Richi's blog

A blog about personal projects and experiences

  • 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 […]

  • an ultrabook for developers

    My old netbook still runs, but it shows signs of senility. I have been thinking of a replacement for a while, but as it still worked, that was constantly postponed. When I first read about project sputnik, I thought this is great news and I want one. The device that followed looked very nice, but […]

  • 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 […]

  • revisiting enable_if

    It was roughly 2008, when I wanted to make a template function for serialization, only available to container types. Template stuff can become complicated at times, and from reading the documentation boost::enable_if seemed to be just what I needed. I didn’t get it to work, and I blamed Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 for not being […]

  • 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 […]

  • VW Bus Treffen Schwarzsee

    Last saturday we went to the vw bus gathering at the Schwarzsee. There were more than 460 VW Busses present from all different types. I had the impression, to see less vehicles than last time, but comparing the pictures from 2009, I’m not so sure anymore. It’s amazing in how good a shape some of […]

  • sniffing i2c with the BusPirate

    I received my BusPirate v4 a while ago, but didn’t really use it so far. That’s a cool analysis/debug tool for serial buses such as uart, spi, i2c and the like. For me i2c is the most interesting. From time to time, the communication doesn’t work as it should, and so far, I worked it […]