From a Nokia to a Note and back again: experiences  Tags: hardware, keyboards, computers.
About 22 months ago I got my first touchscreen phone and my first Android. I was pretty excited about this Galaxy Note II and it fully lived up to my expectations. Last week it broke down.

I'm back to my good old Nokia E75. Officially called a smartphone, it runs Symbian which is as powerful as your average shoebox. It has a numeric keyboard and a slide-qwerty, which means that you can touch-type and blindly navigate even inside your pocket. It is so small it actually fits in the palm of

Now that I've actually had an SSD for a while...  Tags: computers, hardware.
Since I have an SSD, I'm never going to go back. The voice in the back of my head that's telling me I am expending write cycles every time I copy an iso is totally worth it.

An SSD is not just faster, it's an order of magnitude faster.

No, not by any benchmarks. Harddrives hit over 125MB/s and my SSD gets about 475MB/s, so at 3.8x faster it's by no means an order of magnitude. However, we're forgetting that you hit the maximum harddrive's throughput about, what, 0.001% of the time? The rest of the time, we are waiting for this thing called a "read-write head" to move and the thing called "platter" to turn around.

Laptops, SSDs and wear  Tags: hardware, computers.
So I'm thinking about getting a new laptop with an SSD. No actually,
a laptop and an SSD. There's a big difference: When comparing some similar laptops, it turns out that the ones with an SSD are much more expensive.

Take the Asus K56CB-XX311H and HP Envy 6-1208ed. Same CPU, RAM, one has an SSD of 128GB and the other a 500GB HDD.

The routing project  Tags: networking, computers, Windows.
I've worked at this project for a couple months, every few weeks spending a couple hours testing some new idea. It was at internship and I only finished it by coincidence a few days before I also finished internship (and I graduated, yay!).

The challenge was to setup internet on my laptop. Sounds simple enough, right? Let's see how complicated we can make this :)

I had one company-issued Windows computer with no administrator privileges. I could look at the IP configuration, but that was about it.

How my grandparents' home connection got 100x faster than my server's  Tags: computers, real life.
Reggefiber is putting down FTTH connections to most people around here. Much of the network up to the local exchange points is already optic fiber, only now it goes from the local exchange point to your home over fiber. This is quite a massive operation to connect thousands of homes, and at least 30% of the people have to do it to make it worthwhile. Most cities reach 30% and can then choose which ISP they want. Reggefiber just puts down the connection, they don't provide the internet service itself; nevermind that they're 51% owned by one of the ISPs, namely KPN, but on paper they're unbiased.

So my grandparents are almost 80 years old.