Author Archives: admin

Because of my interest in BitCoin I was confronted with the question of the expected number of attempts to achieve a specific result if the probability of achieving the result per attempt is fixed. In BitCoin mining, the miners test … Continue reading →

I am fascinated by the new electronic currency BitCoin, so I have decided to accept BitCoin in exchange for freelance coding work. Obviously I can not bet my whole livelihood on it, so for the time being I would be … Continue reading →

UPDATE: Not sure if it worked in the beginning and got messed up somehow by other people fiddling with the computer, or if it never worked. Anyway, I was unable to get Skype to work on the Notebook under Ubuntu … Continue reading →

Since my last entry was about MacPorts, I just wanted to note that the last time I had to reinstall OS X (because of replacing the hard drive with a SSD), I decided to switch to Homebrew instead. It seems … Continue reading →

Just a short snippet, because I keep forgetting this: to upgrade installed ports in MacPorts, use “sudo port -u upgrade outdated”. The -u flag tells ports to uninstall outdated versions of ports (the ones that have newer versions that are … Continue reading →

It is almost too simple to blog about, but on the other hand, it caused me some grief. Short summary: fixing the WLAN channel fixed the WLAN performance. It had never occured to me to try switching the channel because … Continue reading →

I finally got WPA2 to work on my old Mac Mini G4, which is running Ubuntu Linux 10.04 server edition for PowerPC (Update: WLAN worked for a while, but it seems to be very unstable. Could be the location where … Continue reading →

Valentine’s day is upon us, and like many other special days throughout the year a pesky aspect of the internet rears it’s head again: e-cards. For one thing, spammers jump on the opportunity and send around intriguing e-card announcements of … Continue reading →

The S.M.A.R.T. monitor has been warning about imminent failure of the hard drive in my mother’s laptop, so it was time to exchange it. Since it is running Ubuntu Linux (version 9.10, Karmic Koala), I was looking for ways to … Continue reading →

Whether they loved it or hated it, all reviewers of the iPad agreed that usability of “normal” PCs for average users is atrocious. And I have to agree: whenever I take a look at the PC of a friend or … Continue reading →