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Enable Deep Sleep mode on Tuxedo Computers Pulse 15 Gen2

A while ago we bought new Pulse 15 laptops from Tuxedo Computers.

Installed Ubuntu on them, and for a while the sleep mode was nagging me, it does not really work. Today I found time to investigate this issue.


fwupdmgr: /usr/libexec/fwupd/efi/fwupdx64.efi and /usr/libexec/fwupd/efi/fwupdx64.efi.signed cannot be found

From time to time our laptops receive firmware updates, by using the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (short: fwupd). This worked fine for a long time, until it didn’t. One day I was facing the following error message:


QNAP: exclude files and directories from rsync

I’m moving files from one QNAP system to another, and I’m using rsync for this. It’s preinstalled on a QNAP system. So far, so good.

To sync entire shared volumes, I want to exclude the @Recently-Snapshot and @Recycle entries - I don’t want to sync the trash bin and I also don’t want to sync entire snapshots.

The usual approach when using rsync is to just use the --exclude option.


WMF Küchenminis Smoothie-to-go 0,6l

Irgendwann September 2020 wollten wir unseren in die Tage gekommenen Smoothiemaker ersetzen. Nach etwas Recherche wurde es dann der “WMF Küchenminis Smoothie-to-go 0,6l”. Es sollte nicht der einzige bleiben.


Delete directories recursive on Hetzner Storage Box

Among other external solutions, I store some data on Storage Boxes from Hetzner. The Storage Box allows you to have sub-accounts, so for every server and system storing data there, I use a separate account. For each sub-account, one can select a subdirectory where the data is stored, and the sub-account then can only see this data. The Admin account can see all data, and see all directories.


HP Color LaserJet: Unable to connect to the network

We have a HP Color LaserJet in the office, one of these devices which can do both printing and scanning. The newer versions include a very nice feature “Scan to network folder” - so I did setup options to scan different PDF sizes to all of our laptops. Very convenient!

Until it stopped working a while ago.


SMART error (ErrorCount) detected on host - but the NVRAM disk is perfectly fine

Recently I got a new system with a NVRAM disk (nice and fast). Upon installing smartmontools, it started reporting that the error counter for the disk is increasing. For a brand new disk?


Raspberry - Raspbian - First steps

Installing a new Raspberry Pi is always the same few steps, and still I have to look them up almost every time. Here is the summary.


Reading data from my Scuba Diving computer after Linux removed IrDA support

When I go Scuba Diving, I use two diving computers. It’s always good to have a fallback, right? My main computer is a ScubaPro Uwatec Galileo Luna. That’s a wrist mounted computer with hoseless air-integration. That means that a sender is connected to the first stage of the regulator, and it transmits data to the wrist computer. In addition the computer records data like depths, consumption, temperature, alarms ect. My fallback is an air-integrated console mounted Suuntu Cobra. I check this computer too when I’m under water, but mostly for the most conservative reading for the safety stop.


Replace and re-add a failed drive to a Linux software RAID

Most of my systems run on a software RAID 1 configuration (that is, two disks, where each disk is mirrored to the other). This way, one of the disks can fail and still all the data is available.

If a disk failure happens, the disk is replaced with a similar disk, and then needs to be configured and re-added to the RAID.