bkil vs. programming

The correct usage of GnuPG (public key cryptography) is to offer a download link of your public key in every channel you communicate and also include your full fingerprint on your business card. It doesn't make sense in this combination to distribute either your key ID or your fingerprints electronically, because it opens up all kinds of bad practices involving trusting the unverified and confusion. Key servers and the web of trust itself erodes your privacy as your social relationships are publicly revealed, and your e-mail address is also opened up for easy spamming. However, a key server does make initial contact easier if you forgot to provide a link on the business card and it also enables key updates if you do use the web of trust by mutual key signing. No single solution is perfect for everybody. Note that both the PGP protocol and GnuPG internally reference a so-called 64-bit long key ID, however many tutorials erroneously use only the short key ID instead. Also note t...

Installing a Huawei E352 HSPA+ dongle took ages under Windows. I had to abort it halfway through because I was running out of time. In retrospective, it was probably caused by a conflict with the previous modem's connection dashboard. I was shocked when I wanted to resume next time. Some time after inserting the device, the system asked for a .sys file from a driver disk. Neither modem worked anymore. As usual for this kind of dongle, no vendor download is available as the device itself contains all drivers on a virtual CD-ROM. However, that is only accessible before it's  switched to modem mode  by the parts already installed. Chicken and egg problem. Puppy Linux to the rescue! Thankfully, I had it on my USB flash along with DSL and SliTaz . The system loaded to RAM rapidly. I copied over the drivers from the modem to another USB flash. As a plaything, I enjoyed the command line and the responsivity, also browsing the web a bit over 3G. After rebooting to Windows, re...

SpeedOf.Me - online HTML5 bandwidth test It runs both on desktop and mobile, as no Flash or Java is needed!

It runs on over the air broadcast, so you won't see any more grabber failures because of a website that decided to change their design (deliberately). bkil-open: tv/grab-dvb-epg.sh

Hugs is a nice little interpreter if you'd like to try out the language Haskell. It has few dependencies and it requires moderate resources to run. The download for a minimal install is less than 1.5MiB in size. If you have an operating system with package management, you can simply install the package 'hugs', or 'hugs98'. For example, on Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu) this amount to simply running: aptitude install hugs On distributions without a decent package manager (like Puppy Linux), you can install the Debian packages manually (refer to your distribution for details, but it usually involves clicking on each downloaded package or typing dpkg -i name.deb ). You first need to select a Debian major distribution version which matches with the versions of libraries on your system. On the Pupeee (Puppy 4.3) I had been using till now, choosing Lenny seems to work fine. So I've downloaded each i386 version from a mirror close-by of the following packages:...