Richi's blog

A blog about personal projects and experiences

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • Wallis Ski Holiday

    Last week we spent a ski holiday in the Wallis. We stayed with Mirella’s mother. Most days we went to Bürchen to practice skiing with Levin, and have some sledge rides with Noah. Levin went to the ski school for half a day, but he didn’t like it at all. He preferred being taught by […]

  • 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 […]

  • Skiweekend in Hasliberg

    Last weekend I was in Hasliberg wih the ski club “Schneefreaks” from Steinhausen. They booked two full days of tandem flights. So I did ten flights with skis and two with snow board. The weather was almost perfect and so was the snow.

  • 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 […]

  • One legged speed flying

    Today, I took a day off, to go to the Gemsstock for speed flying. It was almost as sunny as the forecast predicted. The cirrus became dense in the afternoon. Although the prevailing wind was north west, sometimes it blew down the slope, especially in the lower parts. But it was well within the comfort […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]