tl;dr: Over the past weeks, I’ve put together a Firefox add-on for SSL certificate pinning so I would notice if ever a man-in-the-middle would use forged certificates to spy on me when I interact with my home servers, banking websites, and so on. I feel a lot safer now again! You can find it here and the source code here.
Once upon a time…
It’s early days in 5G deployment and while Vodafone, as far as I know, has not yet launched their 5G network in the UK they have already published a coverage map so one can get an impression of where 5G will be available once they open up their network.
A bit of different personal speed record today: When I was recently on a high speed train between Cologne and Paris, I was surprised when a speed test gave me well over 100 Mbit/s in the downlink direction when the train raced through the French countryside at almost 300 km/h.
Time flies and I am always astounded that I’ve been writing this blog since 2005. Over the years, quite a number of posts have accumulated. As my current WordPress profile bundles them in pages of 10 posts, I’m now on page 255 and thus close to an 8-bit overflow. If you don’t get it, you are probably too young and never lived through the 8-bit home computer era ^^
After my post on the stellar data rates that can theoretically be achieved by combining 60 MHz of bandwidth of 4G LTE with 100 MHz 5G NR in the 3.5 GHz range, I think it is also necessary to look at real life and have a look at how much capacity is actually offered by a live network cell when it is fully loaded.
In the previous two posts on 5G NR massive MIMO, a.k.a. beam forming, I’ve gone into the basic principles of what it can be used for in practice and how antennas for beam forming will look like. Great background information from Keysight and Ericsson respectively. The next question I then had was how mobile device and the network communicate with each other to adapt downlink transmission in mobility situations.
It’s been a while since I had a list of recommendations of other interesting wireless related sites on the net. This time around my picks are not standard websites or even blogs but Twitter and Youtube accounts. This means that their focus is on images and videos, perfect to get an idea of how equipment looks like and how it is used in practice!
A bit off the beaten path, I’ve been to Helmond this week, a city in the Netherlands not far from Eindhoven for a very particular purpose: To visit the Home Computer museum there that opened last year. Run by volunteers, I can’t quite remember anymore how I stumbled across them on the web, perhaps it was their short videos about how they found some space at the border of the city center and how it was converted for putting their collection on display. Based to the size and significance of Helmond I was expecting a small museum with a few exhibits which is why I was quite surprised when I saw its real dimensions.
Continue reading An Afternoon In The Computer Museum in Helmond
Not long now and we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon! 50 years ago, on the 20th July 1969, humankind’s greatest tech adventure culminated with Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar surface. Altough I wasn’t born back then, this has inspired me from early childhood and over the years my fascination grew even more. Even after several trips to the Manned Space Flight center in Huston and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, I still get goosebumps when I pick up a book about a particular aspect of the Apollo program. So in anticipation of the 50th anniversary celebrations, here are the top three books I think one should have read about Project Apollo: Continue reading 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 – My Book Recommendations
When you accidentally drop your phone and it looks like on the picture on the left when you pick it up, your plans for the rest of the day are pretty much out the window. There are several options after such an accident one of them is to just get another device and start from scratch. This is what I did and spent the next 3 hours installing LineageOS and all apps and data from scratch again. Once done I thought I’d make the best out of the broken phone, which was still working, and see if I could have been faster (next time…) by just cloning the complete Android installation from one device to the other. This works great on the PC with Linux and I regularly do this to make sure I have a backup SSD with a working clone of my installation. After several hours and approaching the issue from several angles, I have to say that I came up empty handed.
Continue reading Is There A Way To Clone An Android Installation?