A blog about personal projects and experiences
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ScroogeCoin
After a long pause, I just started attending a MOOC again. It’s on Coursera, from Princeton and it’s about BitCoin. In one of the first lectures the teacher goes through some simple hypothetical digital coin concepts. I don’t know if the lectures are publicly available piecewise, but as a whole they are at youtube. Jump […]
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When VISA doesn’t work
I used to order stuff from dealextreme on a regular basis over the last few years. Like many other customers I asked them to accept BitCoin payments. But that didn’t happen so far. So we are left with the payment options from the last century for the time being. It used to work acceptably so […]
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Verifying downloads
Last week I stumbled across a post from last year, where somebody described how it was impossible to download an important infrastructure program securely on Windows. My first reaction was of course to pity the poor souls that are still stuck with Windows. How easy is it to just type apt-get install and have all […]
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How much luggage fits into a vintage grand tourer?
Our camper has an engine problem, so we had to look for alternatives for this years summer holiday. We looked at last minute offers, but bringing all our own food to Greece didn’t seem like such a good plan. The kids wanted to sleep in a tent anyway, so we went to Tenero in the […]
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connecting home securely
It has been probably close to a decade that I run a small server at home. At first it was only because I could not find a web hosting company that would serve my fcgi libwt apps at an affordable price. Then I added this blog to it. In the meantime I added a lot […]
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ubuntu phone will be great, but it is not yet
The BQ Aquaris ubuntu phone that I waited for so eagerly was delivered today. Full of anticipation I unpacked it and switched it on. After playing with it for a while the excitement turned into dissatisfaction. I hate to say it, but on a phone the solid base and polished user experience is not enough, […]
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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, […]