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 … Continue reading A Refurbished Lenovo X250 As My ‘New’ Notebook
Once upon a time, Skype was THE voice and video calling platform for me. It was independent, decentralized and offered end-to-end encryption. But that was a long time ago, today it’s centralized, more closed source than ever, and encryption seems to be rather optional. But on PCs there was little else that was usable and … Continue reading Nextcloud Talk – Voice and Video Calling – First Impressions
Over the past two days the Internet has been full of news stories about Meltdown and Spectre and how horribly and devastating these issues are. Chipset vendors scramble to update their microcode, operating systems get patched and even web browsers get an update. What I found missing in pretty much all articles, however, was how … Continue reading Meltdown – The Technical Lunchtime Pitch
A few days ago on a sunny but freezing cold Friday afternoon I had a few hours to visit the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge. I was very much looking forward to it as the first computer I ever programmed on was a Sinclair ZX80 that was built in the UK back in 1980 … Continue reading The Computer Must Be Earthed!
7 Days, 15 Terabytes and 1 Kernel Bug Later was the headline of a post back in March this year in which I described how I was chasing a problem with file read and write performance that got worse the more RAM I put into my notebook. With 16 GB of RAM, file write speeds … Continue reading My Kernel Bug’s Gone With Ubuntu 16.04
One of the biggest revelations I had during my (ongoing) journey to discover how a processor really works is to find out how that mystical microcode in a CPU is implemented. Things culminated in the 4-Bit Nibbler Do-It-Yourself CPU project that uses a microcode ROM in the control part. For understanding how microcode works it … Continue reading Microcode Implementation In A Real Processor
It’s become almost a tradition for me in December each year to have a look back at what happened in the previous 12 months in the telecoms industry and in my private technology endeavors that have left long lasting impression or have marked the start of something new. And so here we go again, in … Continue reading Things That Moved Me In 2015
Just about a year ago I bought my first Raspberry Pi out of curiosity and to get my Owncloud server project started. At the time it was an experiment but it turned out to be the most liberating computing experience I had in many years. A large part of this is due to Owncloud that … Continue reading Some Thoughts On My 8th Raspberry Pi
Nostalgia post – part 2. During the revival of my electronic kits use from my teenage years about which I blogged previously I stumbled over a 30 year old computer advertisement conveniently put on the back of one of the instruction manuals. No, we are not talking about computers as we know them today. No, … Continue reading Learning How Computers Work vs. How To Work With Computers
In part 1 and 2 of this review I've been taking a look at the dual-SIM capabilities of this device for voice and data and came away quite impressed. Part 3 now concentrates on the Android experience on this smartphone. Can it really be good for 138 Euros (SIM free) including taxes? The quick answer … Continue reading The Samsung Galaxy Y Duos 6102 – Dual-SIM And Android – Part 3 – Entry Level Evolution