After moving from Typepad to my own WordPress installation, search engines haven’t yet caught up with the change. As a consequence most of the traffic is from regular readers who have updated their bookmarks and RSS feeds after reading about the move from the old site. So before traffic referred to my blog by search engines is increasing I made a snapshot of current statistics to see if regular readers use a different mix of browsers, operating systems and connectivity.
Author: Martin
I Like Free Wifi on The Train – But Would I rather want to Pay for it?
When Thalys started to offer Wifi service in 2009 on their trains in Europe I was ecstatic as it was working great. Over the years however, their service deteriorated to something barely usable (see here, here and here) and has remained so ever since. In contrast to their service, Internet access on high speed trains in Germany has remained mostly usable over the years. Instead of satellites, Deutsche Bahn (DB) has been using a dedicated cellular network along the railway lines and has upgraded to UMTS and LTE over the years to increase capacity. So far, the service was not free so the number of users was limited and the network has remained usable. Now, however, driven by national politics who is looking for quick and simple answers, DB needs to upgrade the system and offer it for free to all passengers. A recipe for disaster?
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Privacy Enhanced Youtube Embedding
A thing I was not aware about embedding Youtube videos so far was that even when visitors do not click on the video, they are already tracked by Google. Visiting the page in which the video is embedded is enough to get tracked. But it doesn’t have to be that way as there’s a “privacy enhanced” way to embed Youtube videos.
The DIY Retro Game Console Revisited
Back in December I returned from 32C3 with a DIY retro game console kit created by Voja Antonic as it promised to be fun to assemble and to study the source code. To me it was “the” hardware discovery of the congress! Apart from the prospect of playing a retro-game and to feel transported back into the 1980’s I was intrigued by the fact that the VGA graphics is not generated by a dedicated graphics unit but is instead done in software on the PIC CPU with three digital outputs that are connected to the red/green/blue lines of the VGA connector and two additional digital outputs to drive the horizontal and vertical synchronization signals for the screen. In other words, a perfect platform to get a hands-on practical view of how bits in memory can be transformed to a colorful picture on the screen.
320 MHz of Wifi In Univiersity of Vienna’s Main Reading Hall
When I recently configured a computer for Eduroam access in Vienna I took the opportunity to have a quick look at what’s in the air in Vienna University’s main reading room. It turned out that it was much more than I thought. In short, they use pretty much ALL available spectrum in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands:
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Removing Google Fonts On This Blog
I was more than a bit annoyed when I noticed that whenever I restart the browser and load my website, the browser reaches out to Google to load a number of font files. What!?
Book Review – The Billion Dollar Heist
Good techno-thrillers with realistic plots and technical details are hard to come by and it seems they are mainly coming from what I would call “alternative authors” these days. Case in point are Chronos by William Hern, The Martian by Andy Weir and books by Mark Russinovich like Rouge Code that I’ve reviewed and recommended in the past. Here’s another one “The One Billion Dollar Heist” by Ben Lovejoy!
A Busch 2090 Emulator on an Arduino
Over the past years I’ve explored many ways how to combine my memories of computing of the 1980’s with my quest to better understand how a CPU works and using contemporary technology for the purpose. Here’s another cool approach to do this by emulating a Busch 2090 4-bit computer on an Arudino.
Uninstalling Wine – Bye Bye Windows Emulation Layer
It’s been a while since I switched the final Windows based machine to Linux at my place. Admittedly there are a few things I still need Windows for but those can comfortably run in a Virtual machine on a Linux host or by using Wine, the Windows Emulation Layer for Linux. But time has come to go a step further once again.
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Eduroam – Wifi With A Certificate And Cool Roaming Features
Back in December 2015 I found my first public Wifi network at 32C3 that used a certificate instead of a common password, not so much for user authentication but for assigning an individual ciphering key to each device. Especially at a hacker conference that’s a plus as normal WPA encryption uses the same passphrase for everyone and hence attackers can decrypt the Wifi traffic of others if they know the common passphrase and have intercepted the authentication dialog. When recently being asked to configure a computer for Eduroam access, an international Wifi network at universities (for a world map see here), I found yet another flavor of Wifi certificate use that is highly interesting.
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