Category Archives: Computing

Android device encryption hang at Time remaining 00:00

Posted on April 18, 2020 by Matthew

Recently I had a frustrating problem while trying to enable full disk encryption on my Android device (Motorola G3 “osprey”). Every time the encryption process would hang forever at: EncryptingWait while your phone is being encrypted.Time remaining 00:00 After forcibly … Continue reading →

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WebEx audio input hang on Linux (Chrome/Chromium bug)

Posted on April 13, 2020 by Matthew

If you have been connecting to WebEx meetings on Linux using Chrome/Chromium versions 79 or 80, you might have run into issues where your microphone randomly stops working and other participants cannot hear you. When trying to reconnect to the … Continue reading →

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Splines in Onshape, part 2

Posted on July 25, 2017 by Matthew

In this second part of the series, I’ll briefly cover drawing splines directly in 3D, and then discuss offset curves, which are the original reason I started on this long journey delving into Onshape curves. Continue reading →

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Splines in Onshape, part 1

Posted on July 5, 2017 by Matthew

In this post I talk about splines and various ways they can be represented, with particular reference to Onshape, a web-based CAD system. Continue reading →

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Dell Venue 11 Pro travel keyboard troubleshooting

Posted on May 29, 2017 by Matthew

Introduction I recently purchased a pair of Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 tablet computers — one for myself and one for my girlfriend. I figured this would be a good crossover device between a tablet and a laptop, and so … Continue reading →

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Unlocking my Lenovo laptop, part 3

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Matthew

The decryption function If you are just joining this story you may want to start at part 1. In part 2, we discovered that a embedded controller update is performed by uploading a small ‘flasher’ program to the EC. This … Continue reading →

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Unlocking my Lenovo laptop, part 2

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Matthew

The embedded controller In part 1, we looked at the communication between a Lenovo Thinkpad X230T laptop and battery, and discovered that there a challenge-response protocol used to authenticate ‘genuine’ Lenovo batteries. On the laptop side, this – and battery … Continue reading →

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Unlocking my Lenovo laptop, part 1

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Matthew

Introduction Two months ago, I bought a new battery for my Lenovo laptop (a ThinkPad X230T). I was about to go away on holidays and wanted a battery that could last me through a plane flight; the original battery was … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing | 24 Comments