I am quite unsatisfied with the current state of full disk encryption solutions available for use with Windows 10 on a Laptop with SSD. This blag post will mirror some of what [Bruce Schneier already said on the matter][Schneier2]: I will discuss some of the options and point out problems. I am not offering a solution, just a variety of bad choices to pick from.
[Schneier2]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/encrypting_wind.html
Do you want to know more?
So you develop in [Microsoft Visual Studio Community Edition](https://www.visualstudio.com/de/vs/community/) and you long for the old days when there was a way to get the [MSDN Library](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/) as an offline help file? Fear not, you still can. Open Visual Studio, type
Ctrl+Q to open the quick access bar, usually located in the upper right corner of your interface. Enter Help Viewer, it should yield one result by that name, marked as an *"individual component"*. Selecting that entry should allow you to download and install the Help Viewer. Now relaunch Visual Studio and start the Help Viewer via quick access in the same way. You will be prompted whether you want to download some *content* - and I bet you do.
I am not very disciplined. So trying not to be distracted while working at my computer is a major project for me. Since "deep work" is en vogue, it is possible to disable notifications in nearly every app nowadays. But there are often tiny bits one cannot change: Slack's icon in the notification area is one of those things: Whenever you have an unread message in any of the channels you are part of, Slack will show a small blue dot on its icon in the notification area. One can argue that it is not that hard to ignore that but fishing is also not that hard and I cannot do it. What I can do though is overwrite
slack-taskbar-unread.png by slack-taskbar-rest.png in %APPDATA%\Local\slack\app-VERSION\resources\app.asar.unpacked\src\static\.
Spoiler: My main point in this post is not given away by the title.
But first things first: What are all those words?
Would you like to know more?
Part of me wants to write about all the [horror](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ten-malicious-libraries-found-on-pypi-python-package-index/) and [glory](https://crates.io) there is to be seen in package management, but quite frankly it'll take too long. Instead, I will just leave you with a tiny piece of advice. Here comes. If you are on Windows and you want to install a *legitimate* Python package (like for example [PyCryptodome](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pycryptodome), because naturally you are **fully aware** that [PyCrypto is dead](https://github.com/dlitz/pycrypto/issues/173).), which in reality is a bottomless pit, at the center of which there is a C library, straight from hell - then maybe get the [Microsoft Compiler for Python](http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44266) instead of, who knows, wasting hours or even days looking for a less reasonable solution. Credit, as so very often, [goes to stackoverflow](https://stackoverflow.com/a/27327236/1578458).
I am currently on vacation and my Hotel offers free WiFi in the lobby. The reception on the third floor, where my room is, is pretty bad on my Thinkpad and my phone doesn't receive anything at all.
Fortunately, I am always carrying a high gain USB WiFi stick with me that gave me almost optimal signal strength.
Having 2 network cards ((My Thinkpad's internal card (named "Wi-Fi") and the USB card (named "Wi-Fi 2") )) I was able to use my Windows 8.1 machine as a Wireless Repeater (more…)
On 2016-08-01 a law came into force, allowing customers in Germany to use any internet router they want, as long as it meets the providers requirements.
On that day I decided to buy a Fritz!Box 6490, for three reasons:
1. I wanted to replace the crappy router my provider gave me (which didn't even have WiFi)
2. besides its routing function, it is able to stream up to 4 concurrent TV programs into the Network
3. it was the only device that fulfilled the above-mentioned requirements.
I wanted to setup [Tvheadend](https://tvheadend.org/) to act as an intermediate between clients and the router, because it would allow me to have an EPG, stream the same program to 2 clients, while only occupying a single stream of the Fritz!Box, and allow me to record TV shows.
As you can see from the date of this post, it took me one year to figure out how to do it.
This blag post describes how to use a [Raspberry Pi](http://amzn.to/2wjICvo) to remotely "press" and potentially "hold" the power button on a PC. This is my first non-trivial (still pretty-trivial) hardware-related project. So don't expect anything too fancy.
Would you like to know more?
I have a [problem with my Nokia 3](https://android.stackexchange.com/q/180669/197410) and decided to try the [Nokia customer support](https://www.nokia.com/en_int/phones/support) while doing some [recreational math](https://projecteuler.net/), that's what a great Saturday is to me. Don't judge. During the conversation, I grew very suspicious that I was talking to a chat bot. This was the first time for me hearing about chat robots being deployed in support by a [respectable company like Nokia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#Controversies), so I decided to make sure I wasn't being paranoid. Time for a Turing test! I guess you can never really know, but I am quite convinced they lie to me and are actually robots. You can try it yourself, just go to [their support site](https://www.nokia.com/en_int/phones/support) and start a chat. Would you like to know more?
My lamenting will be about the overall way in which device encryption is implemented in Android. This is mostly a collection of links where you can find out more about how it ~~worked across the recent versions~~ all went south. This article strictly expresses my own, badly informed opinion and you should check all the provided references carefully before forming your own.
read();
We decided to use the javascript markdown engine [showdown](https://github.com/showdownjs/showdown) for the blawg, and [$\KaTeX$](https://khan.github.io/KaTeX/) for rendering latex. If you think that's a good way to go: Here is how to do it with wordpress.
I like to have all "stuff that I need to do something with" collected at one place. For the virtual world, this place is my email inbox. To remind me of things, I send myself an email and can be sure that I'll process it at a later point in time for example. Having another place with the result of RSS feeds always annoyed me a bit. As soon as I realized that I find this annoying, a solution was easy to implement of course:
aptitude install rss2email
r2e new your@email.address
r2e add blag https://blag.nullteilerfrei.de/feed/
*/10 * * * * r2e run
Github has a history of not giving a frack what their users want ((https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github)) ((https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues)). For example, a few developer friends of mine were reluctant to click any links in their notifications-page, since after they clicked the link, the notification was marked as read and you might lose track of it, if you just close the browser tab ((on a side note, tellmewhenitcloses.com is pretty handy to avoid too many notifications in the first place)).
So David Badura ((https://github.com/DavidBadura)) and I decided to fix this problem by writing a browser extension. The result can be found on Github: https://github.com/larsborn/GithubToDos. After installation (also possible in Opera btw, the best browser there is), the extension injects an "Add ToDo" button on every issue page and pull request. When clicking, it, the URL gets saved to the local storage of the browser ((Using local storage is handy for people that are not very concerned about privacy and just use the cloud synchronization feature of their browser: the content of their ToDo list will then also just be synced to all their devices.)). The list of all URLs added like this can then be access through a new button in the header toolbar of github.
You can clone the project from github and add it as an "Unpacked extension" or just head to the Github ToDos on the Chrome Store and just install it from there. Pull requests are welcome, open an issue, if you find a bug, open source yadayada.
You can clone the project from github and add it as an "Unpacked extension" or just head to the Github ToDos on the Chrome Store and just install it from there. Pull requests are welcome, open an issue, if you find a bug, open source yadayada.