Jackdaw's Nest

Chrome Hardware Acceleration Issues in Ubuntu 22.04

  • 2023-09-11

I just got a fancy new Lenovo ThinkPad T14 laptop in the summer. I had my first ThinkPad in 2005 and I'm a big fan of the sturdy build quality and the excellent ergonomics. And also, running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad is usually a breeze.

My First AMD ThinkPad

This time I got my first ThinkPad with an AMD processor. It's AMD Ryzen Pro 7, to be specific. I'm not sure if it's the processor support in Linux in general, or if there's some issues in Ubuntu with this hardware, but I've run into some issues that I've never experienced before. I haven't had enough time to really pinpoint the issue.

Basically, the problem is that my screen goes completely blank every now and then. It only lasts less than a second, but it's really annoying. It happens randomly both on the external monitor and the internal display. Sometimes only one of them goes blank, and sometimes they both do.

Chrome Hardware Acceleration

I googled some forums and some people have had problems with Google Chrome on this same hardware. Some people reported that disbaling hardware acceleration in Chrome settings helped. I started wondering if this is also a Chrome related issue. And indeed, I don't have the screen blanking issue if I don't have Chrome running.

I tried disabling the hardware acceleration mode in Chrome settings it looks like the issue has been fixed now. I disabled the mode just a few hours ago but I haven't got s single blank screen since that. I haven't really investigated what the hardware acceleration does under the hood and what's the underlying issue in this case, but it looks like I've found the culprit for these annoying issues.

Fixing Session Fixation

  • 2023-08-25

I just ran into a Fixing Session Fixation problem with Passport in a NodeJS app.

I ran into this because the app started returning thir error whn logging out:

Error: req#logout requires a callback function

It turned out that there was a good reason for this breaking change, and that's session fixation.

Luckily, this was an easy fix for the app and security is improved. This is also in line with best practices recommended by OWASP.

Just out of curiosity, I had to check how Symfony (my framework of choice) handles this. To be honest, I hadn't really thought about this issue until now. It looks like you can configure this behaviour in Symfony and updating session ID's to prevent this problem is enabled by default.

Blogging in Context

  • 2023-08-21

I've decided to take a slightly unconventional approach to blogging in this new site. I decided to have just one long markdown file for each year, and I will just add new posts on the top of that file.

There are a few benefits to this approach that I really like:

  • It's easy to blog in context because I see all the older posts in the same file
  • The markdown file makes sense by itself without any blogging platform

Obviously, there are some downsides as well:

  • Difficult to link directly to a single post (using hash based linking is ok)
  • Sharing a single post in social media can be tricky and platforms will pick up wrong content for preview
  • Cannot create alternative representations of the content like RSS feeds

Especially the lack of RSS feeds bugs me, but I still think that, for me, the pros outweigh the cons. It feels so nice and simple to just write in a text editor and see all my older posts in the same file. Most markdown editors support previewing and the preview looks like a blog should.

Here's [the markdown file] for this blog for year 2023.

Moving on to Stenope

  • 2023-08-20

I've just decided to give Stenope a try. There's just something about static website generators that keeps on bugging me and I return to them after every time after using a web based CMS for a year or two.