Computer people are hereby banned from naming software projects ever again. GNU is not Uniplexed Information and Computing Service Image Manipulation Program Tool Kit Library Object Introspection Repository There is also the messenger appli…
I bought a smart power plug for €6,49 at the Action today. Lots of home automation stuff assumes you want to use Home Assistant. I do not want Home Assistant, I just want to use a bunch of simple and industry standard tools like curl, jq an…
Continue reading for the good story behind the Karl-Marx-Stadt magnet. I went on a trip through Germany together with a long time friend, Rik. We wanted to visit some cities of the former East Germany (DDR) and look at what had remained fro…
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it. Big centralized social networks run on big iron. Those have cool aspects and can be challenging to maintain, but ultimately I find them boring: you just throw a lot of VC money at the p…
These kind of commands command are useful if you want it now and not any later time, unless you explicitly run the command. You wouldn’t be the first person to discover they have been running a random daemon draining their laptop battery fo…
Yesterday I saw on the Dutch second hand website Marktplaats a new listing for a Microsoft Touch. It’s a touch-tone telephone made by Ascom Zelcom AG as the OEM. It came with 3 floppies and I really wonder what those were used for, because
I bought a second hand Cisco IR829 in a thrift store for 25€ without a power supply. On the bottom it says that it runs on 12-24 volts and draws 6 amps max. I soldered a 20 volts USB-C PD trigger board to the P4 connector of an old ATX powe…
When talking about scalability in the context of software, it is always about being able to handle more: users, data, network traffic, etcetera. That might not be without trade-offs: it is important to consider scalability to any size, so i…
One my favorite computers ever manufactured is the Canon Notejet, manufacted by the Canon subsidiary Canon Computer Systems, Inc. in a collaboration with IBM. Today I found out that Computer Chronicles gave the Canon NoteJet IIIcx (also bra…
This is a rather short article, but I hope it will be useful to someone who is Googling their problem. Sometimes, my Lenovo ThinkPad T480 has an empty main battery on Fedora Linux and just shuts down non-gracefullly at the moment I try to r…
Setting up a virtual machine (VM) on Linux using open source software is the standard way of doing things, but on macOS it usually involves VMware Fusion or Boot Camp. QEMU is my favorite hypervisor and wanted to use it when I have to use m…
I got a second hand IBM ThinkPad 365XD from Marktplaats, the local version of eBay in The Netherlands. It contained a very old installation of SuSE Linux, but with a corrupt ext3 filesystem. Adding a different disk required entering a super…