contacts and maybe #memories.

If I'd break #nextcloud I'd break all of these applications. So I'm thinking if I could just use a bunch of applications like #lufi and #syncthing to migrate to instead of using the nextcloud framework.

I'd be happy about comments on this line of thought, motivations and arguments to keep using nextcloud and insight, practical experiences and reasons to migrate to other projects and drop nextcloud.

Should I

As we are shorn of alternatives, we are forced to purchase products that we can never own while our payments fund our own surveillance and coercion. Adding insult to injury, data rendered by this wave of things are notoriously insecure and easily subject to breaches

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
by Shoshana Zuboff

#SurveillanceCapitalism #privacy

Follow-up to this note.

Dragan had asked me to do repeated power-cycle tests with different kernel versions using the patched dtb for #RockPro64 to make sure the kernel #oops wouldn't still be an issue.

I learned that cutting the power of the device could kill the #LPDDR4 #RAM. This is documented in the specification referenced on the RockPro64 wiki page for Micron LPDDR4 Mobile LPDDR4 Datasheet as stated on page 37 in Uncontrolled Power-Off:

An uncontrolled power-off sequence can occur a maximum of 400 times over the life of the device.

I never had heard about this before! Cutting power without shutdown can kill my RAM?

show dmesg and shutdown

To get all the debugging information I needed I wanted the system after booting to print dmesg to the serial console, wait a short time and then actually shutdown.

root:~# cat /root/bin/dmesg_and_shutdown.sh
#!/bin/bash
# a small script that outputs dmesg to serial
# console, waits 20 seconds and shuts down
dmesg > /dev/ttyS2
# show a message how to stop this script and wait 20 seconds
echo "Will shutdown in 20 seconds - to stop me call 'pkill dmesg_and_shut'" > /dev/ttyS2
sleep 20
echo "shutdown -h" > /dev/ttyS2
shutdown -h now
# a cronjob that runs after each boot
root:~# crontab -l
@reboot /root/bin/dmesg_and_shutdown.sh

powercycle the board

I took the time needed for a complete cycle of booting, showing dmesg, waiting and shutting down: well below 2 minutes.

To automate the power cycle I used an #esp8266 based power switch made by #Sonoff (Powr2) running ESP Easy (mega-20210503).

#ESPeasy offers a simple scripting language I used to powercycle after 120 seconds of being switched on:

On System#Boot do
 gpio,12,0
 gpio,13,1
endon

On button#button_state do
 if [blue_led#blue_led_state]=1
  gpio,13,0
  timerSet,1,2
 else
  gpio,13,1
  gpio,12,1
  timerSet,1,0
  timerSet,2,0
 endif
endon

On Rules#Timer=1 do
  gpio,12,0
  timerSet,2,1
endon

On Rules#Timer=2 do
 gpio,12,1
 timerSet,1,2
endon

Pressing the button on the Sonoff device toggles between:

• blue led off: timers disabled, relay on permanently
• blue led on: timers switch the relay off for 5 seconds, on for 120 seconds and then repeat

logging

minicom logged the serial output to a file.

Further down the #RabbitHole I went when looking at the resulting logfile…

Follow-up to this note

Meanwhile Dragans changes to the dtb file helped my testing setup to boot without eMMC. So I could test booting manually from scsi devices like on my production system.

Looking for some simple instructions on how-to do this failed and I put together the following information.

u-boot on #RockPro64 uses variables written to flash. The important ones for choosing a device/kernel to boot:

# this u-boot will look for scsi devices only
boot_targets=scsi
# it will scan the devices for 
bootcmd=bootflow scan

Since I have a boot.scr in my /boot the bootmeth seems to be script. There's also the source of that file boot.cmd available and from there I extracted the commands to run on the u-boot console to start any kernel/initrd/dtb I could find on disk:

# initialize pci bus
pci enum
# show devices on pci
pci
# reset bus and scan for scsi devices
scsi reset
# get partition table
scsi part
# find boot files
ls scsi 0:1 /boot
# load armbian defaults
load scsi 0:1 0x800800 /boot/armbianEnv.txt
# replace the xyz on the following line with the
# filesize output by 'load' above
env import -t 0x800800 xyz
# write uuid of partition to variable partuuid
part uuid scsi 0:1 partuuid
# arguments passed to the kernel on boot
setenv bootargs "root=${rootdev} rootwait rootfstype=${rootfstype} ${consoleargs} consoleblank=0 loglevel=${verbosity} ubootpart=${partuuid} usb-storage.quirks=${usbstoragequirks} ${extraargs} ${extraboardargs}"
# look for available images, initrds and dtbs
ls scsi 0:1 /boot
# get the dtb directory, **uInitrd** and the vmlinuz
# from the output to use with the following 'load' commands
load scsi 0:1 0x02080000 /boot/
load scsi 0:1 0x06000000 /boot/
load scsi 0:1 0x01f00000 /boot//rockchip/rk3399-rockpro64.dtb
booti 0x02080000 0x06000000 0x01f00000

At this point I only needed to wait for the Pine64 sata ctrl to arrive to test the current kernel with the same ctrl used in my production system.

So I went back to the fork in the tunnels and took the other way down the #RabbitHole…

Follow-up to this note:

At one of the times the current #Armbian #linux kernel didn't crash, but booted on my #RockPro64 I installed #GotoSocial and yes: no more strange error messages running it. The only time I remember that I updated a linux kernel to make an application work.

Preparations to get the production system running with the newer kernel:

• in case of problems I'd need to know my way back to boot the old kernel: u-boot recap and learning
• test suspected problems with the #sata #pcie ctrl beforehand (get a second Pine64 sata ctrl for the test system)

Meanwhile Dragan had patched the device tree and asked to check on a few reboots whether this would make a difference or cause any regressions.

Further down the #RabbitHole the tunnel forks…

Follow-up to this note:

I decided to test whether #GotoSocial would work on the #RockPro64 using the current instead of the legacy #Armbian kernel before risking problems upgrading my production #yunohost.

I have a similar testing setup: old mechanical drives instead of SSDs, a different PCIe SATA controller, an additional eMMC.

The additional eMMC I need to boot from, because for some reason the PCIe SATA ctrl didn't work, when u-boot initializes the controller before the kernel.

Installing the current kernel on my testing setup I found it not working: no console on hdmi, no network. Forgot to install the newer dtb (device tree binary) as well.

With currrent kernel and dtb from #Armbian installed the system booted half of the times I switched it on. Asking around on the rock64 chat I met Dragan Simic who greatly helped me to get further down the #RabbitHole…

On my #yunohost I tried to update #gotosocial from 0.17.4~ynh1 to 0.18.1~ynh1 and the update failed.

GotoSocial just showed some cryptical error messages when started.

@dumpsterqueer@superseriousbusiness.org traced the problem back to a changed lib version used in the new GotoSocial version and the developer of the lib answered my #linux kernel would be too old.

The old #armbian legacy kernel is running, because … I don't remember.

I need a kernel update for my #rockpro64.

Down the #RabbitHole…

unobtrusive good, mild, low on acid

Good to drink black without sugar.

#espressi by @QuijoteKaffee@mastodon.social

Inevitability rhetoric is a cunning fraud designed to render us helpless and passive in the face of implacable forces that are and must always be indifferent to the merely human

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
by Shoshana Zuboff

#SurveillanceCapitalism #privacy

A led light bulb (230V~) went dark in a room. By dark I mean that it dimmed down to very low light. No, I do not have a dimmer nor is it a light bulb with some fancy build-in iot stuff.

Two classic halogen bulbs didn't work in that socket. Testing the led bulb in a different socket it worked. I looked for contact problems and cleaned the contacts and the lamp seemed to work again using the led light bulb.

Then it went dark again and I decided to exchange the socket in the lamp. Opening the socket I found that in-between one of the cables and the socket an electronic part had been placed by soldering it to the end of the power line and fastening it to the socket.

I took out that part having never seen a stupid simple lamp coming with some small electric part build in. The lamp worked again with the all the bulbs I had tried.

Looking at for the specs I found this datasheet. It seems to be a resettable fuse or polymeric positive temperature coefficient device. I didn't know about these, but obviously the one I took out of the circuit seemed to have broken in a way that it switches too fast to a high resistance that only allows the led light bulb to glow dimly and isn't sufficient to drive a classic light bulb.

I guess the pptc has been put into the plastic lamp to protect it from heat: If a certain amount of power would be exceeded the light bulb used probably would emit too much heat for the lamp case. Still the lamp came with the usual label saying what light sources are allowed, but not stating any hint that it would not work with non-spec light sources or would contain active electronic parts.