Category: Software
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BitCoin hits CHF 100 mark
Yesterday one BitCoin was, for the first time, worth more than CHF 100! When I first learned about BitCoin in early 2011, CPU mining was still enabled in the default client. I mined for a few days, but it was probably already too late for the CPU. GPU’s took over before that. Last year, you […]
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Adding a display to rfid time tracking
More than a year ago, I blogged here about using RFID to track presence times in the BORM ERP system. I used the system a lot since then. But the BlinkM was really limited as the only immediate feedback channel. To use it with multiple users, a display was needed. The default Arduino compatible displays […]
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GPGPU programming class
It’s already a while back that I completed the coursera class “Heterogeneous Parallel Programming“. It was mainly concerned with cuda, which is Nvidia’s GPGPU framework. GPGPU is about running common computations on the graphics card. The class also quickly covered OpenCL, OpenACC, C++AMP and MPI. In the programming assignments, we juggled a lot with low […]
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minimalist lasershow
For a long time I marvelled at sites with self built laser shows. There is truly amazing stuff out there. But most of them look like really lots of work. And with simple commercial units getting cheaper, I don’t know if all that effort can be justified. So I had a look at the commercial […]
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my first package in the official debian repository
I have created deb packages for a couple of years now. Primarily for software that I created myself, or was somehow involved. But sometimes I also packaged stuff that I just used, and wanted to be able to conveniently install and upgrade on different systems. One of these was printrun, a host software for reprap […]
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locally encrypted remote storage
Unlike the ordinary users, tech savy people are well aware of what can happen to your data, if you store it on cloud services such as dropbox. There are services that promise to encrypt your data locally, so that they can’t access them, a prominent one being wuala. On one hand, I don’t know if […]
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switching the christmas tree online
The first time I got interested in home automation, was when browsing the arduino libraries. That was all about X10, which communicates over power lines. There are switches that can replace the regular light switches and are pretty cheap in the US. If you want such switches here in Switzerland, you’ll be surprised how expensive […]
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accelerated ray tracer
In all the great online classes I attended over the last year, there was one topic missing. Finally I found an offering for a Computer Graphics class. After all, that’s the field I ‘ve been working in for the last five and a half years. The class is offered at edx.org and is from Berkley. […]
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rs232 bluetooth adapter
Usually, headless embedded systems can be managed conveniently using ssh. The consumer focused devices have web interfaces. SSH is perfect, for when the system is running, but if the boot process has problems, there is no screen to read the boot messages that the kernel prints out. For this purpose these devices usually log to […]
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RaspberryPi reading analog input using an AtTiny through i2c
The raspberrypi has some GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) pins. That’s great for experimenting with electronics for example sensors and actuators. It’s totally different than an Arduino in many respects, but that’s something they have in common. Some of the pins have special functions. For example SPI, I2C, UART … There is a breakboard adapter […]