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  1. Using a google account as OpenID

    You might have a Google account, and encountered various websites and services who allow you to log in with for example a Facebook account, a Google account or an OpenID account.

    As usual, Facebook wants (or rather forces) you to use their services exclusively, so if a Facebook login is the only possibility, you're screwed.

    Google however tends to use open systems, and they do this for logins, too. Even if a website requires you to log in using your Google account, it is using Googles OpenID services. Unfortunately you're still screwed: if the site supports the Google account excuisively, it will have the Google OpenID URI hardcoded.

    Now for the good news: if a site offers OpenID login directly, you cannot only use any OpenID provider you'd like, you can also use your Google account. Unfortunately, it is (imho) less than obvious - Google doesn't provide a short, practical URI for this purpose. The Google OpenID URI is https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id.

    Not terrible, yet inconvenient, because you'll have to type it in if there is no huge "Google Login" button.

    To make it easier, I first tried various link-shorteners, but this ...

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  2. Flashrom support for AMD SP5100?

    I recently bought a very neat little Supermicro mainboard, with AMD's Socket C32 and a SP5100 chipset.

    I did so because it is neat hardware, I needed to replace my home-server - and mainly because it is supported by Coreboot. Unfortunately, it turns out that there is no version with a socketed BIOS chip out there (and resoldering a SOIC16 socket isn't easy) despite some pictures showing it. Even more unfortunate was that it turned out that flashrom didn't support flashing the board either.

    The reason for this is, that AMD's Soutbridge 700 series makes noise on the SPI bus with its IMC (Integrated Microcontroller), so you can't safely flash because data gets corrupted.

    Luckily AMD has recently released a new version of the SB700/SP5100 register datasheet that documents how to turn the IMC off, and Frederic Temporelli has already added support which is waiting for inclusion in flashroms inbox: 1/2 and 2/2.

    I haven't tried it out yet, but I'll do so in the next couple of days.


  3. Bluez and the Keyboard

    I recently bought a nice little bluetooth keyboard. Being bluetooth based and supporting the standard hid protocol, I didn't expect any trouble at all.

    But I was wrong.

    After charging the keyboard and putting it in pairing mode, I tried hidtool scan - but it didn't find it. I checked my other bluetooth devices, and they were found - but they also found the keyboard.

    Long story short: Turns out it was a bluez bug - thanks to Pacho Ramos for the hint.

    As all howtos and so on only cover some GUI frontends for Gnome and KDE, as well as the old (and deprecated) hidd, it wasn't that trivial to get the keyboard to work even after it was finally discovered by hcitool.

    jhe in #bluez-users on freenode gave me a brief description on how to do pairing without all the stuff mentioned above:

    1. Install bluez with USE="test-programs" set
    2. Set the device to pairing mode
    3. Use hcitool scan to get the device address
    4. Run simple-agent hci0 $(hid device address)
    5. Enter PIN on both sides, PC first, Keyboard second
    6. Run bluez-test-input connect $(hid device address)

    After that it works fine.

    Using a frontend might be more viable though, seems ...

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