Samson C01U USB condenser microphone on Ubuntu Linux 12.04

I recently acquired the Samson C01U USB condenser microphone for better quality voice-overs on the sleep-inducing screencasts I sometimes make. It took some fiddling to get it setup correctly on Ubuntu 12.04 with the default ALSA drivers and PulseAudio sound system, so I’ve documented the steps here on the chance that it might help some other Ubuntu / Linux user. The microphone looks like this: Samson C01U condenser USB microphone

Acer V3-571G FullHD IPS: Superb price/performance Linux development laptop

I recently needed a new mobile development workstation. My main requirements were that it should have at least a Full HD (1920×1080) IPS (in-plane switching) screen and a good keyboard, and that it should be able to run Linux, preferably Ubuntu, as its primary operating system. After experimenting with a screenshot of my 1920×1080 desktop workstation running IntelliJ Idea 12 (my IDE of choice) on an Asus UX31A with 13″ Full HD IPS screen, I realised that I would have to go with a larger screen.

SSDs with usable built-in hardware-based full disk encryption

(tl;dr / post summary: Many current SSDs do super fast hardware AES encryption, but only a very few expose this correctly to the user, meaning you often still need a third-party software solution. Information on this is incredibly hard to find.) Imagine that your laptop or your PC gets stolen. That would be terrible. However, it would be even worse if your laptop contained confidential data, either your own or that of your employer or client.

Adding the ATA Security eXtension BIOS to AMIBIOS (Asus P5KC)

I’ve just purchased an Intel 520 SSD drive, which does hardware-based AES encryption of the whole disk, and is clever enough to encrypt the AES passphrase with the ATA / HDD password. This encryption implementation was my primary reason for getting this specific SSD. Many modern SSDs also employ hardware-based AES encryption for randomisation and for fast secure erase (they just reset the AES key!), but do NOT use the ATA password to encrypt the keys, so the encryption is far less effective at protecting your precious data.

European Motorola Atrix 4G: Rooting, unlocking and CyanogenMod 7.2

The Motorola Atrix 4G, flagship phone about a year ago, is now a great budget option if you need an unlocked and high performance Android phone. An NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core 1 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of built-in storage, micro SD slot, front and back cameras, a 1950 mAh battery (!) and more can be had for an affordable € 260 here in the Netherlands. However, Motorola has cancelled the plans to upgrade this phone to Android 4.

Removing URLs from Zotero bibtex exports

When you export bibtex from zotero, it includes the URLs in the bibtex records. Some LaTeX bibliography styles include this information, and sometimes this is not what you want, for example because the URLs take up unnecessary space and are hard to wrap. It’s quite easy to get zotero to export bibtex without the URLs. Go to Preferences | Advanced and click on the “Show Data Directory” button. Edit translators/BibTeX.js with your favourite text editor.

Review of Ubuntu Linux 12.04 on the Samsung NP300V3A Core i5 NVIDIA Optimus laptop

An important warning: During installation, do NOT activate home folder encryption. Due to bugs 957843 and 509180, you will most probably suffer data loss, and you won’t even know about it until it’s too late. This happened on two of my laptops during normal use, both of which I have since completely reinstalled with LUKS whole disk encryption. It’s a shame that this bug has been known for years, but that Ubuntu still ships with this as its default home folder encryption configuration.