Thoughts of a Little Sinchen

Category: Hardware

  • Invalid Password! [Sinchen Rant]

    One of my long-term goal of maximizing my computer security. Since roughly two years I went from better-than-average settings to seriously trying to harden my operating systems as good as possible.

    As I mentioned previously, my Windows knowledge is pretty much stuck in the XP-era. XP isn’t quite representing the status of current Microsoft operating systems. When reading “Windows 11” many people instinctively think of telemetry, software bloat, Copilot, forced online accounts and all this rubbish. I’m more interested in the things under the hood. For example: Virtualization‑Based Security (VBS), Hypervisor‑Protected Code Integrity (HVCI) and App Control for Business. I needed a pretty recent device offering the hardware Windows 11 expects (TPM 2.0, CPU with IOMMU, Secure Boot using year 2023 certificates) to do experiments… without playing around with my mum’s computer.

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  • Let There Be Light!

    Don’t worry, I’m not becoming religious. After reading the Bible and the Quran… well… covering these nonsensical historic artifacts of human-made pseudo-literature is a task for another blog entry. No religion today.

    I mean it literally. I just wanted more light. Nonono! That reminds of what are allegedly Goethe’s last words, “Mehr Licht”

    Sinchen, stop writing nonsense and start telling about your failing battery powered LED-spotlight!

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  • SD Password Functionality and Transcend RDF5


    Did you ever find an Symbian based Nokia phone containing an SD in your drawer after many years? Now you want to see if there are any worthwhile photos on there. Where is the charger with the tiny coaxial power connector again? Do you still have it? Nevermind. You will just take the SD card out and put it into a laptop. What’s that? No new drive shows up! Nothing happens. Just like “Magikarp used Splash!” in a Pokémon game. Did the old SD give up the ghost? Not necessarily. It might just be locked with a password by CMD-42

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  • SD Card Write Lock [Linux Laptop] [Android Tablet]

    SD cards are really versatile and powerful storage media. Unfortunately much of their interesting functionality is more or less unused. You will have quite some fun reading the easily available PDF file “SD Specifications Part 1 Physical Layer Simplified Specification” (currently version 9.10 with >400 pages).

    Two features are of great interest for me: write lock and password protection. This entry will be (again) about setting SDs to read-only.

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  • Reviving Old PC

    My madness must have reached a new maximum. For no reason I decided trying to reactivate an old PC. The motherboard, ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe, once had been the basis for my main PC. Bought about 2006 and upgraded over time it ended up with 8GB DDR2 RAM and 4*2TB HDD with a hardware RAID5 controller.

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