Oneplus One touchscreen bug fix

There is a very common touchscreen bug with the Oneplus One that can only be partly/temporarily fixed by a reboot and shows in several ways:

  • Touchscreen less responsive at all times
  • Touches are often not recognized (apparently triggered by heat)
  • Ghost touches (apparently triggered by heat)

Although this seems to be in some way related to the hardware (because I could easily reproduce it by making it warmer), a new touchscreen firmware was published recently in the CyanogenMod 12.1 repository that seems to work arround the problem somehow. I can attest that installing the new firmware fixed the problem on two Oneplus Ones that I tried it on. Battery life is noticably worse though, but this is said to be fixed with some changes that were committed to the CM12.1 repository on June 2.

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Simple LDAP server as authentication back end / Single sign-on on Ubuntu 14.04

I have wanted to create an LDAP server as authentication back end for a small student association that I am in for quite some time, but I did not do it yet because of the administrative chaos that LDAP servers seemed to be. I did not find a good ressource which described the best and simplest solution for a simple use case:

  • Create, change and delete user accounts
  • Have several, easily-managable groups
  • Have easily-integrated interfaces for different services (e.g. Dokuwiki)

Most of the tutorials I found seemed overly-complicated, and I did not want to leave an administrative mess for the next person who has to manage the system.

The following (German) blog post described the process in very easy terms. I set up a working LDAP server with OpenLDAP in under one hour (including some testing I did that was not in the tutorial):

http://www.welzels.de/blog/projekte/raspberry-pi/low-budget-nas-mit-einem-raspberry-pi/pi-nas-ldap-server/

I followed the tutorial until “LDAP Samba Implementierung” and had no problems under a virtualized Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server (not on a Raspberry Pi).

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Automatically reboot TP-Link router WDR4300 / N750 with bash script

I wanted to reboot some TP-Link WDR4300 routers automatically, because the TP-Link firmware is rather buggy and often causes WLAN problems after a few days of use.
Sadly, rebooting those routers with current firmwares is not quite as easy as it used to be (simple and short one-line curl call). You first have to generate a cookie with the name ‘Authorization’ and value

urlencode(Basic base64($admin:md5($password)))

(pseudocode). And then you have to extract some kind of one-time key from the post-login page to get the actual HTTP address of the reboot page (http://$IP/$KEY/userRpm/SysRebootRpm.htm?Reboot=Reboot ). Did I mention you also have to set your HTTP referer to the reboot page?

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No wired (LAN) connection in Linux, although everything looks right

Today I experienced a strange problem with my notebook (Dell Precision M4800) and LAN card (Intel I217-LM, driver e1000e). I connected a LAN cable, but it just would not get a connection. Not via DHCP and network-manager, not via DHCP/dhclient, and not via static ip. On the same notebook, everything worked fine under Windows 8. Symptoms: Read More

Android DialogFragment that gives the user some list options to choose from

  • DialogFragment that creates an AlertDialog with the title and options specified in the constructor
  • Can store some a data object (useful if you want the user to select an action on a specific item)
  • Is retained in case of an orientation change
  • Works great with ActionBarSherlock
  • FIXME: do not use custom constructor, but add data with .setArguments and a Bundle

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Using a TI LM35 temperature sensor with Arduino Mega

This is some code I wrote for fun to read the temperature from a TI LM35 temperature sensor and output the result with a speaker as morse code.

Note: Fig. 7 from the LM35 datasheet seems so have a different number in the current version of the datasheet

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