N. Harrison Ripps @nhr@fosstodon.org

So... I updated the driver for my laptop keyboard. And now I’m telling you about it from my iPad. So you can guess how that went. 🤔

It would appear that Linux kernel 5.4 does not play nice with my laptop. The problem does not occur with 5.3.x, so it is clearly some recent change.

The failure mode is: I close the laptop lid, then the laptop never correctly suspends, and when I open the lid the screen is dark and unresponsive. I have to hard boot the laptop to get it responsive again.

Can anyone point me at a decent kernel troubleshooting guide?

Hey all -- shameless plug for some job openings that I am looking to fill at Red Hat:

Principal Software Engineer
https://social.icims.com/viewjob/pt157832323831171d13

Senior Principal Software Engineer
https://social.icims.com/viewjob/pt157832317331695cf0

New year -- new job?

#jobs #redhat

Questions for anyone who is self-hosting their infrastructure (minimally e-mail but perhaps full groupware like Nextcloud): What do you do to prevent data loss? What do you do to ensure uptime? With email, I’d hate to be traveling and suddenly have to find a way to log in and debug my mail setup. More than that, having to constantly stay one step ahead of spammers and stay up to date on security patches sounds like an endless amount of work. Curious to hear how you deal with these things.

Okay FOSS friends -- there are two iOS + iCloud-based apps that I use quite a bit in my daily life: Notes and Reminders. I'm looking for FOSS alternatives that don't sacrifice functionality:

The Notes alternative needs to support nested folders of notes, and notes with attachments. The Reminders alternative needs to support multiple lists _plus_ very smart recurring rules (like, "first Saturday every two months").

I need an iOS client and a web client.Any suggestions?

I finally got my laptop to play nice with Fedora 31. It’s a late 2019 Razer Stealth with a discrete nVidia GPU. The magic steps: 1) swap out nouveau for the nVidia drivers (admittedly not a FOSS move) and 2) pass a flag to the kernel that tells it how to deal with Razer’s special laptop-lid-close shenanigans. So happy to be able to get some real work done with this thing now!

PSA: I absolutely hate troubleshooting printers. Especially because the printers I typically get asked to troubleshoot are the low-quality loss-leader-to-sell-toner-cartridges variety.

I was _this close_ to playing Mass Effect: Andromeda again. Couldn't do it. I've put 250 hours into that game, and playing it again isn't going to make Bioware back into the company that it was when it made KotOR and the original Mass Effect...

Fellow Linux aficionados: I bought a Razer Blade Stealth with an nVidia GPU because gaming. And I found the GitHub repo of the folks that hack Razer’s hardware to make Linux-compatible drivers (https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer). This model laptop is quite new and so is not yet supported by those drivers.

How hard is it to learn how to hack hardware drivers? Where do I start? This is a type of hacking I’ve never really tried before. Aside from using cat on files under /proc, I’m out of my depth here.

If you do a web search for "rust primer", don't be surprised when the results that come back are related to actual treatments for actual rust.

Decaf is the Nicorette of coffee.

It is proven! I am nhr on Keybase: https://keybase.io/nhr/sigchain#c70a1815550a8802870fc8a0720bc55b7ea1de0160fa341f141036f3fa3d69310f

A few days I asked folks' opinions on a good FOSS & secure set of options for mail and cloud storage. I settled on kolabnow.com for email and pCloud for continuous sync cloud storage. Thanks to everyone for all of the great suggestions!

I'm currently looking at non-Google, non-Apple cloud storage options. The challenge is this: I don't trust myself as the best person to administer my secure cloud storage, either. So while a solution like self-hosted ownCloud looks good from a FOSS and privacy perspective, I don't trust myself to run one effectively and couldn't respond to an attack. Curious to hear if anyone else has been kicking this around, and if you've found a cloud storage service you trust... Maybe sync.com?