Close to an 8-Bit Overflow On This Blog

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 ^^

5G: How To Control Beamforming

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.

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An Afternoon In The Computer Museum in Helmond

Helmond signA 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.

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50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 – My Book Recommendations

Project Apollo InsigniaNot 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

Is There A Way To Clone An Android Installation?

Impact crater on phone displayWhen 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.

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Book Review: All These Worlds

When I finished the second book of the Bobiverse trilogy by Dennis E. Taylor, I immediately jumped into ‘All These Worlds‘, the third and (so far) final part of this brilliant science fiction series. Short summary of what happened so far without too many spoilers: Geek brain gets frozen today, wakes up as replicant a hundred years later, explores the Galaxy and tries to save mankind with the help of his clones. The second book ended with the clear indication that in the third part, Bob and his ‘descendant’ clones would have to deal with ‘the Others’ and that a peaceful solution was probably not in the cards.

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How To Run A Server At Home Without An IPv4 Address

IPv4 tunnelingOnce upon a time the Internet was bidirectional and everyone could run a server at their end. Unfortunately, these days are long gone and many ISPs today, especially cable providers, do not assign a public IPv4 address to their customers. Not even when you ask them nicely. Not even for money, unless you are a business customer who is willing to pay through the nose for the privilege. Fortunately, there is a way to run servers at home and make them accessible to the outside world and an easy one at that. The following text and shell commands are from a talk I gave at GPN19 (in German).

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