- 258 words - 2 min read

When you run Dropbox on your laptop, you’re assuming that it’ll synchronize your files whenever appropriate - for example when there’s a local or remote file change. And generally speaking, this is exactly what Dropbox does - hence minimizing the chance of conflicts within files, and keeping your machines in sync.

There’s one big exception tough: If you make remote changes whilst your machine is in suspend or hibernate, Dropbox will not sync after waking up. According to some quick searches on the Internet, this issue has been around for quite a while (aka years).

Dropbox will only synchronize after...

- 382 words - 2 min read

I use Offlineimap to download mails from various accounts to my machine where. After my last Debian upgrade, when running offlineimap, I got the following error for one of my accounts:

Establishing connection to imap.redacted.ch:993 (redacted-Remote)
ERROR: Unknown SSL protocol connecting to host 'imap.redacted.ch' for repository 'redacted-Remote'. OpenSSL responded:
[SSL: DH_KEY_TOO_SMALL] dh key too small (_ssl.c:727)
*** Finished account 'redacted' in 0:00
ERROR: Exceptions occurred during the run!

If you have the following error, let me save you some time with your favorite search engine: The reason is that "newer" versions of OpenSSL fend of a TLS attack called FREAK (Factoring RSA Export...

- 330 words - 2 min read

If you’re a PulseAudio user on Linux, you might have experience this feature: When you change the volume in an application, it changes the system volume at the same rate.

This feature is called “flat volume” and seems to be targeted to users who do not understand the concept of a mixer. For example someone might turn up the volume of an application (i.e. Spotify or Youtube) all the way up while the system volume is very low or even at zero and wonder why “it” isn’t working.

On a first glance, this might seem reasonable. However, speaking from personal experience, it’s actually...

- 287 words - 2 min read

The Lenovo X1 Carbon 6th gen is quite a nice laptop overall. It used to have some quirks under Linux, with regards to ACPI sleep, CPU frequency and such. They have all been taken care of by BIOS upgrades, already, so just upgrade if you any issues there.

There was one thing that I never got properly to work: Bluetooth. The new 6th gen uses a different chipset than the older models which I saw working just fine on my colleagues machines. It turns out, that the new chipset also did work fine under old Kernels (I tested 4.9) while on...

- 293 words - 2 min read

This is an update to our post from yesterday X1 Carbon 6th gen about 50% slower on Linux.

Based on the Intel datasheet on my CPU (i7-8550U), it seems that with the ‘fix’ enabled, the CPU potentially draws a lot more power for longer times than it is designed to do (see the TDP numbers in the sheet). This whole clocking issue seems to be an issue for people that really know what they’re doing - and I feel I don’t have all the information to make a reasonable decision to overrule the defaults. I have the feeling that...

- 358 words - 2 min read

The X1 Carbon is one of the most popular notebooks for the ambitious Linux user. With the 6th gen, however, there have been a couple of caveats. Some other notebooks of the same family (like the T480s) are affected, as well.

If you’re not running the latest BIOS version (1.30), we strongly recommend upgrading. The most pressing issues under Linux that have been solved since 1.23 are:

  • ACPI S3 (Sleep/Suspend) doesn’t work (A workaround exists which involves patching the ACPI tables manually)
  • When using speakers through the audio jack, there was a pretty annoying fizzling sound - unless a certain audio volume was...

- 131 words - 1 min read

If you recently upgraded the Slack Desktop App on Debian and now are wondering what happened to your automatic HiDPI recognition: Don’t worry any further. It’s a little peculiar, since this regression doesn’t seem to be well documented on the net. However, the solution is easy. Slack on the Desktop is an Electron app - therefore it generally supports the same flags that other Electon Apps (like Spotify) support and Electron has a flag since 2014 --force-device-scale-factor. On my Macbook Pro, I’m using a scale-factor of 1.5.

Here’s a little convenience wrapper around the slack binary to always start Slack...

- 640 words - 5 min read

Generally speaking, Linux tooling support is pretty great these days. I’m running Debian Stable on a Macbook Pro (MBP) and couldn’t be happier. Most things just work as expected.

Apart from a few tiny things here and there. One of them is the ability to adjust brightness. The standard way for many window managers (WM) is to defer that functionality to xbacklight. However, this doesn’t work on the MBP.

...

- 116 words - 1 min read

After upgrading to Chromium 60 on current Debian Testing you might find yourself with a huge UI if you are on a HiDPI device. The current Chromium version has a bug (see Debian tracker). The proposed solution is to run Chromium with a manual scale factor setting. On a 15" MBP Retina, using chromium --force-device-scale-factor=1.5 yields the same UI size that I was used to before the upgrade.

Looking at the Chromium upstream bug tracker, this issue is solved since end of May. It’ll find it’s way to Debian, eventually. In the meantime the workaround works just as well.

The exact...

- 147 words - 1 min read

If you happen to upgrade your Debian Jessie to Stretch (currently Debian Testing), one of the things you might want to patch is the default behavior of Chromium having extensions disabled by default. There’s no way to fix that in the UI, it has to be done by setting a global configuration flag.

There’s also a reason why extensions are disabled by default. Apparently Chromium started downloading binary extensions that don’t show in the extensions list which had access to the Google Voice API which sounds kinda scary. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

However, if you decide you can’t live...

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