This summer, Starlink launched another hardware iteration of their terminals, the Starlink Mini. I have to admit that I only stumbled over it by accident, but I was immediately intrigued because it is significantly smaller than the Starlink terminal I tested in 2023.
Continue reading Starlink Mini – Part 1 – IntroIt’s the time of the year again to reflect on what has happened in the last 12 months and looking back, I’m happy to say that it has been an eventful year again. So let’s jump right into it.
Continue reading Things That Moved Me in 2024In the previous post, I’ve had a look at the Anker Prime 200W A1336 power bank and its features. One thing I wanted to do a separate post on is the simultaneous charging and discharging feature.
Continue reading Anker Prime Power Bank – Simultaneous Charge and Discharge
It’s not often I review a product on this blog other than notebooks with Linux on them, but I’ll make an exception for the 72Wh Anker Prime power bank, because it has a number of features that made it very interesting to me, and a few quirks that are not mentioned in the advertising. I bought this power bank, as the one I bought 2 years ago is limited to USB-C 60W Power Delivery (PD) and there has been a recent application for which I needed at least 100W PD. So I looked for something new and ended up with this one, which can deliver 100W on each of its 2 USB-C connectors. So here’s how it performs for me in practice.
Continue reading Review: Anker Prime Power Bank 72Wh
In addition to a notebook, I recently also configured an Android phone for Eduroam for a University of Vienna user. Fortunately, things have become a lot simpler in recent years, and no special knowledge or app is required for Android 14. The screenshot shows the parameters to be set. For added security, I set the minimum TLS version required to 1.2. There is also a version 1.3 setting, but it looks like the University is not yet using this TLS version. So back to 1.2, better than the default setting. It’s nice to see there is a field to configure the ‘domain’ which makes me hope that the device does indeed check the domain during the certificate exchanged for increased security.
After my initial post on this topic yesterday, I kept thinking about about the potential implications of eventually also providing LTE IMS voice and Internet service over One NZ Starlink in New Zealand ranging from satellite density over data rates to emergency calls. Follow me into the world of wild speculation…
Continue reading One NZ Starlink – More ThoughtsJust shortly before Christmas and seemingly pretty much unnoticed by the rest of the world, RCR Wireless reports that mobile network operator One NZ in New Zealand has launched Starlink Direct-to-Device SMS text messaging with four unmodified smartphones! To date I can only find the ‘official’ description of how the service works and only the promotional video on Youtube. Too bad, I’d really be interested in some more technical details and field reports by independent people. I’m sure these will come in due time, but for now, there are at least a few interesting details in the material provided.
Continue reading ‘One’ New Zealand Launches Starlink Direct-to-Device SMS Texting
Like a number of times before, here’s a quick note how to setup Eduroam in a secure way, this time for Ubuntu 22.04. My example is for a University of Vienna student, parameters for other institutions might differ slightly. And like in previous Ubuntu versions, one input field is missing in the GUI configuration screen and perhaps thus also left out in the official documentation of the university.
Continue reading Eduroam Setup for Ubuntu 22.04I’m close to the point where my 8 TB backup disk drives need to be replaced by something bigger. No problem I thought, I’ve had those drives for four and a half years now, so bigger drives will probably come at the same price by now. I expected around 150 euros per 20 GB drive. Well, that didn’t quite work out.
Continue reading Price Per TB over the Last 5 Years
After I had figured out how to upgrade a Windows 10 installation in a Virtualbox VM to Windows 11 on ‘supported’ hardware, I was ready for the next step and upgrade a VM instance on a Linux based server with somewhat older hardware. In part 1 in this series, I could demonstrate that I can install a fresh W11 in a VM on that server without any problems. So I speculated that an upgrade of a W10 based VM to W11 would also work. Well, not quite…
Continue reading W11 – Part 3 – Virtualbox: Upgrading to Windows 11 on ‘Not-Supported’ Hardware