Giving the Microsoft Wireless Desktop 900 keyboard a power switch

Say whatever else you want about them, Microsoft has always made amazing peripherals hardware. I got their Microsoft Wireless Desktop 900 keyboard/mouse set, which is much the same as the Wireless Keyboard 850 in a kb/mouse bundle. It's no exception - reasonable price, great quality, does exactly what it says with no nonsense and stray LEDs. The keyboard is really flat and convenient.

Unfortunately they took the minimalism a bit too far. The keyboard has no power switch.

Fix Lenovo T460 failure to suspend (sleep) under Linux

My Lenovo T460 with Intel integrated graphics abruptly stopped suspending properly a few weeks ago and it's been driving me nuts. Today I fixed it.

TL;DR: For my specific issue lowering the integrated graphics memory portal from 512MB to 256MB in the UEFI firmware setup ("BIOS setup", F1 boot menu) resolved the issue.

Updating Lenovo T460 BIOS (UEFI, firmware) without a CD on Linux

Some of Lenovo's newer models come with a firmware update distribution compatible with fwupd so you can just do a firmware update directly from the shell.

This is not the case for the T460, which has a bootable ISO, or a Windows installer that ... creates a bootable ISO.

I couldn't find my USB CD/DVD drive so I landed up finding a workaround.

Nova Empire Beginners Tips

I've fallen down the rabbit hole of a p2w but still fun if you're free-to-play game called Nova Empire. Despite numerous flaws the game is entertaining and good for when you're pinned under a baby.

However, it has a bunch of traps for beginners. I'd like to share some tips. Currently as a bit of a random assortment. I'll update this occasionally.

Beware, the game is kind of addictive. I play it when I'm pinned under my cranky toddler who wants to use me as a pillow. But it's designed to get its hooks into you and get you playing more, so keep an eye on it. If you're tempted to spend money on it... well, with my software developer hat on I say "go ahead, really, do it." But with my responsible adult hat on I say "the prices are ridiculous for what you get, just be patient, it's a game". If you do want to drop some cash to support them, do it early on in the game to get to level 5 station faster and speed up overall growth.

Adafruit Gemma, Macbook and the dim red light

My partner recently picked up an Adafruit Gemma as an intro to Arduino and embedded. It has not gone according to plan - it turns out there's a known issue where on some systems the Gemma will fail to enter the bootloader properly. The green power light comes on, but the red light stays dimly and constantly lit. If the reset button is pressed it goes out for a moment then returns.

Trying to program it anyway results in an error like

avrdude: Error: Could not find USBtiny device (0x1781/0xc9f)

The issue seems to be somewhat intermittent, too. Occasionally it works on her Macbook Air. It always works 100% of the time on my Lenovo T460 (Linux). So there's something platform related...

Not a great intro. The Gemma doesn't behave like usual Ardiuno systems - it doesn't expose a USB serial port, for example - so answers are also thinner on the ground.

But I think we found something.

Updating the tomu bootloader on the tomu.im EFM32HG

I got a tomu tiny EFM32 that fits in a USB port at lca 2018. More information on Tomu.

Mine came with the serial bootloader (it presents a USB CDC ACM device). I didn't manage to get to the update booth to reflash it at LCA.

I had some difficulty getting the new bootloader on it when I pulled out recently to try to play with it, but since I got it working, here's a short runthrough of how I got it updated.

I use Fedora 28 but this info should apply for any Linux really.