For synchronizing address books and calendars on my Android smartphone I’v been using  DAVDroid for quite a while. It is Open Source and also available on F-Droid. However it is now called DAVx⁵ – why?

The reasons are explained in this tweet – using “droid” as part of a name violates a trademark of Lucasfilm. Also see this extensive article at Priceonomics. Therefore the creator of DAVDroid decided to change the name to “DAVxxxxx” and replace “xxxxx” by “x⁵” – even though the official statment says something different ;-).

From now on I have a fast internet connection using VDSL100 which nominally provides 100 Mbps downstream and 40 Mbps upstream (before: 50 and 10 Mbps).

Eventhough the achievable speeds are slightly lower, uploading data is still more than three times as fast as before :-).

By the way… a copy of the first web site of the world still exists:

http://info.cern.ch

My humble beginnings in the web don’t reach back that far (see the archive of my website of from 1997).

Probably everybody knows public displays which are composed of segmented characters.

On https://aresluna.org/segmented-type/ you find an emulator for that which displays different variations from 8 to 93 segments per character. You can type any text on your own  and select different display variations with the displayed text.

Does anyone still remember the time when the first pinball machines started using 14 segment displays which allowed to show not only the current scores but also any kind of messages?

Many years ago I already had look at OwnCloud, which was first released in 2010 and claimed to offer an alternative to commercial services like DropBox or Google. The idea was good, only the implementation and the security was lacking at the beginning, which had kept me back from permanent use.

For exchanging files I later discovered Seafile as an alternative. For addresses and appointments I used Baïkal to synchronize the data between my Android devices and different computers with CalDAV and CardDAV. Added to this is Roundcube as a webmail client with an extension for using the Baïkal address book via CardDAV.

Although this constellation basically worked, there were some drawbacks: a browser-based calendar does not exist at all and Baïkal has no longer being actively developed for some time – the latest version is from August 2016 (see release page at Github).

Continue reading →

If you are using wireless mice and keyboards you should be aware of the risks. Also see this article at Computerworld.

At least Logitech provides a firmware update which fixes the problems:

Announcement at Logitech concerning “MouseJack”

The program also checks if there is an update needed at all. So I found out that even the Unifying Receiver of a new keyboard (K270), bought in January 2018, was still shipped with an outdated firmware.

Only when the update tools displays a message that all found devices are up to date, there is no risk.

For a long time there had been an SVN archive of Thing at atariforge.org. Unfortunately this website is not online any longer. But I’m happy to announce that the commit history of the SVN archive could be rescued and the sources are now available at Github: https://github.com/arnowelzel/thing

Thanks to Miro Kropáček for his support in preserving the commit history from the old SVN repository.

Recently details of two security problems got published which allow to bypass protection mechanisms of CPUs to get access to sensitive data – known as “Meltdown” and “Spectre”.

More about this at https://meltdownattack.com.

Sometimes I need to check the function and picture quality of displays. Usually this is done by using some kind of test software – but you can not always install or run software, for example when Linux is installed but the test software is only available for Windows.

For this reason (and because I wanted to learn more about using canvas elements in HTML5 and High DPI displays) I created a test page which uses a canvas element and JavaScript to create a number of test pictures. See “Monitor test” in the “Tools” menu.

In the latest version I also fixed some problems for full screen mode, so every modern browser should be usable for the test.