Category: Uncategorized

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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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?

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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!

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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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Malaga on Fiber

When I go on business trips or vacation, I usually do that in the mindset that Internet connectivity will not be as good as at home and that I will be restricted in some way. While in Europe, LTE coverage is usually good wherever I go and speeds are usually sufficient in the double digit Mbit/s range in both the uplink and downlink direction. That’s good enough for most things but outside of Germany, the amount of data I can use per month is still limited. Outside of Europe, things are worse but they are getting better. On the fixed line side I’ve long given up expecting decent Internet connectivity at hotels, with speeds in the double digit Mbit/s range in both the uplink and downlink direction being a huge exception rather than the norm. When I was recently in Malaga in southern Spain for a week, I went there with the same expectation but was very positively surprised about the triple digit up- and downlink speeds in the rental apartment.

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2 TB SSD Update At 320 Euros

I had to wait a long time for this but finally, finally, SSD prices have dropped again! Back in August 2017 I wrote a post that SSD prices had not fallen at all over the previous two years and that I was at the point of needing an upgrade from a 1 TB SSD to a 2 TB SSD. However, not at 600 euros a piece. Fortunately, Moore’s law has resumed and in 2018, SSD prices finally started to drop again. Now at the beginning of 2019, I could finally get a 2 TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD (2.5″ SATA) at my price limit of around 300 Euros. It cost 319 Euros to be exact. Prices of other manufacturers such as SanDisk and Crucial were down to around 250 – 270 euros. No more economizing and moving seldom used data to offline storage anymore for some time to come!