The Alphabet Lists

2013-10-28 2 min read Alphabet Lists Marco

Kubuntu made it to Saucy Salamander, the release starting with an ‘s’ and formally named 13.10 (after the year and month of the release). The previous one was 13.04, code-named Raring Ringtail, with the letter ‘r’, which is one before ‘s’. The next release will be named after another animal living in South Africa (where Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, lives) who name starts with ‘t’. Also, there will be another adjective in ‘t’ to alliterate with that.

Keep Your Data Safe: Cloud RAIDs

2013-10-24 8 min read Howto Marco

You have probably heard the story: someone has all their data stored in the Cloud, and one morning it’s all gone. Maybe Google disabled your email account and won’t you let back in. Or maybe it’s Dropbox that dropped your files. Or maybe it’s (and this is a real case) box.com that handed somebody’s account to someone else, who promptly cleaned the account and deleted all the other person’s files.

Introducting Umana

2013-10-19 7 min read Electronics Anonymous Marco

Here is the initial sketch for a new programming language, umana. I know, I know: the world has already enough programming languages, and it seems to be every programmer’s wet dream to create a new one and join Guido van Rossum and Dennis Ritchie in the Halls of Eternal Fame.

umana, though, is a little different. It doesn’t want to be the proof of great intelligence and technical acumen. Instead, it aims to translate the way computers do things into terms readily understood by humans. Hence the name: while it sounds derived from an African language (think Ubuntu), it is actually the Italian word for, “human.” The analogy here is the term, lingua franca, or Frankish language (in Italian), which was what people used around the Mediterranean to speak to each other when they had no better language in common.

Privacy or Transparency? The Battle for the Soul of the 21st Century

2013-10-16 7 min read Essays Marco

When you drive at night through the countryside in the Netherlands, you notice something odd: people are sitting at the dinner table, watching TV, or getting ready to go to bed in their homes, and you can clearly see them from the street. There are no curtains, no shades, no privacy. Coming from a society that values the ability not to be bothered, the idea that everyone gets to see everything you do seems threatening.

L'America: Wireless Service

2013-10-10 6 min read L'America Marco

*Note: I should be writing about the mess in Washington with the Continuing Resolution and the Debt Ceiling, since that’s what you readers keep asking about. Maybe later, but right now I have Washington Dysfunction Fatigue Syndrome*

There I am, in 2013, and I need new cell service. It’s mostly a work thing: I need a newer Android device with Bluetooth 4.0, and that means a new contract of sorts. Which gets me to explaining the weird way the American wireless carrier system works.

In the rest of the world, you (mostly) have phones and carriers. The two are merrily separated. You buy your phone, you get your SIM card, you put your SIM into the phone, and you are good to go. When you don’t like your phone no more, you get a new one and put the old SIM into the new phone. If you find a cheaper carrier, you get the new SIM card and put it into your old phone. Simple.

How “China” Is Missing the Open Source Evolution

2013-09-18 6 min read Electronics Anonymous Marco

Pebble Smart Watch Three independent events came together last night to give me one of those rare flashes of insight.** There is a radically better way of doing business, and everyone is missing out.** Best, still, this radically new way of doing business is completely free, both as in beer and in speech.

So, this is what happened. Yesterday, I was perusing Amazon product pages for solar charges. I stumbled upon one (and I will not mention which one) that had the worst product description I have ever read in years of amazoning. It was strangely ungrammatical, using words entirely out of place, presenting the product in a flowery language that was so far off the mark, it made me smile, then laugh out loud.

How Did the Mortgage Crisis Happen?

2013-09-10 12 min read Essays Marco

1. Introduction

digs There is a branch of Physics called Catastrophe Theory. It deals with the way something that changes smoothly for a long time may get a sudden change, a catastrophe. The classical example is a pile of sand onto which you drop grain after grain: after a (long) while, the pile can’t sustain all the added sand and there will be an avalanche. How is it possible that something innocuous like adding a grain of sand will end up in an avalanche?

Forever Red: What to do at stop lights that don't change

2013-09-09 3 min read Motorcycle Marco

Every motorcyclist knows them: those traffic lights that remain red until a car or truck triggers a green phase. They have sensors embedded in the road surface – you can usually see them as circles or octagons covered in tar. The idea is that it’s pointless to turn a light green unless there is actually someone on the road to take advantage of that green.

Well, my sense is that those sensors are relatively old – I’d say from the 80s and maybe 90s. I guess at the time, they seemed a good idea. Nowadays, though, two-wheeled traffic is increasing and these sensors cause real problems.

Firewire Baked Potato - The Review

2013-08-30 9 min read Surfing Marco

I’ve had my Baked Potato over the summer now: time to update my first impressions and get you a real review!

Who Is It For?

The Firewire web site is a little cagey about the intended audience, and they have videos of Gabriel Medina on a Baked Potato. The smallest adult size you can get, though, is the 5’1″ which has a volume of 29.3l. That’s a tad large for an advanced surfer and indicates the board is mostly targeted at an at most intermediate audience.

L'America: Buying a Car From a Dealer

2013-08-29 7 min read L'America Marco

One of the first things you’ll need when you move to America is a car. Sure, there are places where you can (and should) do without – Manhattan, for instance. All in all, though, America assumes everybody owns a car, which translates directly into the typical distances you travel to get from anywhere to anywhere.

For the average American, the car is the second-largest expense they will make (the first one being their home). As such, it’s a really important choice, and you should think a lot before committing to anything.

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