For $reasons, I needed to run VirtualBox on my laptop, to make some changes to a .vdi disk image. I installed VirtualBox but, when I tried to run it, I got an error message saying Cannot operate in vmx boot mode Or something like that. (I couldn’t find a way of copying the error message to the clipboard.) To make this go away, I edited my grub config (/etc/default/grub) to add kvm.enable_virt_at_load=0: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet kvm.enable_virt_at_load=0" I then ran sudo update-grub...| Neil's blog
I’ve been using RevK’s new voice recorder boards for a few weeks now - the original prototype (on the left in the photo), and now the production v2 board (on the right in the photo) - so I thought it was a good opportunity to write up my thoughts. What it is It is a small, open source - PCB files, as well as the default software, are available - standalone audio recorder, with stereo microphones, which records a .wav file to a micro SD card. I have been using a 128GB micro SD card. One bu...| Neil's blog
Sandra has an iPhone, and I wanted to back up the photos on it to an external drive. I was expecting this to be a bit of a nightmare but it turned out to be very easy. I used a laptop running Debian testing with GNOME. Sandra’s iPhone is running whatever the latest version of iOS is - 18.something, I think. It is not “jailbreaked”/“jailbroken” / “rooted” or anything like that. It went like this: I plugged Sandra’s unlocked phone into my computer. The phone prompted me to “Tr...| Neil's blog
For a while now, I’ve used nautilus-image-converter for doing simple operations on images. In particular, for scaling images down to 25%, mostly so I can post them to the fediverse. I haven’t managed to get it working from Debian’s apt repository for testing (dependency issues), and I didn’t fancy building it. Plus, it was only a GUI for imagemagick anyway. So an obvious replacement was to use a nautilus script to call magick directly. Something like this: #!/bin/bash SELECTEDFILES="$...| Neil's blog
I like self-hosting stuff for my own use. And, while I remain of the view that “self-host it” is not the answer for many people, personally, I am a fan. Most of my thinking about this comes from a mix of perspective: technical, freedom, privacy. I like to control what I use. But what about regulatory protection? A couple of years ago, I wrote some notes on English law implications of operating fediverse services. And, at the end, I posited: What about single-user instances? I was asked a ...| Neil's blog
Something I haven’t had to do before arising from my new-to-me laptop. Most of the time, I use my laptop plugged into two large external displays, via USB-C dock. In this case, I don’t care too much about the laptop display. I have it working, and if I want to keep an occasional eye on a piece of software, I might put it there, but my main focus is on the external displays. But sometimes, I will also use the laptop on its own, when obviously the laptop display is important to me. I’m st...| Neil's blog
I have a project which looks like it requires - or, at least, would be easier with - a Linux mobile device. Some brief notes, for my future reference, on getting it working, as I haven’t used my PPP for a while. Flashing the Mobian installer to a micro SD card I wanted to use the installer, rather than a pre-built image, so that I could set up full disk encryption. To do this, I flashed the installer to a micro SD card (a 128GB card, since, price per megabyte, that seems to be the sweet spo...| Neil's blog
I was pretty happy with my X1 Yoga Gen 2, but then I stumbled across a secondhand Gen 6 - four years newer, with a 4K screen and 32G of RAM - going for a very reasonable price. So I took the plunge. These are some notes for me. I doubt that there’s anything unduly interesting or novel in here; after all, this machine has been around for a couple of years now (or longer). It’s fast (by my standards) This is, by some way, the fastest machine that I have ever had. I haven’t done any benchm...| Neil's blog
A hack which resulted in people accessing the wi-fi at 19 UK railway stations being shown a message about terror attacks has been linked to the account of an insider at the internet provider.| neilzone.co.uk
A friend and I had a small competition: what is the best laptop we could get for no more than £50?| neilzone.co.uk
When I have a document to review, I like to flip my ThinkPad into “tablet” mode, and scribble notes in the margin of the document, highlight sections, and generally annotate it.| neilzone.co.uk
I wrote recently about a working wireless plug-and-play display solution for Linux laptops (and others OSs).| neilzone.co.uk
tl;dr I wonder if just running sudo ln -sft /etc/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.d /usr/share/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.| neilzone.co.uk
I “wasted” my lunch break today. Controlling your ThinkPad’s lid LED This morning, Lennart Poettering posted a rather cool piece of information:| neilzone.co.uk