Category: Uncategorized
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libreboot and trisquel
Last month I saw somebody on the fsfe mailing list talk about an OpenMoko phone. As I had one of those collecting dust in the drawer, I asked if anybody was interested. Promptly I got an offer to exchange it for a Lenovo X60 notebook with libreboot. I didn’t need another notebook, but libreboot seemed […]
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xapo debit card backed by BitCoin
It will take a while until we can pay with BitCoin at most merchants. For the time being xapo introduced a visa debit card that credits your expenses directly from your BitCoin online wallet at xapo. Since it runs over the visa network, and since there are currency conversions involved, it can’t be as cheap […]
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missing or lost -> stolen
When we went to our ski holiday last week, we had a lot of luggage. So we had to hurry when leaving or switching the train. It always worked out well, even when we had to run, or walk a stairway twice. When we left the train on the way back in our home town, […]
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Code coverage for C++
Ever since I wrote automated tests, I wondered how complete the coverage was. Of course you have a feeling which parts are better covered than others. For some legacy code you might prefer not to know at all. But I thought test coverage was something easy to do with a language running on a VM […]
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prevent or react
Beginning of this year, there was a very tragic event prominently present in all newspapers across Switzerland. The whole thing was so tragic, that I won’t add a link here. But there is one aspect, that kept me thinking for the last two weeks. Today’s blog post by Bruce Schneier triggered me to write about […]
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decentralized social communication
When you think about social networks, do you even realize how centralized and compartmentalized the prevalent systems are? Neither centralization nor artificial borders are inherent traits of a network though. Imagine you could only talk to customers of the same phone company you use. Or you could exchange emails only with customers of the same […]
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wake up to a clean state
I used to have problems when my ultrabook woke up from sleeping mode. Nothing serious, but annoying. One thing was that the empathy messenger application fully occupied one CPU core, effectively transforming the power out of the battery into heat. I grew tired of manually terminate it every time. So I did some research, and […]
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Paying online without a credit card
I can still remember the times when travelling without a credit card could be really inconvenient. But since Maestro and Cirrus cards work around the globe, it’s fine without. The time where shopping on the internet without a credit card was inconvenient to impossible was not so long ago. In a recent post, I announced […]
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fido universal 2nd factor authentication
In the time since my rant about passwords, more and more sites adopt OAuth. I don’t like this development. Usually they offer login with facebook, sometimes with google or twitter and rarely with linkedin. The problem with OAuth is that the site operator decides what providers are supported. With OpenID on the other hand, I […]