Some things are superseded by other and better things and I find it quite interesting that when this happens, it pretty much goes unnoticed. Let’s take for example 3.5″ disks. If you are old enough to remember, do you remember when you last used one?
Category: Uncategorized
How To Test New Cellular Stuff in the Wild?
Having a lab as a network operator is a great thing. You can test new hardware and software there and once you are happy you can deploy things in the wild and make things better for your subscribers. But every now and then something comes along that you don’t only want to test in the lab but you actually want to have a proper shakedown to test stability and functionality before you let your subscribers use the new technology. So how can this actually be done in practice?
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A Refurbished Lenovo X250 As My ‘New’ Notebook
For 3 years, I’ve used a refurbished Lenovo X230 as my main notebook. During those years I’ve changed the disk drive several times, first to a 512 GB SSD, then to a 1 TB SSD and finally to 2 TB SSD. Also, I upgraded the RAM to 16 GB as I make heavy use of Virtual Machines and I even exchanged the display panel when it started to malfunction about a year ago. But the frame is now around 6 years old and the replacement IPS panel from China was starting to show a number of brighter patches that kept growing so it was time to do something about it.
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Some Eduroam Networks Now Use Root Certificates
And today another quick post on Eduroam, the federated Internet access authentication solution for students and researchers.
When I recently noticed that one of the certificates in the certificate chain I put together for an Austrian Eduroam user I support would expire early next year, I set out to do some preventive maintenance and put together a new chain. Quite to my surprise it seems to be no longer necessary!
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Book Review: Waking Gods
A couple of weeks ago I read the first book of the ‘Themis Files’ trilogy by Sylvain Neuvel and was blown away by the original story. In some cases I find that sequels to an original story might not be bad but have a hard time reaching the same level of storytelling and content of the previous book. So I was wondering how it would be in this case.
Fiber Speeds in Paris – 4 Years Later
Time flies and I can hardly believe that I’ve had a fiber connection at my Paris flat for 4 years now and that fiber is still almost nowhere to be seen in Germany. O.k. I do have vectored VDSL and 100 Mbit/s down, 40 Mbit/s up is not so bad. But fiber is playing in an entirely different league. When I got my fiber Line in Paris four years ago, I measured 264 Mbit/s in the downlink direction and 48 Mbit/s in the uplink direction. So how are things today, i.e. 4 years down the road?
Book Review: Atypical Geek Girl
Today I thought I write down some thoughts on a book I noticed when I was at the Living Computer Museum and Labs (LCM+L) in Seattle last year: ‘Atypical Geek Girl’ by Katherine Hitchcock. In her memoirs, Katherine describe her 30 year tech career in IBM that began in the 1960s.
Further Backup Strategy Improvements
One of my hobbies is to make sure to have a good backup strategy and to loose as little data as possible once the inevitable happens. Rsync and Luckybackup, a graphical frontend for rsync have been my friends for years and helped me to maintain identical copies of critical installations over the years. One weak spot in my backup strategy so far was that some devices are often out of the house and thus away from backup drives and emergency spare duplicates for weeks on end, so any loss of them would mean a significant loss of data. But I’ve got a solution for that, too, now!
Retiring my 2012 Nokia 808
It just appeared to me today that I could finally retire my Nokia 808 that I had since 2012 as I finally have a mobile phone now that can match its camera’s quality!
Android Open Source Tool For A Remote Screen over USB
One of the main issues I have with tablets and smartphones is that I did not come across a good tool for remote support, i.e. seeing the screen on my PC and being able to use the mouse and the keyboard to interact with the system. Yes, I know there some apps such as Teamviewer but they are not open source so my trust in them is very limited. Finally, however, I’ve been made aware of an interesting tool that can partly do the job: Scrcpy by Genymobile!
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