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.

MAC-address analysis  Tags: networking, computers, hardware.
First, a few things you need to know about MAC addresses: When a NIC (Network Interface Card) is manufactured, it is given (issued) a globally unique MAC address. Don't rely on their uniqueness though because users easily can modify them. A MAC address is 48 bits in size (12 characters hexadecimal, as you probably know them), and they are divided up into two halves: the first and the second half! Hard stuff, I know.

The first half is the "OUI" (like the French word for "yes" while forgetting to release caps-lock).

Touchscreens  Tags: hardware.
I hate touchscreen. It's surely good for certain uses, but in general I prefer pressing buttons instead.
Today at the gas station, they had a new touchscreen display instead of the usual display with buttons. I had to type my PIN-code on the touchscreen, what do you mean security risk?!

Usually I cover the keypad with my left hand, easily feel where the keys are with my right hand, and type the code quick & easy. Now I had to look where the keys were and touch them with my index finger (usually I type half the code with my index finger and half with my thumb, goes twice as fast and people don't see the hand/arm movement).