Category: Projects

  • the infinity mirror

    Lately while browsing through thinkgeek, I stumbled upon the infinite dungeon corridor. It looks cool, but they still have no affordable shipping options. That got me thinking that it should be possible to make an infinite mirror with the kids. It didn’t take long to find a recipe for how to go about it. Finding […]

  • A strange kind of holiday

    It all started about two weeks ago when my wife discovered water on the kitchen floor that kept coming. The plumber who came immediately, found out that two parts of the waste pipe shifted out of each other, leaving a gap open. He told us that this must have happened two or three weeks earlier. […]

  • Trezor BitCoin HardwareWallet

    Today I received my Trezor BitCoin HardwareWallet. When I ordered it in June 2013, the expected delivery Date was October. But as it happens all that often with BitCoin related hardware, the dates get pushed back. They offered a device with plastic case for XBT 1 and one with an alloy case for XBT 3. […]

  • Smart Radios

    For a couple of years I have been running mpd (music player daemon) on an Alix, connected to a stereo in the office. The Alix runs headless, but I have a variety of options to control it: gmpc on the notebook, Droid MPD client on the phone and fookebox in the browser. Over the years […]

  • We have been using passwords for too long

    Every time I have to register to a website using a password, I grow more annoyed. Passwords were fine when you only had one, to log in to your corporate mainframe. But these days, computers are better at cracking passwords than humans at remembering them. It only gets worse with the more sites you maintain […]

  • Pimp my miner

    For a while now, I thought about mounting a simple display somewhere that shows the most important parameters of my BitCoin miner. First I started with an AtMega equipped with an Ethernet module. But parsing json without any library support became too cumbersome quickly. So I copy pasted together a small python script, and used […]

  • chording bluetooth keyboard

    Wearable computing is much older than Google glass, and even head mounted displays were around for a while. Personally, I’m looking forward to affordable devices of that type. The display seems to be a very good solution, while voice entry can be awkward. The Hak5 podcast aired an episode last year about a guy that […]

  • BitCoin mining pools

    As stated in an earlier post, after I was mining for a few days, the 50btc mining pool was hacked. A month later, I’m still waiting for my coins. So I tried some other pools. As advised in many places, I avoided the biggest pools, thus mitigating the risk of a 51% attack. I mined […]

  • trading agents

    I always considered finance and accounting as the most boring things you can do with a computer. And while you can earn big bucks, working for a Swiss bank, I have always preferred topics with a more physical background. But BitCoin got me interested in how some aspects of the established financial systems work. Looking […]

  • Mining BitCoins

    Today I read an article called “Why you should care about BitCoin” with a quote that I want to repeat here:  “Hackers are the animals that can detect a storm coming or an earthquake. They just know, even though they don’t know why, and there are two big things hackers are excited about now and […]