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
In a previous post I’ve written about pyshark and how easy it makes it to analyze network traffic in Python. As I often use a Raspberry Pi as a Wifi access point to trace live network traffic network traffic I was obviously intrigued if pyshark would also run on the Raspberry Pi. And it does, but not quite out of the box. Continue reading Pyshark on a Raspberry Pi
Wireshark is a great tool and sometimes I wonder if I use it more often than a word processor. It’s great to analyze things manually in real time or from saved packet captures after the fact. On top of that wouldn’t it be great if you could analyze network packets in your own code and act when a defined set of conditions are met? For a long time I thought that this would be a lot of hassle to pull off but it’s actually a lot easier than I thought.
Continue reading Pyshark to Analyze Wireshark Decodes With Python
In a previous post on this topic I was asking if anyone knew what the ‘g’ in gNB stood for. I got quite a number of suggestions but nobody knew for certain. So I dug a bit deeper and found the person who actually suggested the term.
Continue reading 3GPP 5G NR – What’s the ‘g’ in gNB all about – Part 2?
A while ago, I had a post on a Linux shell command to get the current power consumption of my notebook. Recently, I exchanged my battery for a new one and wanted to keep track not only of the discharge rate but the other parameters as well to see how quickly Ubuntu would recognize that it is a new battery and update it’s capacity values, etc. as well. Turns out there is a nice shell command for that as well: ‘upower’.
A couple of days ago, I had a post on the status of 5G and realistic timelines. A lot of politics is involved concerning the dates and when to do what but few technical details have so far emerged without looking deeply into the meeting minutes. Zahid Ghadialy over at the 3G4G blog, however, has now dug up some interesting technical details.
When using a Wifi network at home for voice telephony everything’s great and shiny as long as there is enough bandwidth for the call. But when you are stuck on a Wifi connected to a slow DSL line that has only little uplink capacity and someone else on the network starts uploading cat images, things get ugly quickly. Recently I was looking into how to simulate delay and packet loss to find out how a voice call sounds over Wifi and to my surprise this is actually quite easy to do, even if you don’t have a slow DSL line available.
Wifi in the 60 GHz band has been specified since 2012 in the 802.11ad extension of the IEEE WLAN standard. It has taken a number of years but it seems that products are slowly becoming available now. Heise and Anandtech have been reviewing the Netgear X10 access point here (in German) and here and the Wi-Fi Alliance has begun certifying products. So it’s about time to have a closer look at the technology.