Every now and then I enjoy reading a good science fiction book. This time I picked up ‘Aurora’ by Kim Stanley Robinson as it got raving reviews. Unfortunately I came out with quite the opposite opinion and I couldn’t even get myself to read the final 30 or 40 pages as the book is massively dystopian. Some people might like such books but I wouldn’t have bothered if I had known.
Read on for more details but beware of spoilers!
Yesterday I was in the Netherlands for a day and by chance it was just the day when they had a trial run of their NL-Alert system at noon that broadcast a test message to all mobiles in the country. I was quite surprised I got the message with my non-Dutch CyanogenMod Android device so I had a quick look at the technical details to find out more.
Continue reading I Had An NL-Alert Yesterday – Some Technical Details
In part 4 of my mini-series about 3GPPs Internet of Things standardisation for cellular networks I’ve given an overview of the currents state of the NB-IoT standardization in 3GPP. Most of what I’ve written in there is based on a 3GPP Technical Report that summarizes the different options that were studied and RP-151621 which contains the Work Item Description for NB-IoT in which the resulting compromise was detailed. But where in the 3GPP Specs is NB-IoT now actually specified?
Continue reading Cellular IoT – How to find out more about NB-IoT in 3GPP – Part 5
In the three previous parts (here, here and here) on the Internet of Things and 3GPP, I’ve described Cat-1, Cat-0 and Cat-M1 devices. In this post we get down to the really interesting development in 3GPP on this topic: Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) and Cat-NB1 devices (previously referred to as Cat M2 devices).
Continue reading Cellular IoT – The Dust Slowly Settles – Part 4 – Cat-NB1 Devices
After an overview in part 1 and and introduction to rather simple enhancements for the Internet of Things (IoT) with LTE Cat-1 and Cat-0 devices in part 2, this 3rd part in my mini-series on the cellular Internet of Things (IoT) takes a look at some of the more profound changes in the LTE specifications for IoT, Cat-M1 and Cat-M2 devices and network support for them.
Continue reading Cellular IoT – The Dust Slowly Settles – Part 3 – Cat-M1 Devices
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!
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