Category: Technology

Design: The Scourge of the Web

When the printing press was invented, we had the understanding that text is best read when contrast is high. They didn't use black ink on paper for nothing. I bet they didn't even consider any other color. Read More »
By halfgaar, 7 years ago, on June 02, 2013, at 12:06 | Comments closed

Creative Audigy 2 ZS design flaws

I would really like to know what the designers at Creative Labs have in mind when they design sound cards. Their cards seem to be broken by design. The Live card was bad enough with its random collection of DACs and DPS's, but the Audigy 2 ZS seems no better. Aside from the fact that it's advertised as 96 kHz and 24 bit, which it isn't, it has serious design issues. I had some sound anomalies, so I decided to measure and test. I found: Read More »
By halfgaar, 8 years ago, on May 09, 2013, at 13:05 | 14 comments

Distracted by the Boston bombing, CISPA passes the house on April 18th 2013

CISPA allows the U.S. government to request information from private corporations about you without a warrant, without ever telling you. Furthermore, it protects these corporations against any legal recourse. Read More »
By halfgaar, 8 years ago, on April 27, 2013, at 13:04 | Comments closed

Postfix, SASL and rimap: making sure the domain is not stripped from the user name

When you want to use your IMAP account as authentication for Postfix, you can set the SASL mechanism to "rimap". However, by default, it will not supply the realm (domain) and therefore will authenticate with an incomplete username (john instead of john@bla.com). Read More »
By halfgaar, 8 years ago, on April 23, 2013, at 17:04 | Comments closed

HP Officejet 6600 in Ubuntu (derivates)

A reminder which printer type I have to select when I reinstall my mom's Officejet in Linux: “HP Officejet 6600 E-all-in-one Printer - h711a”. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 8 years ago, on April 07, 2013, at 21:04 | 1 comment

SSHFS on Windows

Just as a jot, a tool to access SSH shares via SSHFS on Windows: win-sshfs. It gives you a drive letter, instead of fiddling with separate tools to access files. Read More »
By halfgaar, 8 years ago, on March 25, 2013, at 18:03 | Comments closed

Disabling http(s) trimming from Firefox address bar

Some time ago, the Firefox developers decided it was a good idea to trim the http(s):// from the address in the address bar. Since then, I've been getting HTTPS site where I don't want it, because I can't see what I'm doing. Especially so because HTTPS has no concept of virtual host names, and putting https:// in front of any domain might put you on a completely different web site. So, when I accidentally typed https:// in front of an URL once, it will remember that, but not show me... Read More »
By halfgaar, 8 years ago, on March 24, 2013, at 12:03 | 1 comment

Cheap Logitech USB video webcam

Noting this down to not forget. The Logitech HD Webcam C270 is a cheap webcam that is simply a USB video device, so it works in all OS's without special drivers. Read More »
By halfgaar, 8 years ago, on March 20, 2013, at 13:03 | Comments closed

20×2 LCD display

There are a million 20x2 characters LCDs out there, but this is one that I like: http://www.okaphone.com/artikel.asp?id=475234 Farnell code: 9448780 Read More »
By halfgaar, 8 years ago, on March 11, 2013, at 21:03 | Comments closed

Making my USB webcam not the first sound card

When I booted my system with the webcam plugged in, it was sound device 0, instead of 1. This is annoying, so I added this to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf: Read More »
By halfgaar, 8 years ago, on March 04, 2013, at 10:03 | Comments closed