Author: Martin

Back in 2016, I’ve written quite a number of blog posts about how to set up a server at home that is reachable over IPv6. Here’s a link to the summary. Over time one forgets some of the details so I recently couldn’t remember anymore if I’ve just opened my IPv6 firewall for single ports to the IPv6 Interface ID of my server or if I had given a ‘carte blanche’. No worries, as after all, who can find me in 128 bits of IPv6 entropy? But then I watched this talk at the recent 33C3 conference and I got worried enough to check my setup like real quick…

Continue reading 33C3: IPv6 at Home – Make Sure Your IPv6 Firewall Works As Intended!

I’ve been in a presentation on the LoRA PHY on the 29th of December at the 33C3 that I can fully recommend if you are interested in the LoRA IoT radio standard and want to learn about “chirp” modulation. During the talk it was mentioned that AT&T is shutting down its GSM network in the US by the end of 2016. A day later, quite a number of German tech websites such as Heise, Teltarif and Golem had articles on the topic and it really made me wonder if this talk was the seed for them!?

Continue reading As announced in 2012, AT&T Is Shutting Down GSM Now

And finally, here’s part 3 of my series of entries on what moved me in 2016 technology wise. While part 1 and 2 focused on networks and Linux computing this part deal with a few miscellaneous things.

Continue reading Things That Moved Me In 2016 – Part 3: Miscellaneous

Apart from mobile networks, another topic that I write about quite often these days is Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular. Ever since I jumped into the Linux world in 2009 it’s been a thrilling and liberating experience and 2016 has been no different. So here’s part 2 of my summary of what moved me in technology in 2016.

Continue reading Things That Moved Me In 2016 – Part 2: Linux

Like every year, time has flown and it is already end of December and thus time to look back at what has happened this year that has literally ‘moved’ me. This year I have three categories: Networks, Linux & General computing and Miscellaneous Other Things. Let’s start with a look back at my year in the network section:

Continue reading Things That Moved Me In 2016 – Part 1: Networks

Today I have a practical example of how monopolizing access and outsourcing network operation ends up in the ultimate customer disappointment: Network coverage in tunnels and the inability of the network operator to fix it.

Continue reading Give Me Back That Tunnel Coverage – The Joys Of Operator Monopoly And Outsourcing

I’m making screenshots quite often for many purposes and most of the time the built-in functionality to take a screenshot of the entire screen, window or parts of the screen is just what I need. But in some instances, having more advanced functionality such as precisely selecting the part of the screen to capture and edit the result would come in handy. Almost by accident I recently stumbled over ‘Shutter’, a great and easy to use tool that allows me to do just that.

Continue reading Shutter to Make and Edit Screenshots in Ubuntu

I travel a lot in the EU and worldwide so advances in roaming technology and pricing are of particular interest to me. In the past year there have been two major evolutions that have significantly improved my global travel experience: All EU voice and data is now included in my tariff and my operator now supports Voice over Wifi which comes in handy when I need to make calls when traveling outside the EU.

Continue reading 2016 – My EU Roaming and Global VoWifi Year

When I recently read an article in a computer magazine about micro SD-card speeds in the range of 60+ megabytes per second I was quite amazed as my personal experience is an order of magnitude less. So I decided to get to the bottom of it and see if I could improve read/write performance.

Continue reading In Pursuit of Micro SD-Card Speeds – Part 1

My last book I read on computer history was “Dealers of Lightning” that describes what happened in Xerox PARC around graphical user interfaces, networks and object oriented programming in the 1970’s. In that book it was described that the famous Alto computer ran user programs in a “Nova emulation mode”. Digging a bit deeper I learned that the Nova was a popular computer system by Data General at the time and the designers wanted Nova programs to run on the Alto. This lead me to another book, “The sould of a new machine” which deals with how a successor machine of the successor machine of the Nova was developed. I was expecting to find a book that would give me more insight about the computing history from that angle but this was not quite what I got. Instead I got some other interesting insights. Continue reading Book Review – The Soul Of A New Machine