Extending the life of TomTom wearables
TomTom recently announced
it would stop operating their supporting infrastructure by the end of September
following its earlier decision
to exit the wearables market.
This means that its products, such as sports watches, will become effectively
useless, as they will no longer be able to export their activities and
sync them with tracker sites.
Throwing away an otherwise fine watch only because its maker decided to
shut down its proprietary infrastructure seems like a sad waste.
Here is how you can download the watch’s data and
upload it to Strava, a popular activity tracker,
using open source software.
Continue reading "Extending the life of TomTom wearables"Last modified: Friday, November 3, 2023 5:57 pm
Raspberry Pi 400 vs ZX Spectrum
The release of the Raspberry Pi 400 personal computer
reminded me of a wildly popular home computer that was launched
in a similar computer-in-a-keyboard format almost 40 years ago:
the Sinclair Research ZX Spectrum.
I decided to compare the two,
following the steps
of an earlier comparison I performed between
the 2015 Rapsberry Pi Zero and the 1957 Elliott 405.
Continue reading "Raspberry Pi 400 vs ZX Spectrum"Last modified: Monday, November 2, 2020 12:37 am
The titanic battle between big iron and microprocessors
I’m a child of a microprocessor age.
I learned to program on computers powered by
a variety of microprocessors starting
with
the 4-bit SC43177/SC43178 pair
powering a Sharp PC-1211,
continuing with the 8-bit
Zilog Z80 on
the TRS-80,
the Zenith Z-89, and
the Sinclair ZX81 computers,
and graduating
to 16-bit processors:
the Texas Instruments TMS9900 powering
its manufacturer’s TI-99/4A home computer
and finally Intel’s 8088 on
an IBM Portable (16kg) Personal Computer.
At the university I encountered an IBM System/370 4331/2 mainframe,
which I regarded with outer contempt.
It seemed to me like a dinosaur:
slow and unwieldy, lacking interactivity, color, and graphics.
I couldn’t fathom why businesses were using such monsters.
I now understand that I was watching an amazing race
between the sprightly but woefully simplistic microprocessors and
the powerful but slow-moving mainframes.
Continue reading "The titanic battle between big iron and microprocessors"Last modified: Sunday, May 31, 2020 10:55 pm
Contact tracing via smartphone apps has been widely touted as an important
way to control and limit the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic.
However, basing contact-tracing on phone apps has several limitations.
Here are instructions for constructing a contact tracing device prototype
with a Raspberry Pi Zero-W.
The constructed device is compatible with the Apple/Google Bluetooth
contact tracing specification.
It runs the Epidose software,
which is based on the DP3T
“unlinkable” design.
Continue reading "Contact tracing with a Raspberry Pi Zero-W"Last modified: Wednesday, May 20, 2020 9:50 pm
Computer vs Human 0-1
Earlier today the Athens State Orchestra played the
Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78 by Camille Saint-Saens,
which is also known as the Organ Symphony.
The French organist and composer Thierry Escaich was supposed to play
the organ.
There was a slight delay at the beginning:
a lady appeared on stage and explained that there were technical
problems with the organ’s “brain”.
Continue reading "Computer vs Human 0-1"Last modified: Saturday, December 3, 2016 0:26 am
The Computer Tube
I've been reading the book ENIAC in Action,
which details the fascinating ten-year history of the first general-purpose
programmable electronic computer.
In it I found a reference to 7AK7, the so-called computer tube,
which improved the reliability of tube computers.
Continue reading "The Computer Tube"Last modified: Saturday, May 7, 2016 10:49 pm
Raspberry Pi vs USB vs Mac Audio
The audio hardware of Raspberry Pi is
known
to produce relatively poor sound quality.
I bought a cheap USB sound card to try as an alternative.
Here is what I found.
Continue reading "Raspberry Pi vs USB vs Mac Audio"Last modified: Sunday, December 13, 2015 12:02 am
Raspberry Pi Zero vs Elliott 405
Twitter users
@SadHappyAmazing and
@HistoricalPics
posted yesterday
two photographs
(copy)
showing the
Raspberry Pi Zero
juxtaposed in front of the Norwich City Council Treasurer's Department building,
where the delivery of the Elliott 405 computer was photographed in 1957.
Here is how the two computers compare.
Continue reading "Raspberry Pi Zero vs Elliott 405"Last modified: Sunday, November 29, 2015 2:23 am
How to make a MacBook Kensington Lock Adapter
Apple, in its infinite wisdom, has not included a Kensington lock
slot in the current model of the MacBook Pro computer.
Given the computer's price, desirability, and
the fact that three people I know have had theirs stolen,
I decided to build an improvised adapter that would allow me
attach a Kensington lock to the computer.
I realize, that the security offered by such a contraption is what
my colleague
Vassilis Prevelakis
calls an "advisory lock",
for Kensington locks can be easily picked or pried away.
However, I think it might deter a casual thief who would
snatch the laptop you've left unattended for a couple
of minutes.
Continue reading "How to make a MacBook Kensington Lock Adapter"Last modified: Monday, June 10, 2013 6:41 pm
Virtualize Me
The virtual machine (VM) is the most dazzling comeback in information technology. IBM implemented a VM platform architecture in the late 1960s in its CP/CMS operating system. The company’s goal was to provide the time-sharing capabilities that its batch-oriented System/360 lacked. Thus a simple control program (CP) created a VM environment where multiple instances of the single-user CMS operating system could run in parallel. Thirty years later, virtualization was rediscovered when companies like VMware found ways to virtualize the less accommodating Intel x86 processor architecture. The popularity of Intel’s platform and the huge amount of software running on it made virtualization an attractive proposition, spawning within a decade tens of proprietary and open source virtualization platforms.
Continue reading "Virtualize Me"Last modified: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 11:21 am
Research Proposal Becomes Reality
Eight years ago I submitted a research proposal for developing a
tablet-based game platform for toddlers.
Although the proposal was not accepted for funding,
it's nice to see the idea becoming a reality through the
unveiling of the Toys 'R' Us $150 Tabeo tablet for kids.
Continue reading "Research Proposal Becomes Reality"Last modified: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:42 am
Using the HP 4470c Scanner Under Windows 7
Neither
Hewlett Packard nor
Microsoft Windows 7
offer native support for my HP 4470c scanner.
Throwing a working scanner away to buy a new one only because some
software was missing seemed like a waste,
so I looked for an alternative solution.
This is how I made it work using SANE,
an open source framework for scanners.
Continue reading "Using the HP 4470c Scanner Under Windows 7"Last modified: Sunday, November 27, 2011 6:54 pm
Faking it
This column is about a tool we no longer have: the continuous rise of the CPU clock frequency. We were enjoying this trend for decades, but in the past few years, progress stalled. CPUs are no longer getting faster because their makers can’t handle the heat of faster-switching transistors. Furthermore, increasing the CPU’s sophistication to execute our instructions more cleverly has hit the law of diminishing returns. Consequently, CPU manufacturers now package the constantly increasing number of transistors they can fit onto a chip into multiple cores—processing elements—and then ask us developers to put the cores to good use.
Continue reading "Faking it"Last modified: Sunday, August 5, 2018 2:04 pm
Ten Lessons I Learned from Fixing my Laptop's Motherboard
A month ago I managed to break my laptop, by reversing the polarity of
a universal power supply.
The repair shop diagnosed the problem as a failed motherboard,
and asked for €659 to replace it.
I found the price preposterous and the notion of throwing away a motherboard
for a single failed component ecologically unsound.
Here is how I fixed the laptop on my own, and what I learned in the process.
Continue reading "Ten Lessons I Learned from Fixing my Laptop's Motherboard"Last modified: Monday, May 30, 2011 0:14 am
HP-200LX Remote Control Hacks
All my friends know that for the past 15 years I've been semi-attached
to an
HP 100LX
palmtop PC
(recently updated to a 200LX)
for my personal information management and many other tasks.
The device is extremely versatile, sturdy, and flexible.
Amazingly, after so many years of hard daily use, I still find new
applications for it.
Continue reading "HP-200LX Remote Control Hacks"Last modified: Friday, August 21, 2009 0:27 am
Revisiting the Antikythera Mechanism Emulator
Over the past few weeks I updated the
Antikythera mechanism emulator
I built in 2007.
I was preparing for an invited talk on the subject, which I'll give at the
2009 USENIX Annual Technical Conference,
and for this I wanted to include in the emulator the new findings
recently published in Nature.
Continue reading "Revisiting the Antikythera Mechanism Emulator"Last modified: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 12:10 am
The Information Train
The Information Train is a scientific
experiment that I presented at the
Wizards of Science 2009 contest over the past weekend.
The entry demonstrates how computers communicate with each other by
setting up a network in which a model train transfers a picture's pixels
from one computer to the other.
You can find
a video of the experiment
on YouTube, and, if you're interested, you can also download
the corresponding software and schematics from
this web page.
Continue reading "The Information Train"Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 3:21 pm
No Blinkelichten, Please
A computer's flashing lights used to fascinate me.
They showed me it was alive and offered me a glimpse on
its innards.
They also epitomized the hacker culture of the famous "Blinkenlichten" sign.
Continue reading "No Blinkelichten, Please"Last modified: Monday, December 22, 2008 5:54 pm
LTO Tape Drive Compression Considered Harmful
I used to think that tape drive compression was a silly marketing trick
used by manufacturers to inflate the advertised capacity of their tape drives.
Apparently it is worse than that.
Continue reading "LTO Tape Drive Compression Considered Harmful"Last modified: Friday, April 18, 2008 0:21 am
Landscape vs Portrait Monitors
Laptop monitors keep getting wider and wider.
What I would really like would be for them to get higher.
Continue reading "Landscape vs Portrait Monitors"Last modified: Monday, January 15, 2007 4:47 pm
The Capacitor Plague Hits a Baby Monitor
Good baby monitors are hard to come by.
Many tend to be oversensitive, others switch from squelch mode to
transmission with a loud hiss that is more irritating than a baby's
cry.
We were very satisfied with a Tomy Walkabout Digital
1998 baby monitor, until the day it started emitting a squeaking
sound.
Continue reading "The Capacitor Plague Hits a Baby Monitor"Last modified: Monday, December 25, 2006 11:41 am
(Not) Hacking the Digipass Go 3 OTP Dongle
My bank moved to two factor authentication solution, and thus required me to purchase
from them a Digipass Go 3 dongle in order to authenticate my transactions.
To register my dongle I keyed-in a five-digit code they gave me,
and also the key's serial number appearing on its back.
Given that Go 3 utilizes an
open authentication framework,
and a published algorithm
for generating the one time password (OTP), could I utilize the key and the
numbers I keyed in, for using the key in my own applications, of for cloning
the dongle in my mobile phone or palmtop?
Continue reading "(Not) Hacking the Digipass Go 3 OTP Dongle"Last modified: Friday, December 1, 2006 11:19 am
Boot Lock
I first admired this ingenious method of locking a car in
Rowan Atkinson's
Mr. Bean series.
A few days ago I saw it in real life.
Continue reading "Boot Lock"Last modified: Tuesday, July 11, 2006 11:15 am
Disappearing Hardware
Let's start the new year with a retrospective look at hardware advances.
I've ordered some older and current hard disks that were lying around
by date.
We're taking for granted the increases in disk size, but also
impressive is the reduction in size of the control electronics.
Continue reading "Disappearing Hardware"Last modified: Tuesday, January 3, 2006 4:41 pm
MIT's $100 Laptop
The MIT Media Lab is working on a research initiative to develop
a $100 laptop.
This will be distributed through governments to schools to
help the education of the world's students.
These are my notes from a talk
Michail Bletsas,
Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab
gave on the subject, at an event organized by the
Netmode Laboratory .
Continue reading "MIT's $100 Laptop"Last modified: Friday, October 14, 2005 11:34 pm
Hard Disk Failure
I tell everybody that the question is not whether your hard drive
will fail, but when it will fail.
My laptop's drive started emmitting a loud grinding sound last Saturday.
Continue reading "Hard Disk Failure"Last modified: Tuesday, October 4, 2005 11:14 am
Lack of Progress in Palm Applications
An article in slashdot
recently discussed the limitations in the current breed of Palm
handhelds.
I am glad somebody has pointed out the lack of progress in the palmtop market. My 12-year old HP-100LX is literally falling appart, yet I can not find a worthwhile replacement.
Continue reading "Lack of Progress in Palm Applications"Last modified: Friday, May 13, 2005 9:59 am
