akublog

Update:

It’s working now! My keys are swapped =D Yaaaay!

I just had to downgrade to a 2.xx firmware first. Actually make sure you downgrade to a BIOS firmware that has a smaller version number in BOTH “Embedded Controller version” and “BIOS version”.

My failure was that I downgraded the BIOS only one version, so that BIOS version changed, but Embedded Controller version stayed the same. Thus, when using the patched BIOS updater from middleton, it did not patch my Embedded Controller.

So:

1) Downgrade to 2.12-1.01 for example.

2) Use middletons patched updater when in windows.

3) ????

4) Profit.

Thanks so much, middleton!

Still not working. Still with a crippled Windows Seven on my Thinkpad. This renders me incapable of doing any serious work. The netbook is okay, but I do not want to “work” with it a lot. Chatting is fine though =)

middleton is trying to find out what went wrong for me. I sent him a BIOS dump. Let’s see if that helps.

A few days ago, I decided to switch my vServer from keyweb.de (they were alright, but their vServer-Images were not very up-to-date and their “Customer Control Panel” and the whole “managing stuff” was very bad) to SwissVPS. I saw an ad on the wiki of the “Junge Piraten” (bottom-right corner), the youth organization of the German pirate party. “If they like the server hoster, then why shouldn’t I be content, too?”, I asked myself. So after a few minutes reading the Website and the blog (Yeah! They have a blog!!) I ordered my vServer. I also needed a secondary IP for SSL on furdev.org which was no problem at all, thanks to the fast support.

They offer a 256 MB dedicated and 1024 MB dynamic RAM, 25 GB storage, unlimited traffic, Arch Linux based (though other images are available, ranging from Debian 4.0 and 5.0 over Ubuntu 8.04 up to 9.10 to CentOS and Fedora in different flavors. Almost all images are either x86 or x86_64) vServer for 5.80 € per month. Pretty awesome! But see for yourself.

Support is excellent (The admin called ‘lynx-lynx’ is almost always present in the #swissvps IRC channel on Freenode and answers all questions patiently) and the community is very nice. It felt homelike from the beginning on.

So if you need a small “I’m-gonna-host-only-for-a-handfull-of-users” vServer (they have “bigger” vServers, too, of course) which is cheap and runs even Arch Linux: Go for SwissVPS! 5.80 € per months is just an awesome price.

I’ll give you guys a quick update as soon as I finish configuring the server, and as soon as all my stuff has been moved over to SwissVPS =)

PS: The servers are physically located in Germany at the moment, but lynx-lynx will provide servers in Switzerland in 2011.

Digital Rights Management has once again proven to be a pest for paying customers:

Assassin’s Creed 2 comes with a DRM system that forces the user to be connected to the Ubisoft server at all time while playing as a copy protection mechanism.

This mechanism has been cracked already and thus been rendered useless. So much money spent for nothing in the end by Ubisoft. This makes your games more expensive.

So far so bad. If that has not already convinced you, that DRM is a pest, it gets even worse:

Well, as it turns out, when the Ubioft severs go down, no one can play their games and Ubisoft customers get very upset. At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin’s Creed 2 forum that they couldn’t access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games. Fast forward ten hours and it seems that the problem still hasn’t been resolved, despite the assurances from a Ubisoft representative that the servers were ‘constantly monitored’

Source

So not only has AC2 already been cracked, but the DRM servers that let paying customers play the game are also down.

Good job content mafia! Now I really want to rush to the store and buy one of those games. Not.

Wonder why networkmanager does not work with Huawei E160 (or E220:

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 12d1:1003 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E220 HSDPA Modem / E270 HSDPA/HSUPA Modem

) on Arch Linux?

Try “sudo pacman -Sy modemmanager” =) It worked for me after a reboot.

Some user named middleton over at the lenovo forums finally did it!
He “reverse engineered” the BIOS for some laptops from  Lenovo and patched the BIOS files so that now FN and CTRL Keys are swapped.

The following models are supported:

• T400
• T400s
• R400
• T500
• W500
• R500
• W700
• W700ds
• X61
• X61s

I’ll try it out in a few minutes. Hope everything works.

Update: I need to temporarily install Windows, because the patch is an exe file and I’m not brave enough to do it in wine. But worth it, if I get a Thinkpad with swapped Fn and CTRL keys.

Update 2: Unfortunately it did not work. Maybe I did something wrong. Maybe the german keyboard layout has different keycodes? Going to try again this evening.

Update 3: It’s working now! See this post.

My KDE tray

A little python script for the STDIN Plasmoid to show charging rate and the localtime.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import time

sign = ''
rate = ''
for line in open('/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state'):
if line.startswith('charging state'):
if line.split(':')[1].strip() == 'charging':
sign = '+'
else:
sign = '-'

if line.startswith('present rate:'):
rate = line.split(':')[1].strip().split(' ')[0]
rate = int(rate)
rate = round(rate / 1000.0, 2)
rate = str(rate)
if len(rate) < 5:
rate = rate + '0'
print '%s%s' % (sign, rate)
print time.strftime('%H:%M')

I switched from Firefox to Chromium. What an amazing difference!
Firefox, I guess that’s a goodbye. Thanks for those many years of joy with you.

Only thing I am missing: A Vertical Tabs addon like “Tree Style Tabs” for FF

UPDATE: Also missing Video Download Helper and Down Them All =(

Yesterday, I ditched my last Windows (Seven) installation (even tough it was free for me because of the MSDNAA program) and installed Arch Linux. Feels great! Finally I can do as I please.

Steam’s installed and works pretty good (fglrx *rolleyes*) but still… Next thing is WC3 for my boyfriend which shouldn’t be a problem. WC3 runs just fine on recent wine versions.

I am now 100 % Free Software (except for Flash that I need for southpark.de and my bought games). I don’t even use mp3 anymore =) It’s all flac and vorbis here. It feels awesome =)

Does anyone know if gnash does the job for simple h263 Flash videos?

Today I decided two things:

The first decision was an easy one: I dumped my TV. I know I will be better off without it. If I want to watch some series, I can watch them via OTR. Southpark even has it’s own website where you can watch all episodes.

The second decision was an even easier one: I will never ever buy games or movies with any kind of DRM in it. Even if the game is the best and most awesome game ever ever. Only the tiniest bit of DRM in it: Not worth my money. And I am gonna tell everybody I know about it. I will fight with all my passion, that nobody I know ever buys a game that’s DRM-infected.

“Why?” you ask me? That’s why:

Der weltweit tätige französische Unterhaltungssoftware-Konzern Ubisoft hat eine neue Strategie in Bezug auf Kopierschutzmaßnahmen für PC-Spiele beschlossen. Für “wichtige” neu erscheinende Spiele wie “Assassin’s Creed 2″ und “Die Siedler 7 ” soll ab sofort ein Online-Kontrollverfahren eingesetzt werden, das bei allen Spielesitzungen das Vorhandensein eines rechtmäßig erworbenen Softwareexemplars überprüfen soll. Das betrifft aber nicht etwa nur Online-Spielsitzungen, bei denen solche Überprüfungen üblich sind, sondern auch das gewöhnliche Spielen am lokalen oder portablen Rechner. Das bedeutet, dass der spielende PC-Nutzer eine ständige Verbindung zum Internet benötigt.

Die Spielstände werden nicht mehr wie bislang üblich lokal auf dem Rechner des Spielers abgelegt, sondern online auf Servern, die Ubisoft bereitstellt. Wenn die Verbindung zum Server für mehrere Sekunden abreißt, wird das Spiel unterbrochen. Erst wenn wieder Kontakt besteht, stellt die Software den letzten Spielstand wieder her. Welcher das ist, hängt vom jeweiligen Spiel ab. Bei “Assassin’s Creed**2″ wird der jeweils letzte Checkpoint genutzt, während die Spielpartie bei “Die Siedler 7″ genau vom dem Punkt an weiterlaufen soll, den der Spieler vor dem Verbindungsverlust erreicht hat.

Der Weiterverkauf eines gebrauchten Spiels ist [...] praktisch nicht mehr möglich, da jedes Spielexemplar bei seinem ersten Einsatz automatisch individualisiert wird. Ähnlich wie bei Steam ist jedes Spiel an genau einen Spieleraccount gebunden. Dieser Account wiederum gehört einer registrierten Person und lässt sich nicht – zumindest nicht ohne Mitwirkung des Serverbetreibers – an jemand anderen übertragen. Bei Ubisoft ist keine Übertragbarkeit von Spielexemplaren vorgesehen.

Titel, die mit dem neuen Verfahren gekoppelt werden, lassen sich also nicht offline spielen – dies bestätigt Ubisoft auch offiziell. Wer also nicht über eine Flatrate verfügt, muss ab sofort für das Spielen neuer Ubisoft-Produkte doppelt zahlen – einmal an der Kasse und einmal mit der Provider- respektive Telefonrechnung. Besonders ärgerlich kann dieser Umstand für Besitzer von Gamer-Notebooks werden, die gern unterwegs spielen. Sie müssen, wenn nicht gerade ein WLAN-Hotspot zur Verfügung steht, gegebenenfalls auf teure Mobilfunk-Datenverbindungen ausweichen.

Ob das Verfahren sich am Markt durchsetzen kann, werden letztendlich die Kundinnen und Kunden entscheiden. Immerhin verzichtet Konkurrent Electronic Arts nach Experimenten mit rigiden Digital-Rights-Management-Lösungen inzwischen auf Online-Aktivierung bei seinen Spielen, nachdem es in der Spielergemeinde zu heftigen Protesten gegen derart gesicherte Titel gekommen war, beispielsweise anlässlich des Releases von “Spore”.

Source (sorry, German only)

Why do people pirate Movies and Games:

One Two

I started working on a python script to automate cryptographically securing directories and subdirectories and the files within. Need that script to track down changes in my music collection. Used git’s sha1summing for a while, but git seems a little overkill, if I just want to make cryptographically sure that the music files stay the same all the time.