monovergent

When I first looked up psyllium husk powder as a fiber supplement, people were complaining that it made the water thick and gross. That enticed me to buy it. And when the packaging said to drink immediately after mixing lest it thicken, I instead let it sit for a good 15 minutes until my glass of water had a smoothie-like consistency. Makes me love drinking water again and also sad that I can't have it with every glass of water or else I get stopped up.

When the privacy laws in the US are so weak, it seems like maintaining the effect of data removal requires paying for the data removal service indefinitely. Is it worth it regardless? Are there any cases and criteria where one should pay for data removal, more so than the average person? Interested to hear if anyone here has seen noticeable benefits, beyond the mere fact that their PII have been scrubbed from data brokers and search sites.

Middle click failure plagues nearly every mouse I've owned, OEM, Logitech, wired, or wireless. I take full advantage of the middle click shortcuts like opening links in new tabs, but I don't think I'm putting it through undue stress either. As far as I can tell, I'm clicking it with the same force as I would the other mouse buttons and much less frequently than the left click.

Failure usually starts with occasional missed middle clicks, which after some point, rapidly progresses until it's failing to register more often than not. At that point, everything else will still work perfectly. No improvement even if I take it apart to clean out what little dirt had accumulated.

One of my mice has managed to avoid this fate far longer than the others but I've just recently stopped using it due to the rubberized exterior turning all gooey and sticky. The only middle mouse buttons that seem immune to all of this are the ones on ThinkPads. Anyone else notice this or could recommend a good mouse that can stand up to a bit of middle-clicking?

A while ago, I set up unattended-upgrades on my Debian 13 machines. Running sudo apt updatedoesn't cross my mind now that I assume unattended-upgrades takes care of that for me, but every once in a while, I'll try installing something and get the "Unable to locate package" errors associated with outdated repositories. After being made aware of having outdated repositories and packages, I'll go and run sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade on my other machines, only to be told that all packages are up to date and unattended-upgrades did do its job there. I don't keep a record of this happening, but I also don't recall there being any pattern to which of my machines are affected and which aren't at any given time.

Where could I start hunting down the cause of this inconsistent behavior? I did double-check that I enabled it via sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades

TL;DR you can install Libreboot on a T470 with a 7th-gen Intel processor as you would any T480.

Everything below is relevant to T470 units with a 7th-gen Intel CPU. I don't have a 6th-gen Intel unit to test and those may have a different chipset.

The T470 and T480 have very similar hardware, with Intel 7th-gen CPU options available for both models. So out of curiosity, I decided to try flashing the T480 build of Libreboot 25.06 to my T470.

If you are new to Libreboot or Coreboot, I'd suggest going through the documentation first, i.e. https://libreboot.org/docs/install/t480.html. A good video guide is also available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGKhsjvlSBQ. As for BIOS and Thunderbolt firmware, I just updated to the latest versions of each for the T470.

An external BIOS chip programmer is necessary for installing Libreboot itself. I chose to use the CH341a. If you choose to do so as well, be aware that

• without an adapter, the CH341a will push 3.3 volts to the BIOS chip, even though the actual chip in the T470 is rated for 1.8 V
• the chip did survive many previous me_cleaner tests and the final Libreboot flashing despite using an unmodified CH341a. YMMV, use at your own risk.
• Pins 1,2,3,4 are along the same side of the socket as the lever. Use the 25xx section.
• it is always a good idea to back up and double-check the original BIOS chip contents before flashing Libreboot

Libreboot starts up normally and Linux boots with no issue. While I have not exhaustively tested every feature of the T470, I can go about my daily tasks as usual and write this post on my Librebooted T470. Caveats found on the T480 seem to apply to the T470 as well, most notably with the audio jack and internal microphone. Neither of these components are working, although the documentation suggests USB sound cards as a workaround for now. Internal speakers and webcam do work, however.

EDIT: USB-C charging works, but data transfer does not. I'm not terribly surprised though since that section of the board did go from having a dedicated charging port and single USB-C connector on the T470 to having two USB-C connectors and a mini dock connector on the T480.

Additionally,

• No noticeable difference in performance or battery life (I had previously disabled hyperthreading, but Libreboot prebuilt images have it disabled as well).
• TrackPoint felt somewhat harder to use, but that was alleviated by switching from libinput to evdev (note evdev is not supported in Wayland sessions).
• Expected in hindsight since I just used the T480 build as-is, but the laptop will now identify itself as a T480 in various hardware info utilities.
• Intel ME has been neutered.

If you are looking to buy a laptop for Libreboot, I would suggest you skip the T470 since it is only dual core and instead go for the T480 since it comes with a much more performant quad core if the CPU is 8th-gen. But for those of us who already have a T470 or for any reason are limited to buying a T470, Libreboot is an option for us too!

I could in theory upgrade the power supply to go beyond the 150W target, but then I'd also need a better chassis because it is already quite warm with my current 130W card.

Hoping to stick with AMD, but if my wishes to play around with local LLMs and image upscaling makes Nvidia a more practical choice, I can live with that compromise.

Working with a budget of 200 US, I'm fine going with a used GPU.

TL;DR: On the xx30 series, the 4MB "top" chip is easily recoverable, even if you fail to make a backup. If you install the 1vyrain BIOS or use 1vyrain to install Coreboot, only the 4MB chip is affected. However, if you apply me_cleaner to the 8MB "bottom" chip and lose the backup, you cannot return to the stock BIOS!

A few years ago, I had wanted to try out Coreboot (using pre-built "Skulls" images), but didn't want to bother with buying and learning how to use a hardware chip programmer. So I used 1vyrain, as mentioned here: https://lemmy.ml/post/23117122

1vyrain just overwrites the 4MB chip with the supplied image. The 8MB chip is unaffected. Nothing on the 4MB chip is machine-specific. So if you can still boot into Linux but no longer want Coreboot, the recovery is trivial:

1. Boot Linux with the kernel parameter iomem=relaxed
2. Install flashrom if needed
3. Get a copy of the stock 4MB image (I'd recommend v2.60): https://github.com/xy-tech/x330-bios/tree/main/stock/original
4. Flash the image: sudo flashrom -p internal -i bios --ifd -w /path/to/v2.60.bin --noverify-all
5. Wait for it to finish and reboot

If it doesn't POST, you can do the same, but with a hardware programmer.

If you made a mistake with your Coreboot config, but can still boot, and just want to flash a new build of Coreboot, no need to restore stock BIOS and do 1vyrain again, just flash your coreboot.rom like so: sudo flashrom -p internal -i bios --ifd -w path/to/coreboot.rom --noverify-all

That's all that is relevant if you don't have a hardware programmer like the CH341a.

Now the mistake that made me write this post: I had extracted the bottom 8MB chip from one of my X230 and applied me_cleaner to it. Seeing it had worked so well, I jumped to the conclusion that a backup for one X230 would work for another X230. So I flashed my second X230 with the cleaned 8MB image without making a backup. Coreboot worked fine, but then I realized I forgot to apply the keyboard EC patch.

Turns out, the contents of the bottom chip are machine-specific and the stock BIOS will not boot if it has been tampered with or swapped with a backup from another machine. And without the stock BIOS, the EC cannot be flashed.

If I do find a way to make the stock BIOS boot again, I will post an update here.

Friends and I are considering some travelling around the world, including perhaps a trip to China. There is much negative press on the state of digital privacy in China, but what exactly should I pay attention to if I do visit? If I am your typical privacy enthusiast with a GrapheneOS phone and Linux laptop, how might I prepare for the trip privacy-wise? I'd also love to hear any firsthand experience as to which concerns are myths and which ones are real.

Got my hands on a Dell Latitude ON module. Turns out it's nothing more than a 2 GB flash module that fits in a mPCIe slot and is wired to the USB lanes. Shows up as /dev/sdb.

I do have a couple of old laptops that don't have a secondary SATA drive slot, but do have open mPCIe slots with USB lanes (no mSATA lanes). The Latitude ON module would allow for a dual drive system, albeit a rather crappy one. What would you put on a secondary internal drive if it were limited to 2 GB and USB protocol?

For those interested in some numbers on how much a quad-core mod might affect your power usage and battery life. This post only covers power consumption of the CPU as measured by RAPL to eliminate other factors such as LCD panel type, attached USB devices, or number of SSDs installed.

Averages for dual-core i5-3210M, 35W TDP:

• Idle: 2.87 W
• Moderate load: 13.79 W

Averages for quad-core i7-3612QE, 35W TDP:

• Idle: 3.84 W
• Moderate load: 13.03 W

Since I have been unable to source a ULV-modded board, I am looking for justification to do the mod myself. As part of this, I tested a S230U with the dual-core i5-3317U, 17W TDP:

• Idle: 2.49 W
• Moderate load: 9.51 W

Will come back with more numbers if I succeed in putting the ULV chip in an X230. Don't hold your breath since it's a complicated operation with many potential issues. You are also welcome to DM me if you want to sell a ULV-equipped board.

Experiment setup:

• Command: sudo powerstat -R 10 10
• Idle: Debian 13 TTY, X session logged out
• Moderate load: Xfce desktop, Librewolf with uBlock Origin, playing a 720p Youtube video
• I am not sure how much this affects the numbers, but the S230U is on the stock BIOS while the two X230's are on Coreboot with me_cleaner.

For several years, I've entertained the idea of creating an online portfolio, but it's remained only an idea since I am not sure what I should put on it. What's a good way to decide what goes on the personally-identifiable portfolio and what should remain under pseudonyms?

In the interest of maximizing battery life, I've set up suspend-then-hibernate on my laptop. Using a discrete window manager, so I have a systemd unit that locks the screen when I close the lid. After an hour, it automatically goes into hibernation.

All is well, until I have to boot up from hibernation. I'm prompted to unlock LUKS, then I'm hit with a redundant lock screen once resumed. I've tried setting up systemd units referencing suspend-then-hibernate.target and hibernate.target, but I can't get it to kill the screen locker when resuming from hibernation only, so I don't have to type in my password twice. Is there any way to have systemd discriminate between the suspend and hibernate parts of suspend-then-hibernate?