Headworx

Things tend to go wrong at home exactly when I am away. Murphy's Law, of course. So last week I was on the other side of the Globe, when the IPSEC VPN connection we run from our house to my Mom's apartment went down. We run this VPN link to have a seamless LAN covering both locations, with shared resources like printers and NAS boxes. I logged on to my router remotely and it was fine. But I could not log on to my Mom's router. The DSL link must have been down then, I thought. So I instructed her to call the service provider asking for help. They reset the DSL modem remotely, "because it has not been reset for a long time". Unfortunately this did not help. But I was really alarmed with the "because it has not been reset for a long time" statement! 99,9% of us would not even blink at this procedure. But this is not the way things should be. We consider all software buggy. 30 years of personal computing have taught us to do exactly this. Something w...

Only a year ago I praised Amazon's offering of free, worldwide, mobile Internet access in the Kindle 3G. While the original Kindle "keyboard" 3G still provides the free browser service, it may not last long. I have just "upgraded" myself to the Kindle Touch 3G and I feel like child who crushed the nose at the window. The Kindle Touch " Free 3G Worldwide Wireless " does not include the (still called experimental) Web Browser function. The browser now works only on WiFi. There is no free lunch. Uh oh. While this is perfectly understandable - the worldwide 3G Internet access is too expensive to be financed only by book purchases - I feel really sad it is no longer an option. Being a frequent traveler, I cried a river over the roaming data charges. We have such a progress in mobile connectivity and still cannot find a solution to the roaming problem. I am now in the USA, writing this post. When I crossed the border, I turned off the data transmis...

I've found myself logging in to the Facebook less and less frequently. First of all, I started logging out of the service, I think, two years ago. I realized that by having my Facebook logged in on one browser tab, the other tabs had access to my Facebook context. This is quite obvious. But with consequences. Any page with a [Like] button was accessing my Facebook context and the big F was able to collect information on where I was going. I did not like that, so logging out has become my habit. Being logged out meant by default less interaction with Facebook in general. And over the months I have realized I really do not miss what is going there. Because the content I have been exposed to has been of a little interest to me. Facebook manages weak links. By weak links I mean links with people I do not meet, work with or follow every day. It is a great address book of all my school friends. And friends I met or worked with in the past. Whenever I have a need for a contact, Face...

This case is a year old. But worth mentioning. I had a MacMini computer running Windows 7 via Bootcamp.  Pretty standard setup. Every Mac comes with MacOS preloaded and has a component called Bootcamp, which allows to install Windows as a second operating system. Bootcamp consists of a boot manager (lets you select whether you boot in MacOS or in Windows) and a set of drivers that allow Windows to work with the Mac hardware. All the drivers are signed and work really well. I have not had any issues with them. After several months I replaced my old PC keyboard with the small Mac Bluetooth keyboard and later upgraded the setup with the 27" Mac Cinema display. The nice thing of having both the Mac keyboard and the Mac Cinema Display is you can control the brightness of the display directly from the keyboard. I like this function and use it very often. The brightness control on the keyboard is so convenient I really forgot there was no brightness control on the display itself at a...