Archive for July, 2017

N-Trig touch screens occasionally need re-calibration!

Saturday, July 29th, 2017

Since I finally got the touch-screen and pen of my Surface Pro 3 working in Linux I noticed it sometimes generates random phantom touches, or dead zones. Turns out this touch screen’s firmware have some internal re-calibration mode that can be run in that case:

2017 - when not even your touch screens work reliably anymore :-/

hey, ALSA’s arecord has a vu-meter

Friday, July 14th, 2017

who knew?

arecord -f cd -d 0 -vv /dev/null

;-)!

Lenovo ThinkPad T470s

Monday, July 3rd, 2017

I never owned a ThinkPad. My first PCs were built from components, and my first PC laptop was a noname. Then I got into Linux and non-x86 architectures, and as student worked on ARM, SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS. Probably in that order. Given that path of education, my second laptop probably was a G3 iBook - which I obviously run with Linux for the flawless suspend / resume at that time (2003?).

Nowadays I’m more and more disappointed by Apple’s offerings. Few ports, uncomfortable keyboards, too large trackpads, glossy displays to name a few. On the PC side there are so many cheap, but low quality options that it takes a bit or research to find your perfect fit. However, choice is good, and you could opt for a much cheaper model in case of.

One of the more outstanding, higher quality options are Lenovo ThinkPads. Purchased from IBM in 2005, they may still be the only laptops certified for use on the International Space Station.

Lenovo Germany was so kind to send me the 14″ T470s for a test.
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