I’ve been meaning to pick up a micro-controller and work on it again. About 5 years ago when I first encountered Arduino, I spent sleepless night learning about it, and creating things from DIY weather station, world clock, light sensor, etc. Fast forward to the current days, I almost forgot everything I learned. But we can always re-learn, or can’t we? Tonight, I found an Stm32 Nucleo F401RE micro-controller, and I want to start by updating the firmware on it (admittedly, this is the easiest thing to do). ST provides a tool called STW-LINK007, which can be freely downloaded from its website, to flash the firmware on a range of its micro-controllers. I have also written a blog post to update a similar micro-controller, STM32F4-Discovery, in the past. ...

On most my systems I created a user called devops with its home directory created at /srv/devops. And on Fedora or CentOS systems, those home directories have their SELinux context set correctly when created. Recently, I found out that on all 3 machines so far, the SELinux context has been reverted. ~# ls -lZ /srv total 0 drwx------. 5 devops devops system_u:object_r:var_t:s0 127 Oct 30 2019 devops It should have had the same context as the normal user kenno in /home directory: ...

I need to create 20 empty directores with the following name: dvd01, dvd02, dvd03,…, dvd20. My first thought was to use for loop, but then I decided to do a quick Google search, and found something more elegant: $ mkdir dvd{01..20} That’s cool, isn’t it? Reference: How to create multiple directories with incrementing numbers in a single command?

Dell released a new BIOS firmware version 1.7.4 for the Latitude 7300 and 7400 on May 22, 2020. This release is again marked Urgent and contains the following fixes and enhancements: Fixes: Firmware updated to address CVE-2020-5363 Enhancements: Updated the Embedded Controller Engine Firmware This version 1.7.4 is already available on Fedora 32 via fwupdmgr tool. [root@matht436 ~]# fwupdmgr refresh Fetching signature https://cdn.fwupd.org/downloads/firmware.xml.gz.jcat Downloading… [***************************************] Fetching metadata https://cdn.fwupd.org/downloads/firmware-00558-stable.xml.gz Downloading… [***************************************] Successfully downloaded new metadata: 1 local device supported [root@matht436 ~]# fwupdmgr update • Thunderbolt Controller has no available firmware updates • SSDPEKKF512G8 NVMe INTEL 512GB has no available firmware updates Upgrade available for System Firmware from 1.7.3 to 1.7.4 Latitude 7400 must remain plugged into a power source for the duration of the update to avoid damage. Continue with update? [Y|n]: Downloading 1.7.4 for System Firmware... Fetching firmware https://fwupd.org/downloads/a397a5b5fb47d0411ce59e5a4550940681c741ebf8b601f9c90934e4a7ce4e29-Latitude_7X00_1.7.4.cab Downloading… [***************************************] Less than one minute remaining… Decompressing… [***************************************] Authenticating… [***************************************] Updating System Firmware…[ / ] Scheduling… [***************************************] Successfully installed firmware • Touchpad has no available firmware updates • Unifying Receiver has no available firmware updates An update requires a reboot to complete. Restart now? [y|N]: There was no problem after rebooting. ...

Lenovo just released an updated BIOS firmware version 1.30 for ThinkPad P1 Gen1 on June 3rd. The changes in this v1.30 release are: CHANGES IN THIS RELEASE Version 1.30 [Important updates] - Update includes a security fix. - Address CVE-2020-0529, (https://cve.mitre.org//cgi-bin//cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-0529) - Address CVE-2020-0528, (https://cve.mitre.org//cgi-bin//cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-0528) [New functions or enhancements] - Updated the Diagnostics module to version 04.12.001. [Problem fixes] - Fixed an issue where USB keyboard connected via Thunderbolt WS Dock might not be used at BIOS POST. This firmware supports both ThinkPad P1 Gen1 and ThinkPad X1 Extreme 1: ...