Author: Martin

Restoring Individual Raspberry Pi Partitions

In the early days of the Raspberry Pi I mostly used 4 or 8 GB SD-cards to run a system. These days however, 16 GB cards seem to be the smallest and for an Owncloud emergency backup server I’m even using a 64 GB SD-card now. While creating backup image files of 4 or 8 GB SD-cards was quick and didn’t take too much space, creating an image file of the 64 GB SD-card is somewhat of a stretch. Fortunately, there is a way to create and restore images of individual partitions which makes the process a lot quicker and much less storage intensive.

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Cellular IoT – The Dust Slowly Settles – MTC, NB-IOT and Things In Between – Part 1

I haven’t written a lot about the Internet of Things (IoT) so far as there are so many different approaches discussed, specified, prototypes tested and proprietary solutions rolled out these days. In other words, it’s not easy to keep an overview and to get a feeling which solutions might might become popular and which will fade away over time. But it looks like 3GPP is finally getting their act together with LTE enhancements in Release 12 and 13 for a wide variety of different Machine Type Communication (MTC) scenarios and the Internet of Things (IoT). While I’ve found information about many different things in many different places I couldn’t find an overview that sets all of these things in perspective. So I decided to do it here. Read on for the details. Continue reading Cellular IoT – The Dust Slowly Settles – MTC, NB-IOT and Things In Between – Part 1

Tell Mozilla If You Need Thunderbird

thunderbirdI’m pretty unhappy with Mozilla these days for a number of reasons. For one thing I don’t really see any improvements in Firefox anymore that would matter to me. Then there’s a lot of soul searching going on at the moment that has culminated recently in some cloudy talk about the Internet of Things and that Mozilla’s wants to have a role in that domain. Makes me wonder what that might be… To have enough time to think about that it seems they have binned their work on Firefox OS. And, to make things even worse, their Thunderbird email client and online calendar solution has become the unwanted step child to want to get rid of as soon as possible.

I’m especially unhappy about their attitude towards Thunderbird because it is the cornerstone for many who want to download their email on the PC and deal with it in the cloud. Also, Thunderbird is my desktop client for my Owncloud calendar I synchronize across my different devices. So I would expect Mozilla to keep actively developing the software instead of just having it in maintenance mode and trying to get rid of it.

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My Kernel Bug’s Gone With Ubuntu 16.04

7 Days, 15 Terabytes and 1 Kernel Bug Later was the headline of a post back in March this year in which I described how I was chasing a problem with file read and write performance that got worse the more RAM I put into my notebook. With 16 GB of RAM, file write speeds deteriorated after only a few gigabytes and I finally chased down the issue to a kernel bug. Fortunately, after upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 with a 32-bit 3.13 kernel to Ubuntu 16.04 with a 64-bit 4.4 kernel the problem went away. In addition, file read and write behavior has changed completely

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Beware of GSM Service On Board of Aircraft

When I recently flew from Europe to India with Lufthansa I was quite happy to have Wifi on board. For 17 Euros I could get access to the Internet for the complete flight. Not cheap but if you take the ticket price into account it’s acceptable. Like on this flight earlier in the year, connectivity was somewhat slow and patchy but good enough for many things. In addition, this plane was also equipped with a GSM cell. What sounds cool at first turns out to be a massive money trap if your are not careful.

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Eduroam Setup For Ubuntu 16.04

eduroamEduroam is a great Wi-Fi network setup for students. With certificate based authentication, setting it up securely is a bit of a hassle. Once done, however, one benefits from a per device Wi-Fi encryption key and international roaming capabilities. I very much like the system and have described my experiences here and here. For Ubuntu 16.04 and later, however, the security configuration has changed and one has to be careful as there is no security warning if an old setup is reused. Read on for the details.

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