René Rebe

For some time I was wondering why WoL (Wake-on-Lan) was not working on a AM2+ Sapphire IPC-AM3DD785G Mini-ITX board with on-board Atheros Attansic (atl1c) that was lingering here for the usual IT testing purposes.

After quite too much time of trial’n error today I finally found out why. Turns out while the BIOS has an APM: “PME Enable” option - that is not enough! In the same power menu it additionally has a rather cryptic: “Control EuP” option that was enabled.

So how should I know what that is? Obviously not a first thought that this somehow relates to wake form standby handling. And it would certainly help if the manual for the board would somewhere prominently and easy to find linked on their product website. Alas, finally with a manual somewhere deeply hidden on their site it just says to all power settings this:

“Power
The Power Management Setup allows you to configure your system to most effectively save energy saving while operating in a manner consistent with your own style of computer use.”

Wonderful details. Anyways - enabled sounds nice, right? Well turns out that option actually disables power to various wake related components for enhanced standby power savings. Look what I found searching for the setting on the Internet in another product’s manual:

“Control EuP - Enables or disables the Energy Using Products (EuP) Ready function. When set to [Enabled], power for WOL, WO_USB, audio and onboard LEDs will be switched off at S5 state”

Ok, great. And with this disabled wake-on-lan finally works on this box, and it can go to the others into the test system rack. Yay!

The Android update lottery is such an annoying thing. I already got a Nexus 5 specifically to get updates at all. But even when there eventually is an over-the-air (OTA) update, one ends up hitting the “check for updates” button for week without actually hitting the update lottery seed win.

So after a week or so of this silly and annoying game I finally side loaded the update over USB, sigh:

./adb devices
./adb reboot bootloader
./fastboot oem unlock
./fastboot flash bootloader …bootloader-hammerhead-hhz12d.img
./fastboot reboot-bootloader
./fastboot flash radio …radio-hammerhead-m8974a-2.0.50.2.21.img
./fastboot reboot-bootloader
./fastboot -w update …hammerhead-lrx21o/image-hammerhead-lrx21o.zip
./fastboot oem lock

What a cluster mess, only silicon valley companies are elite enough to innovate like this, … sigh :-/!

PS: If you get “./adb devices, … # offline” then you probably run a too old adb version, like 1.0.29 instead of the newer 1.0.31 that handles authentication or such, …

PPS: One does not need to install the whole, huge, Gigabytes of Android SDK, there are various sites that offer (ZIP) downloads with just the two CLI Kilobyte tools.

For some days I had a Surface Pro 3 for some testing. In general the new, bigger 3:2 12″ display is much nicer to work (code) on. I personally find the “silver”ish magnesium looking a bit cheap. The black option of the Surface Pro 1 & 2 looked a bit more Pro. However, the unpainted version should be less sensitive to scratches.

The new flexible kickstand is of course a big plus, though it is still not very comfortable to use it on the lap, e.g. an armchair, or on an airplane tray.

A real showstopper, however, came this morning. Powering the Surface Pro 3 up resulted in an unexpected and automatic firmware update (I guess left over from the last shutdown) which never finished and thus bricked the device. And being in Germany I would not even get an in-store replacement for a self-destructed, 5 day old Surface, and now sit without anything waiting weeks for (a hopefully repaired) device in return. Sigh.

Definitely not a good start for a new companion. I guess a sign that I should have quickly installed Linux, and not let Windows 8 take over the self-destruct sequence, … :-/ !!1!

PS: One more thing: Dear companies - if you want no bad press here, then please sell products that a) work and b) do not self destruct due nightly updates. You’re welcome.

For all too long I was wondering why the middle (center, third) mouse button would not work in a Linux VM on VMware Fusion on a Mac. You know, for copy and paste, … in terminals, … all that text ;-)

I actually googled another rainy day, month or winter, but only found more questions than answers (like mouse.vusb.useBasicMouse = “FALSE” and whatsoever).

Today –clicking around in the Mac’s System Preferences– I came arose the setting for the center button that I would normally not use for Mac apps. Turns out setting this to “Button 3″ is just what is needed for VMware to actually get it and pass it down to the Linux VM.

Sometimes solutions can be so simple, sigh!

Update: Hm, only still a problems with the mighty MagicMouse - as it does not allow to configure a “Button 3″ in Apple’s SystemPreferences … Third party hacks apparently floating in the interweb for this :-/

So now NEC finally comes out with a 4k IPS display. Unfortunately they lost me as a customer already early this year, …

Wondering if they also use MST, and how the compatibility is with Mac OS X ;-)

I kinda like some of the innovations of the Surface 3, like the kickstand, improved keyboard. What I like about the Surface 3 is that the keyboard is cool as the tablet with it’s CPU/GPU behind the display gets warm there. Leaving my typing experience without heated fingers, … Of course the stylus input is nice to have.

One major drawback, however, is that due to the gab between the tablet and the kickstand one can not really use the Surface’s on airline seat desks, … :-/

However, what is a complete shame at this date and time is the fact that the Surface’s are absolutely not repairable.

Of course I do not expect to upgrade the CPU, nor RAM in such laptops. But upgrading the storage (SSD) in a year or two (or when all it’s write cycles are exhausted) or to swap in a new battery in a similar timeframe, … (each of my classic MacBooks got a second battery by now, … in some even the second battery died since then, …). This is not asked too much, and even a must considering todays level of environmental pollution and landfills, …

A tablet / laptop like this can be for good use, even second hand, for five if not ten years. A glued construction like this seriously limits this possibilities without any good reason. Beside maximum company profits, … of course.

On the first glance the “new” entry-level (aka low-cost) 21″ iMac with it’s 1.4GHz ULV CPU looks mighty underpowered for a desktop-class machine in 2014.

On the second glance I wonder if this is a test-run of Apple to see how many people complain about such a low-performance machine for a potential transition to Apple’s own ARM A7 CPUs. Currently this 1.4GHz (base clock) iMac’s peak (turbo boost) performance is just twice as fast as an iPad Air. Apple already called the A7 “desktop class performance”, and next Apple A8 ARM64 CPUs at a higher clock will certainly close this gap further, …

Update: I personally do not believe in a short-term success of possible ARM Macs. The initial performance will be far below current high-end Intel chips. A gap Apple will only be able to close in half a decade or so, if not Intel will always have a lead, … The far bigger problem is that Apple would loose all the customers buying the Macs and still running Windows (or Linux) on the Mac’s natively, or in a VM. Either intentionally due build quality and design or accidentally getting the first Mac due advertising, and later finding out their office warez do not work on Mac, and thus sticking with the Windows OS for the time being. I would estimate this to be a too large portion of the Mac sales to be easily lost in this transition.

I hereby publicly document a novel implementation detail for Just-In-Time compilers. As I am not too motivated to shell out some ton of money for patent process and therefore like to document prior art in case other go and patent this eventually:

AFAIK the state of the art JIT compilers use a tracing technique like in Google’s V8, Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey and Mike Pall’s LuaJIT that first interprets internal byte code representation to collect data for later JIT’ing hot paths.

This has two major drawbacks: Interpreted code is initially slower, and in addition to the actual JIT “backend” an “interpreter” engine needs to be implemented.
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As long as the better Android phones are still shipped with region lock and worse battery exchange / repair than iPhone I say: Thanks but no thanks - and stay with the iPhone. Unless of course future models make battery change even harder as well, … :-/

ExactScan Pro had the ability to batch process existing files for quite some time. The Pro version allows to process existing, e.g. archived files as if they came fro the scanner. This allows for TIFF to PDF conversion, adding OCR for searchable documents, adjust colors, compression or whatever your use case or workflow requires.

As we constantly listen to customer feedback carefully and try to work suggestions into our product we further improved this batch feature to also allow to use the input filename as output filename. Before this change the ExactScan logic for scanning documents would have defined the new output filename - which would be something like: ~/Documents/Scan-{Page#}.png or similar.

Since yesterday’s 2.27.4 release we added a new file naming token: {Filename} which is exactly what you would expect now: the original input filename. For this to work you also need to set the Directory to the file-system root: / as the {Filename} expands to the whole input file. We first thought to simply make the new token just the base filename without the whole path. However, that way the file would not end up in the same directory, e.g. ~/Documents instead.

While at it we also added a new {Resolution} token, allowing to name your scans with the actually scanned resolution in the filename, like: Scan-{Page#}-{Resolution}dpi.pdf.

Made in Berlin; Germany.