Author: Martin

A few days ago the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a couple of cool new features for their desktop UI, one of them being the ability to clone a running Raspberry Pi system to a smaller SD card. The only condition for using a smaller SD-card is that it is big enough to hold all files stored on the original one. In other words only files are copied and empty blocks are never touched. Intrigued I did some background research on how this works as I see a couple of usage scenarios for me if I can replicate this from the command line.

Continue reading Clone a Raspberry Pi To A Smaller SD-Card And Make Incremental Backups

Back in 2013 I first heard of Fairphone and was immediately taken by the company’s plans to design and produce a smartphone that is ‘fair to the people producing it’ and ‘fair to the environment’. I gladly prepaid 325 euros to get one when it was finished. In early 2014 I was rewarded with the result of their efforts and I’ve since been a glowing supporter. Today the company reports 100.000 Fairphone owners and availability in stock so there are no waiting times anymore!

Continue reading 100.000 Fairphones Sold!

In part 1 on this topic I’ve been giving a quick overview of Machine Type Communication (MTC) and Internet of Things (IoT) from a cellular network operator and 3GPP point of view. In this post I’ll jump right to the first couple of enhancements made the 3GPP LTE specifications over the years to show which enhancement could be used for which kind of MTC and IoT usage scenario and devices.

Continue reading Cellular IoT – The Dust Slowly Settles – Part 2 – Cat-1 and Cat-0 Devices

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.

Continue reading Restoring Individual Raspberry Pi Partitions

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

I’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.

Continue reading Tell Mozilla If You Need Thunderbird

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

Continue reading My Kernel Bug’s Gone With Ubuntu 16.04

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.

Continue reading Beware of GSM Service On Board of Aircraft

Just a quick thought today about a use case change of a feature over which hard battles were fought about in the past: UMTS Fast Dormancy.

Continue reading Prime Use For UMTS Fast Dormancy Today: Fast Reselection to LTE

Eduroam 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.

Continue reading Eduroam Setup For Ubuntu 16.04