Yes, targeted attacks like that definitely exist, most famously maybe the most recent social pressure to merge a vulnerability to the xz library by actor “Jia Tan”:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils-backdoor-that-almost-infected-the-world/

This started a whole discussion about relying on (often unpaid) volunteer work for critical systems and the pressure and negativity these people face, which is a discussion that was absolutely needed, and which we are still lightyears away from fixing.

Currently, open source is still treated like this: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/10341

(I can only recommend reading the whole story around this issue, which boils down to Microsoft admitting they rely on an open source project for something they consider critical to their customers, but not willing to pay the maintainer a bounty for fixing the issue)

That’s why there is a huge market for 0-day exploits.

I am on my 4th personal TUXEDO laptop, never had any issues. I actually started giving them to the devs at my company, no complaints so far.

They don’t offer my choice of OS, and I wouldn’t use a preinstalled OS anyway, so I can’t comment on that.

Couldn’t watch, so I got a summary. Maybe it’s helpful for someone else:

• Bluefin is introducing a new “Stable” tag for their Fedora distribution, in addition to the existing “GTS” (Grand Touring Support) and “Latest” tags.

• The Stable tag will provide a middle ground between the aggressively updated Latest Fedora and the more conservative GTS version.

• Stable will use the latest Fedora release, but with a slightly older kernel that has been more thoroughly tested and vetted by the Bluefin team.

• This is intended to cater to enthusiasts who want the latest Fedora features, but with a bit more stability and reliability.

• Bluefin will be publishing weekly updates for the Stable images, rather than waiting 2 weeks between updates like the Fedora CoreOS team.

• The Stable images will also use zstd chunked compression to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed for updates.

• Bluefin is unsure whether the Stable configuration (latest Fedora, slightly older kernel) or the GTS configuration (older Fedora, latest kernel) will ultimately feel more stable in practice

• The Stable tag is a response to user feedback requesting access to the latest Fedora releases, rather than having to wait for the GTS version.

• Nvidia driver updates for the Stable images will also be provided on a regular basis.

• Bluefin is interested in exploring this middle ground between aggressively updated and conservatively updated Fedora distributions.

Generally all correct, here is a resource with a lot of in-depth information and additional links:

https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries

It’s not true that precision measurements are impossible with low value resistors, a lot of measurement equipment works exactly like that - it might just be more expensive than what the manufacturer is willing to budget for.

Tuxedo also offers products with an aluminum body, and while they do import the hardware from China, you get the local service and warranty guarantees any company in the EU must provide, so that’s fine by me.

Also, honest question: what do you think a unique laptop is, in particular when buying from a mass consumer brand like Lenovo? I really can’t figure out what that’s supposed to mean.

lspci will read the vendor and device id via PCI and use that to determine what the device is. You might want to make the output a bit more digestable / useful via lspci -s 03:00.0 -k -nn, but I’d assume the ids that match an 2070 will show up.

Could you please take the card out and provide us with a few pictures from different angles, maybe getting a good look at the actual chips?

I’d like to rule that out before chasing rabbits here.

Also, you could always run nvidia-settings, which will show information about an NVIDIA card using a different access method.

I’d still like to see the pictures of the card though ;)

Oh, that makes everything a lot easier. The majority of the relevant settings will be in your home folder then, i. e. in the ${HOME}./.config folder, while some might also be in ${HOME}/.local/share etc.

You probably want to backup the whole home folder anyway, so that would pickup most of your settings. In order to make that work on a different system, you would have to install all applications you were using on the tablet as well. Luckily, software installation in Linux is pretty easy, so you can export a list of installed applications from the Surface and then re-install them on your target system before migrating your home folder. The software list should become part of your backup. See e. g. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/82880/how-to-replicate-installed-package-selection-from-one-fedora-instance-to-another for an idea of how to perform this.

I have used this approach in the past and it will get you 95% there. There might be some global system settings that you’d like to also transfer to your new system, but you can add those as you discover you miss them on the target system.

In general, no, this won’t work. In your case, you’re lucky since at least the Surface Go is using an x86 CPU, so it’s not completely out of the question, but transferring the image as-is to a completely different device typically does not work without modification.

Simple example: your target device might not refer to existing hardware (let’s say a storage medium) in the same manner as your old device, so the existing references in your cloned image won’t work. There are other issues of course, e. g. missing drivers for different hardware present on the target device.

It’s possible to modify the image so it would boot, but given the Surface runs Windows, that’s going to be a chore. I’d consider this an interesting project if bored on a slow weekend, but I’d most likely just do a filesystem backup of relevant data and call it a day.

Honestly, that just seems like you’re treating dd as some kind of arcanum. dd works just fine and I’ve been doing 1:1, full system backups for decades with it, no issues. Honorary mention for ddrescue / dd_rescue for recovery options, i. e. re-trying bad sector reads etc.

In fact, when Clonezilla doesn’t know your filesystem, it will simply employ dd to copy the data sector by sector.

I’d argue that Clonezilla (due to its use of partclone) is actually a less complete form of backup, since it will only copy used blocks, you don’t really end up with a clone of your devices, just a copy of what partclone believes to be your data. Don’t get me wrong, that is fine in most use cases, but there are some cases where this doesn’t cut it, e. g. wanting to backup / restore a storage device from a PLC where the vendor had the glorious idea to store licensing data in unused sectors, or when you want to create a forensic disk image, might want it look into d3dd then, although it absolutely works using regular old dd as well, d3dd just adds some amenities.

All I want to say is: dd is an absolutely reliable tool and can be a one stop solution for device backups. Also, I have absolutely no quarrels with Clonezilla, if it fits what you’re trying to do and it works, great.

It’s actually a lot worse than ASM, there are far more ambiguities in C++. And yet here I am, still developing with it some 30+ years later.

Don’t worry, I’m using Rust were it makes sense.

The best way would in fact be testing it with an electronic load that applies a precise and well known load to the battery and integrates capacity until a matching shutoff condition is reached.

However, the majority of people do not happen to have access to such an instrument, so I’d say your suggestion is a close approximation of the best way, which could be augmented by adding simple measurements, which can be done by most people at home for a reasonable, quantifiable judgment.

Great project, I like that you went all in and installed the solar panels - there is a nonzero chance I would have tested it with only a battery first, therefore creating a suboptimal solution that would have stayed around far too long, endlessly bugging me in the process.

Just one remark: the mailbox is so nice, you should definitely route a channel in the treated pine to hide / protect the blue cable better, that’d make it perfect.

Just for the sake of completeness:

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

It’s useful to be able to do this without additional tools (and there are more applications for the general command setup discussed in the video), but in practice, ease of use and performance often make a difference.

I am aware of what you are saying, however, I do not agree with your conclusions. Just for the sake of providing context for our discussion, I wrote plenty of code in statically typed languages, starting in a professional capacity some 33 years ago when switching from pure TASM to AT&T C++ 2, so there is no need to convince me of the benefits :)

That being said, I think we’re talking about different use cases here. When I’m talking configuration, I’m talking runtime settings provided by a customer, or service tech in the field - that hardly maps to a compiler error as you mentioned. It’s also better (more flexible / higher abstraction) than simply checking a JSON schema, and I’m personally encountering multiple new, custom JSON documents every week where it has proven to be a real timesaver.

I also do not believe that all data validation can be boiled down to simple type checking - libraries like pydantic handle complex validation cases with interdependencies between attributes, initialization order, and fields that need to be checked by a finite automaton, regex or even custom code. Sure, you can graft that on after the fact, but what the library does is provide a standardized way of handling these cases with (IMHO) minimal clutter. I know you basically made that point, but the example you gave is oversimplified - at least in what I do, I rarely encounter data that can be properly validated by simple type checking. If business logic and domain knowledge has to be part of the validation, I can save a ton of boilerplate code by writing my validations using pydantic.

Type annotations are a completely orthogonal case and I’ll be the first to admit that Python’s type situation is not ideal.

I’m not talking about type checking, I’m talking about data validation using pydantic. I just consider mypy / pyright etc. another linting step, that’s not even remotely interesting.

In an environment where a lot of data is being exchanged by various sources, it really has become quite valuable. Give it a try if you haven’t.

I wholeheartedly agree. The ability to describe (in code) and validate all data, from config files to each and every message being exchanged is invaluable.

I’m actively looking for alternatives in other languages now.

Your USB ethernet adapter is down according to this output.

In case Ubuntu server comes with e. g. dhclient installed, you should be able to get a working network connection by ensuring a cable is properly plugged into your USB ethernet adapter and running

sudo dhclient -v enx949aa9857457

You might want to post the output of that command here. Alternatively, configure the USB adapter using one of the management tools mentioned in this thread already.

As a general rule, maybe don’t use shorthand terms you invented in posts that are supposed to provide information to the people trying to help you, just so you don’t confuse them any further.