Part II - Please Refuel and some new Bumpers Just in time for the new year, the revived Apple Macbook Pro with Debian from the first part is back on my desk. It served well in December. Now, it’s time for a pit-stop: Would you refuel and change bumpers, please? Battery Replacement after 12 years I was way off the mark with the expected endurance: I wrote something about 1.5 hours last month. Well this may have been 7 years ago when I last worked with it. Today the battery doesn’t last for even half an hour. Over Christmas at home on lockdown this is not a problem, though it is a nuisance as it was carefully but clearly pointed towards me. Read more

Rescue-Ops before Christmas Eve What is the worst-case scenario right before Christmas during a Corona Lockdown? Let’s leave zombie apocalypses, too little toilet paper or slow internet connections aside for a moment. Right! A broken laptop. Exactly such a call for help came to me this afternoon from my own circle of friends. I was asked if I had a spare notebook available shortly. Coincidentally, yes. An old mid-2009 Macbook Pro 13" has been hanging around in the corner for years. Too valuable to be thrown away, technically perfectly okay, but unfortunately no longer supported by Apple. There she is again, the planned obsolescence1. Read more

Battery Today I will report a brief description of the battery and power management of Mobian on a Pinephone. Reading the battery parameters from the console was already quite special. The usual way with upower was not successful and provided only zero values. Without ACPI the readout only worked with: # cat /sys/class/power_supply/axp20x-battery/uevent My first measurements: At idle with active mobile network, BT and WLAN and 50% display brightness the power consumption is about 2.5 to 3W. At 100% display brightness it jumps up to 3.5 to 4W each time without any apps in the background. From the desktop perspective this may not sound bad, but in fact it is. Read more

Screenshots What was missing in the first part the day before yesterday, I will catch up today: Screenshots! This led to the question of how to do this? A hotkey like in iOS (home + on/off switch) is unknown to me on the Pinephone. The classic desktop Linux tools like Gnome Screenshots or Peek are installable but do not work properly. It’s quite banal, they fail due to the fact that I cannot trigger any hotkey on a touch display UI. As a solution I have chosen the workaround via SSH and grim taking screenshots remotely in the background while in the app in the foreground, Waylands makes it possible. Read more

Holy Unboxing Welcome to my new blog series and travel report. After more than 12 years with Apple iOS, and before that already 7 years with Microsoft PocketPC devices and before that - we are already in the 90s - with Palm (my PalmV is still alive!) I finally think it’s time to move on and start a new journey. Away from proprietary, closed systems with their wiretapping assistants1, the uncontrolled extraction of behavioral data, the constant intrusion of a more less subtle nudgeing2 and the latent threat of simply being bricked3. Read more

40.000 Companies in Germany affected The BSI (German Federal Authority for Informationsecurity) warns with the second highest level “orange” (= the IT threat situation is mission critical. massive disruption of regular operations) in the public media1. Around 40,000 companies in Germany alone are affected by several critical vulnerabilities because security updates have not yet been installed2. In fact, Heise speaks of playing Russian roulette3. It’s not without reason that I have been warning for several years now about interlocking internal AD and internet functions like Microsoft does deliberatly. Unfortunately many hang their Exchange server directly “in the Internet” including OWA and EAS without any firewalls, mail gateways or reverse proxies. The normal case is totally negligent: Via port forwarding! Read more

One more SME customer (approx. 250 users spread over several nationwide locations) is migrating away from Exchange to free and Open Source solution. With the ready-to-use installation of a new Linux mail server I have provided my very modest contribution. The rest of the user and the data transfer will be done by the customer’s own IT department. Users can continue to work in their familiar Outlook and mobile client environment when the new EAS accounts are rolled out “side-by-side” to the existing onces. From one second to another, the switch can be carried out without hassle or downtime just by reconfiguring the reverse proxy and the mail gateway. Time-consuming, cost-intensive and above all “hard” migration paths are no longer necessary. Read more

Today Mike Kuketz published a great article in his blog on Digitization in schools and on educational policy, unfortunately in German only, but worth to read: Bildungswesen: Entlarvung der häufigsten Microsoft-Mythen Have fun reading and a good start to the week! Here are some Power-Quotes: Therefore, only product training courses take place. The expiration date for such trained knowledge will be exceeded by the next update of the user interface and subsequently has to be re-learned. So students do not receive digital competence about how something works from a technical point of view, but rather which “buttons” they have to press. Read more

I really just wanted to show you this Fnord, which is a very Microsoft-like thing: Well however, you might ask why I am tackling with Outlook 2019, let me please explain. A company with 40 mailboxes has decided to abandon its Exchange server. The following sentence is for all accountants and auditors: We are talking about cost-savings of 15-25% per year! Now everything runs with common internet standards on a Debian 10 with all the comfort and convenience as before: Starting with EAS-ActiveSync for Outlook (sigh if it has to be), a great webmailer, public folders, calendars, contacts and even resources. Here are some more screenshots: Read more