I have an Android phone with a broken USB port: neither the data nor the power lines work. However, I can still charge the battery by removing it from the device and putting it into an external charging device. Apart from that, the device still works absolutely fine and I see no reason to throw it away or risk breaking it by trying to repair it. I have now decided that I want to encrypt this phone, but Android wanted me to connect it to power, even though the battery was 100% full. Read more

I usually have to work more than eight hours a day on my computer. Especially in winter when the sun sets early, I often would have to dim the brightness of my monitor in the evening. But because most monitor on screen menus are hard to use, I almost never do that, because I am too lazy. But if I don’t I sometimes get a headache. So I thought, it must be possible to somehow control the brightness of my monitor without using the crappy menu. Read more

Until now, I only ran pfSense on my PC Engines APU boards. But I now wanted to get one of them running under Debian Linux. The first challenge is creating a live Linux that starts a serial terminal on boot. I found that this was the easiest using Grml2Usb. I booted Grml on my normal PC and plugged in a USB stick. Then, using a Grml ISO image, I did the following: grml2usb --fat16 --bootoptions="vga=off" --bootoptions="fb=false" --bootoptions="console=ttyS0,115200n8" grml96-full. Read more

I don’t want my firefox to perform searches on google or similar when I don’t explicitly instruct it to do so. This is especially annoying if you enter something like sw01.mgmt.corp.client.com and firefox performs a google search on that because you didn’t configure your DNS correctly. Go to about:config and set keyword.enabled = false But that isn’t enough. If you enter something like internalapp it will complete that to www.internalapp.com… This “feature” is called Domain Guessing. Read more

With the recent SHA1 deprecation in new browsers, I wanted to start deploying SHA-256 certificates to my clients. One of them used a Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). Because I could not find any information about whether they support SHA-256 certificates, I just wanted to post that they do and it works without any problems.