It seems that I’ve taken quite a long time since the last post to return here. Such a long pause is mainly explained by my work on the thesis and participation in the Discrete Choice Analysis (DCA) school organised at EPFL. Probably I should make some posts with a more academic content, but it’s something for future projects.

Today I wanted to document the procedure for updating a Coreboot firmware on my X220. To give some context I should say that after I bought the laptop the summer of 2021, I nearly immediately swapped the proprietary Lenovo BIOS for the Coreboot. At that time it was done mostly for testing purposes, but as it worked pretty fine I started to use the X220 as my main laptop. Now I’ve decided to explore the procedure a little more.

Continuing the posts’ streak, today we are going to see how to eliminate the PWM flickering problem that arises on some of the ThinkPad laptops of early 2010-th. The proposed solution is specific for the laptops equipped with Intel GPU’s (Intel i915 only) running Linux.

This summer I’ve acquired a second laptop, an old ThinkPad X220, to have something more portable at hand in complement to my main ThinkPad T430. Today I’ve decided to finally patch my X220, because with time the eye strain has become more and more noticeable. Both of the machines encounter the same screen flickering issue even after the upgrade of their screens to the IPS versions. And even though I already corrected the problem on my T430 about 2 years ago, I’ve completely forgot how to do it by now. After some search on the Internet, I’ve found the solution and this post serves mostly to keep it by hand, just in case.

Some days ago I’ve descried my new password management model, where I’ve mentioned a tool named pass. By the end of the year 2021 I’ve been using this tool for some time for my passwords management, while in 2022 it became more of a fallback measure for my backups and secure password storage. Today I’ll discuss some of the features of this tool, as well as my personal setup and use-case.

Today we are going to speak about the self-hosting. Since the start of January I’ve spent some time on configuration of my home server for my personal applications. The idea behind this transition was to put some more distance between myself and my dependence on the external services, where I’ve no means to control my personal data. The last year, I’ve already performed the transition from using the Google Drive and Dropbox to the usage of more private NextCloud solutions (offered by my university,as well as a privacy respecting server in Zurich). Nevertheless, when I’ve discovered a long unused motherboard, belonging to my school laptop, I’ve decided to give it a new life.

After receiving a hardware authentication token for the New Year, I’ve spent quite a lot of time on the configuration. Even though I’d already modified my security model by the end of 2021, I needed to reconsider it once again. Now my password management framework comprises three elements:

1. Hardware security token (OnlyKey) for most sensitive credentials and 2FA (two facto authentication like OTP, FIDO2 / U2F)
2. Self-hosted cloud storage (Vaultwarden) for less sensitive credential
3. Encrypted password database (Pass-Tomb) on a USB

Each of these elements requires a separate post, but for now I’ll focus only on the first part. What is more, I’ll separate the content into several parts: in this particular part I’ll describe how it’s possible to configure the OnlyKey as second factor authentication for Linux system login (or sudo).