Thue's blog

I quite like the idea of a common interchangable power supply for laptops, like micro-USB is/was the common interchangable power supply for phones. Hence I have been keeping half an eye on Universal Power Adapter for Mobile Devices . There doesn't seem to be any actual users of that standard, so I sent an email to IEEE inquiring if they knew of any users. This is the excellent reply I got from chair Leonard Tsai: Hi, Thue, I am the chair for IEEE 1823 working group and your email inquiry was forwarded to me early. Sorry about the belated reply as I just travelled to Asia. Currently the IT market which 1823 standard was originally intended had been swayed by USB SIG to use type C connector as alternatives. However, EU standard body had made inquiry to see if 1823 should be consider as the preferred connector for next get mobile device. Also, there are new interests from some automotive industry players that are looking at distributing DC bus inside a car (obvious that 1823 with C...

I have gotten access to an old wireless tablet ("wireless" as in the pen is battery powered, tablet is wired USB), and have gotten it work. Since it was not trivial to figure out how to do that, I though I would describe the steps. First the context: in the old days, X11 communicated directly with the hardware. So for a tablet to work, there needed to exist an X11 driver. There seem to be 2 kinds of tablets: Wacom tablets and non-Wacom tablets, with Wacom tablets generally having much better Linux support. So the first thing I found was some X11 Wizardpen drivers which had not been updated since 2011, which supposedly supported various non-Wacom tablets. This was very much a blind alley. After some further investigation, I found that in the newer Wayland architecture, tablet drivers had been moved into the kernel, and the Wayland project libinput had been created as a middle layer. And in fact the DIGImend project had already created a driver for my tablet (which turn...