René Rebe

ok> also hidden
ok> d# 480 at-speed

ok> nvstore
ok> setenv use-nvramrc? true
ok> reset-all

ok> .speed
ok> .version

With this years of Apple’s macOS 10.15 aka “Catalina”, Apple removed support for 32-bit applications, as well as deprecated and removed a log of other stuff as usually. The consequence is that lots of old, and not further maintained software and drivers do not work anymore. One very popular one are Fujitsu scanners, such as the ScanSnap ix500, 1500, and Canon P-215 or other DR series devices.

However, you do not need to obsolete and recycle or sell the scanner, nor buy new ones! ExactScan does include some 500 built-in drivers for scanners like this, including those Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500, 1500, and even many much older ones, such as other popular models like the fi-5110EOX.

ExactScan does not only allow to continue using all these scanners, it even has some more, advanced image processing options and enhancements, and the Pro version includes blazing fast OCR, that is up to 10 times faster than what most vendors use in their scan software.

Don’t delay and try ExactScan or ExactScan Pro for free today!

Made in Berlin; Germany.

tcpdump -i eth0 udp port 18194 -vv -X

# bluetoothctl

power on
agent on
default-agent
scan on
pair xx:…
connect xx:…

- Zwiebel mit 250g Mett anbrutzeln
- kleine oder halbe Zucchini
- 1, 2 Mönchen, schön klein scheiden
- Knoblauch, wenn man will
- Paprika
alles dazugeben und mit anbrutzeln, nicht zu viel
dann 1/4 Liter Wasser, Brühwürfel und Kritharaki direkt mit dazu
wenn es köchelt ein bisschen (mehr) Tomatenmark (ca. halbe Tube)
ca 15 Minuten kochen und
immer wieder gut umrühren, ggf. Wasser nachgießen
ggf. wenn man mag mit Sahne oder Schwand abschmecken
und/oder mit Feta (oder Mozzarella) Käse dekorieren

Since some years I have a Apple 15″ Retina MacBook Pro that I mostly used with macOS. But as that becomes buggery and slower with each release I started to migrated back to my t2sde as primary desktop. One thing I noticed last year already, is that the EFI BIOS is switching off the Intel iGPU when booting anything else than macOS. A special and secret EFI protocol is required to authenticate as macOS and being worthy to leave the integrated graphics switched on. As this year it again did not work anymore, and it took a whole afternoon to find out, I made a short video covering the details:

Turned out, an EFI firmware update changed the protocol return value, so that the previous code would not call both protocol functions anymore, sigh!

If that is the new state of apple hardware and firmware design you probably want to thin twice if you want to get one, especially if you ever may want to run anything beside macOS, … :-/

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 :-/

People who know me certainly know by now how disappointed and frustrated I became over the last years with Apple’s MacBook lineup and their hardware refresh. Or better, the lack of it, …

The other month Dell was so kind to send a Dell XPS 15 to me to give it a try. While I’m still writing on a full review I wanted to share a first performance figure compiling the Linux 4.7 kernel from an external USB3 SSD, both with 16GB RAM.

rMacBookPro late-2013 w/ i7-4850HQ CPU @ 2.30GHz: 20m48s, 145m40s
Dell XPS 15 w/  i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz: 13m32s, 92m14s

The first time is total wall clock time, the second is total CPU time due parallelism as shown by time(2).

Yep, that is some whooping 35% faster

And a contributing factor for Apple’s MacBook loosing so much is also the notoriously underdesigned thermal system, fans, and heatsink and such. As the Linux kernel points out quite some thermal throttling on the Apple machine, but not on the Dell:


CPU5: Core temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)
CPU1: Core temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)
CPU3: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)
CPU2: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)
CPU4: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)
CPU6: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)
CPU7: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)
CPU0: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)
CPU1: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)
mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged
CPU5: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1)
mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged


So I wanted to do some Qemu/KVM tests. Turns out all my aging local AMD boards have not yet an IOMMU in the chipset, sigh (though it sounds like the AMD Phenom II cpus would otherwise include one already?).

I wish I could already buy some AMD Zen silicon - just to support them, you know, …

So I looked at Intel for some single socket heavy multi core CPU.

Turns out their situation around Xeon CPUs is totally ridiculous. If you want more than a couple of cores you are left with 3++ years old silicon, look here:
Xeon e3 v5 (Skylake) about up to 8 cores

If I am going to spent some 1000++ EUR for a CPU, I will definitely not award it toward a 3++ years old chip architecture, … :-/

As Mac OS X requires booting the recovery partition to disable SIP. What does the command:

csrutil disabled

actually do?

Looks like it sets

csr-active-config w%00%00%00

in the nvram.