I’m always amazed by the unexpected things happening at Congress. This year, or rather at 35c3 in December 2018, I could hardly believe what kind of gift I got and how I could immediately put it to good use to rescue a 30 year old program of mine from an ancient storage media.
Continue reading Congress, an SX64 and Rescuing a 30 Year Old Program
For many years, I’ve been using the RSS button built into Firefox to copy and paste the feed link of a blog or website to my favorite RSS reader, Selfoss. That is until recently, however, when Mozilla decided to remove all RSS functionality, including the RSS button from the codebase. Shame on you Mozilla! Yes, compared to the billions of Facebook and Twitter users, those few (?) millions who use RSS seem to be nothing to you. Thanks for nothing! Frankly, I could not imagine to browse all the different sites I follow manually to check for new content without going utterly mad.
Continue reading An RSS Icon And Feed Link to Your Left Now!
I value my privacy and have no intention to put apps on my devices whose first act is to scrape my phone book. That’s why I’m a heavy user of ‘Conversations‘, an open source mobile chat app for Android with end-to-end encryption. Unfortunately, Conversations is only available for Android. There are some iOS Jabber apps available as well but I always found them lacking in one way or the other and could thus not recommend them to iPhone users. Until now!
When I recently flew from Europe to the US with Delta Airlines I was quite positively surprised about the Internet access that was offered on board. Over recent years, I noticed that Internet connectivity in the air significantly slowed down to a point where it is almost unusable. On this flight however, I could browse the Internet just fine and get a lot of stuff done for which I needed to be online. However, I noticed an interesting traffic shaping method that made downloading larger files impossible.
When you spend 16 hours a day at Congress, there is some time to do things that one otherwise would not come around to do. For 35c3, I took a model kit of a Cray Y-MP with me to assemble that has space for a Raspberry Pi Zero in its center cabinet. A bit of time and half a gram of super glue later and I had the perfect combination of what once was the fastest and one of the most expensive computers in the world in the 1980s and one of the smallest and cheapest computers running Linux in 2018.
Back in November last year I wrote about ‘The Supermen‘, the story of Seymour Cray and the birth of supercomputing and mused about my personal reasons to learn about this particular piece of computing history. Reading about something is one thing, getting hands-on experience with technology from the 1960s quite another. Not possible you say?
Continue reading Chasing Seymour, Supercomputing And Punchcards
In the previous post I had a lot at how I can get my newly acquired NB-IoT module connect to the network. This is part two that now focuses on how to actually send some data back and forth across the NB-IoT network to a server on the Internet.
Back in 2016 and 2017 I had quite a number of articles on NB-IoT, the Narrow Band Internet of Things technology that can run alongside LTE to connect things to the Internet over the cellular network. From being very power efficient to run over years on batteries to increased in-house coverage, the standard contains a lot of bells and whistles to address a wide variety of use cases. While I believe that ‘connecting things’ is the next big thing after mobilizing the Internet, it’s been very slow in the making, at least when it comes to cellular connectivity. I would have been quite keen to experiment with NB-IoT but up to now I didn’t come across devices and SIM cards that could be bought that would support it. Until a few days ago that was when I discovered an NB-IoT module for the Raspberry Pi on Amazon so it was finally time to go from theory to practice on the technology.
One of the technology mysteries most people don’t really want to spend a second thought on is how the operating system of a PC is booted. When installing Linux next to Windows on the same disk, however, or when you plan to move a disk from one PC to another at some point, or when you want to restore a system image from a backup, it’s worth to understand at least the basics of the process to fix things in case something goes wrong. In a recent edition of the c’t magazine (see here, in German, article behind a paywall) there have been a number of great articles about the topic and here are my takeaways that will help me in the future.
There is a lot of media attention in Germany on the upcoming spectrum auction for 5G that is scheduled for early 2019. Like in previous rounds, spectrum is awarded via an auction to the highest bidders. Someone recently asked me if spectrum has always been auctioned so I had a look in my archive to find some details from days long gone.