Category: Uncategorized

Like so many other events recently, the Vintage Computing Festival Berlin (VCFB) will hold its annual event in the virtual domain this year. Other retro computing events have already taken place online in 2020 and I very much enjoyed to join events I could not have gone in person. However, all of them have focused on talks while the exhibition of retro computing equipment was unfortunately ditched. At the online VCFB this year, we attempt to do things a bit differently.

Continue reading Vintage Computing Festival Berlin – 10. – 11. October 2020

After the introduction of my network statistics data collection system in the previous post I can now analyze my line usage over time in detail. Here’s a screenshot that shows a number of overlapping data flows.

Continue reading Up- and Downlink Streams On My DSL Line

One thing I wanted to have for a long time was a better visibility of how my DSL line at home is utilized over time. My Fritzbox router has some basic functions for this such as showing the uplink and downlink utilization of the past few minutes and a daily, weekly and monthly traffic counter. That’s a start but the amount of information is limited and so are the conclusions that can be drawn from it.

Beyond these features, however, the Fritzbox has a number of counters that are updated every few seconds which can be queried over the network. Sounds promising! Together with the Grafana visualization suite that I also wanted to have a closer look at for quite some time now, it made for an interesting project. So I started searching a bit and found out that a number of other people have been at this point before as well and have put together a complete data collection and visualization front-end for the information provided by the Fritzbox. Perfect, exactly what I was looking for!

Continue reading Fritzbox Monitoring with Grafana

Not meeting in person but in online meetings these days has the advantage, or disadvantage, you decide for yourself, that you can also participate while on the road. While I try to avoid this as much as possible as I prefer a bigger screen and a quiet environment for meetings, the only alternative sometimes is not to participate at all. Surprisingly I found that conference calls while on the road work better than I anticipated at first.

Continue reading Online Meetings On The Road – Some Thoughts

In recent months, more and more web sites greet me with super annoying pop-ups and request my consent to their use of cookies. Some even give me the option to control for which purposes cookies are used. Of course, web site owners don’t do this for fun but because of laws such as the GDPR that have come into effect in recent years. While I think that the GDPR is a good thing overall, I am particularly unhappy about this side effect.

Continue reading Annoying Cookie Consent – But…

We’ve had a visitor at our place recently for a couple of days who used a video streaming service quite a lot. When I had a look at our Internet connection usage statistics, I was quite surprised how differently the service behaved when it came to resource usage compared to the video streaming provider we use in the family. Yes, we only use one! Perhaps a generational thing. Anyway, when I had a closer look at the datarates of the two streaming services I was quite surprised that there is a 10:1 difference.

Continue reading Comparing Two Streaming Data Rates In Practice

In 1999, Tim Berners-Lee, together with Mark Fischetti, wrote ‘Weaving the Web‘, a book on how he invented the World Wide Web in the late 1980s and the early 1990’s. It is still published today so it’s not difficult to get hold of it. You can also lend a copy in PDF format from OpenLibrary.org. Written less than a decade after the web had its early break through, it is now two decades old itself and offers incredible insight into the early days, the thoughts of the time how it should evolve and it made me reflect on how it turned out today.

Continue reading Book Review – Weaving the Web

And in this final part of my mini-series on disk and SSD passwords that require interaction over the ATA protocol I’d quickly like to say a few words about another interesting feature that I have previously missed: Securely erasing a device.

Continue reading Deleting An SSD With ATA Security Erase

In the previous two posts on how to use the password protection feature of hard disks and SSDs and how to unlock them when temporarily connected to another computer via a USB adapter, I mentioned that the adapter has to support the UAS (USB Attached SCSI) protocol. Unfortunately, some (older) USB-3 to SATA adapters do not support the protocol which results in strange hdparm error messages. As I was doing this for the first time, I had the dilemma that I didn’t know if the strange error messages were a result of a mistake I made or if the adapter did not support the required protocol. After a bit of searching I came up with the following procedure to check for support:

Continue reading Is your USB to SATA Adapter UAS capable?

In a previous post I have looked at what hard disk password protection would do for me and what its limitations are. One issue is that it’s no longer straight forward to just use a password protected drive in a USB to SATA converter as a lower level ATA command is required to unlock the drive. On Linux, the drive can be unlocked with ‘hdparm‘ but there are a couple of pitfalls that took me quite some time to figure out.

Continue reading How to Use A Password Locked Disk over USB