Add-on icons vanished after Firefox upgrade

Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t upgrade Firefox. It upgraded itself suddenly into Firefox 68.o Quantum. How did I notice? Not because it became any better, but because suddenly things stopped working. And I got logged out from several sites. For example, my Adblocker and other add-on suddenly vanished. Checking the add-on settings, the relevant [...]

Intel FPGA’s Stratix 10: My impressions and notes

Introduction These are a few random things I wrote down as I worked with the Stratix 10 Development Kit, with focus on its PCIe interface. Quite obviously, it’s mostly about things I found noteworthy about this specific FPGA and its board, compared with previous hardware I’ve encountered. Generally speaking, Stratix 10 is not for the [...]

KiCad notes: The one-timer PCB maker’s hints for the next time

Intro These are my notes to self for the next time I’ll have a PCB design to make. This is definitely not my expertise. My original intention was to start this post with some kind of apologize, saying I only needed to make a simple board, so KiCad was good enough for this purpose. However [...]

PCB layout: Selecting the track width and spacing for a differential signal

Introduction Even though this is definitely not my expertise, I made a simple adapter board carrying USB 3.0 signals. The name of the game with such boards is to make a minimal impact on the signals, which means, among others, selecting the attributes of these two pairs of differential lines (SSRX and SSTX) in a [...]

KiCad PCB layout: Adapting the footprint’s pads to match track width

Introduction It just so happened that I went for a pair of 0.8mm thick wires, with 0.2mm between them, in order to achieve 90Ω differential impedance on a 1 mm thick FR4 board. No wonder PCBnew (KiCad’s layout program) refused connecting these wires to a USB SuperSpeed receptacle’s footprint, with its 0.4 mm side pads, [...]

Linux / X-Windows: Which process owns this window?

Once in a while, there’s a piece of junk on the desktop, and the question is who should be blamed for it. The short answer is: $ xwininfo and fetch the window’s ID from the line at the beginning saying e.g. xwininfo: Window id: 0x860000a “xclock” And next, fetch the alleged process ID: $ xprop [...]