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Trying to understand the new cellular modem subsystem in Zephyr, I realized that building a working demo system should be the best way forward. Having an evaluation board of the A7683E available, the first step was to pick a well suited eval board to match the module.

As it turns out, the Simcom module runs at 1.8V and even on the evaluation board there are no level shifters. So that quickly gave me the first hard requirement, namely that the UART needs to be run at 1.8V.

Looking at my collection of recent MPU eval kits, I realized that the NUCLEO-U575ZI-Q could run completely on 1.8V by a simple jumper setting. On the other boards it would have been more involved to define the UART pins to run on 1.8V, so I decided to use this eval board for the MPU part.

So the aim of this blog post is to document how I implemented the demo on this hardware combination:

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As the NAND storage technology reaches speeds that cannot be satiated with SATA anymore, the modern SSDs are attached over PCIe, the descendant of the very successful Peripheral Component Interconnect standard that allowed for many extension cards in the IBM PC ecosystem. But where most PCI cards could not be software upgraded in the field, the question on how to update firmware on attached PCI devices is not obviously standardized (or am I missing something?). So under Windows, the manufacturers of NVMe modules deliver their proprietary update tool, but what do we do in a Free Operating system like GNU/Linux?

In this blog post I will take a quick look at how I was able to upgrade the firmware of my Kingston SA2000M8250G NVMe drive in my desktop system.

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As the NAND storage technology reaches speeds that cannot be satiated with SATA anymore, the modern SSDs are attached over PCIe, the descendant of the very successful Peripheral Component Interconnect standard that allowed for many extension cards in the IBM PC ecosystem. But where most PCI cards could not be software upgraded in the field, the question on how to update firmware on attached PCI devices is not obviously standardized (or am I missing something?). So under Windows, the manufacturers of NVMe modules deliver their proprietary update tool, but what do we do in a Free Operating system like GNU/Linux?

In this blog post I will take a quick look at how I was able to upgrade the firmware of my Kingston SA2000M8250G NVMe drive in my desktop system.

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#+BEGIN_COMMENT .. title: Empowerment Through Free Software .. author: Detlev Zundel .. date: 2025-04-03 23:15:39 CET .. slug: free-software-empowerment .. tags: debian, linux, fsf, gnome, simple-scan .. category: .. link: .. description: .. type: text #+END_COMMENTg

Due to having ordered a new multi-function printer, I find myself wanting a feature in my software stack, which seems not to be available. But as I use a Free Software GNU/Linux system, it is possible to modify and extend the software on every level, so I decide to find out if I can fix the problem myself.

Specifically, the new printer has a document feeder for the scanner, so that I can feed a whole stack of documents to it without manual intervention. Unfortunately, it is not able to do both side scans, as this feature is only available at a much higher price tag. But double-sided scanning can be done in two batches by first scanning the front sides, and then in a second batch the back sides. The scanned pages then need to be reordered in a post processing step to group the corresponding front- and back sides. Already with my own scanner, I am pretty happy using the default scan software from the GNOME desktop, i.e. simple-scan. I used the GUI to remove pages and reorder them manually, but I did not find such a functionality that I would now like to use. So the topic for today is how to make this work, ideally before the printer arrives.

I believe this to be a very good example of how empowering Free Software is, and so I decided to document all my steps in order to show how I approach this task, which is completely inaccessible for people working with non-free software. Actually I invite you to reproduce the steps on your own distribution to get a feeling on how easy (or difficult?) it is to work on an arbitrary aspect of the whole system.

So fire up your terminal and follow along! Expect some transcripts!

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Using shared calendars with my wife is a very productive aspect of todays digital tools. As we coordinate more and more things in this domain, I have learned to love the STATUS property of iCalendar entries. It immediately tells me if a calendar entry is a reafl, fixed and confirmed entry or if it is just a blocker so that other planning can take into account that the dates are not yet finalized. The usual calendar apps (NextCloud Calendar, Thunderbird, Fossify) display this information in an intuitive manner, but I found out that the Android app fossify (fork from simple-tools), does not allow editing this property of an entry.

Whenever I need something in a Free Software project, but it is not there, I eventually come to the conclusion that I could implement it myself if I need it "bad enough".

So let's find out how Free Software empowers the users with this example.

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As the medium E-Mail has to be considered an open channel, once you want to send sensitive content by e-mail, you should really use a secure encryption method with it.

Having setup this with my local machines, this report propably can be interpreted as a short guide on how to get things going.

For me the basic requirement was to enable one e-mail account with encryption capabilities and this account is accessed from a desktop system and a mobile (Android) system.

So what we need is something like the following:

1. Generate secret key
2. Publish public key
3. Verify published key by e-mail
4. Install additional required software
5. Use/Import secret key
6. Import public keys from the web

Email Self-Defense

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