The Flag's a Plus

A small thing that I haven't talked about before: When we moved from the US to Switzerland, because there was a voltage difference, we did not take any electrical kitchen appliances with us. We've also tried to resist buying things until we were certain that we'd use them. So, we only decided to buy a microwave oven a month or two ago. One of the first things that we noticed was that microwave ovens in Switzerland almost never have a revolving tray. A revolving tray is common in all of the higher end US microwave ovens, while only the cheapest Swiss microwave ovens had this feature. It turns out that there's a good reason for this: most Swiss microwave ovens also have conventional heating elements. They're basically a cross between a microwave and a toaster oven.  A lot of frozen food offers 3 reheating times: oven only, microwave only, and a combination time to use with one of these combination ovens. It works pretty well, particularly with things like p...

A few months ago, I finally gave in and applied for a Supercard and a Cumulus card -- the loyalty cards for Coop and Migros, respectively. The process was a bit more onerous than in the US. I had to apply online, then I received the cards in the mail, but the cards couldn't actually be used until I confirmed them again online. This is to ensure that I have both the cards and the online account information -- a sort of one-time 2-factor authentication. With the cards, I was able to drastically change the way that I shop. Now, when I go to the grocery store, this is the shopping process: When I walk in the door, I stop at a kiosk where I scan my card (or a picture of my card on my phone), and it unlocks a handheld barcode scanner. I could also skip this step and scan groceries with an app on my phone, but my phone is a lot slower because the camera takes a while to focus on the UPC. When I want to buy something, I scan it with the barcode scanner then put it into my reusable g...

When you set up a network, whether it's for home or work, you need to think about how the network's going to be used and which resources are going to be most limited. For a long time, the relative scarcity looked like this: Internet bandwidth was very limited Wireless network bandwidth was somewhat limited Powerline adapters were faster than wireless, but slower than Ethernet Wired Ethernet network bandwidth was relatively fast To get around these limits, you would avoid using the wireless network whenever possible. If you needed to get an internet connection from one end of a house or building to another, you'd try to find a way to use wired whenever possible, even if that meant something like Powerline adapters. Anything to maximize the scarce WiFi bandwidth. Keeping local copies of big files like OS updates also made a lot of sense, as those could take hours to download. I even had a well-tuned QoS (Quality of Service) setup on my old home network to prioriti...

A quick one for today: I've been looking into what passes for American food in Zürich. Short answer: fried appetizers and burgers. Here are the menus for a few places that sell American style food in Zürich: Fork and Bottle sells a wide selection of beer, along with burgers, ribs, and salads. Like one of the good the microbrew / gastropub places that are in almost every city in the US. We visit them regularly. Brisket Southern BBQ and Bar is a rib joint. Their ribs are a blend of US styles. They're pretty good, but they're not quite as good as the ribs from that run-down shack outside of town. You know the one I mean. (For my non-US friends: I'm mocking rib snobs. No matter how good the ribs, they've always had better. The place with the best ribs in the entire world is always, amazingly enough, just outside of the town where they live or grew up.) Papa Joe's has recreated the "fried food and lots of crap on the walls" restaurant concept popu...

I've been rethinking my personal threat model due to wholesale scanning of electronic devices at the U.S. border. I think I've figured out a few things that I can use that might be useful for others. The problem is this: Currently, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is scanning devices, but they are not scanning data that's not on the device or not directly reachable with the device. This is due to their interpretation of Riley v. California -- a U.S. Supreme Court decision that said that law enforcement can't use credentials found on the phone to gather additional data without a warrant. If they're suspicious (or if you annoy them), they can seize your phone. So, I need to be sure that my phone is "disposable" and I won't lose any critical data. Wiping my phone might work, but there's some information that I'd like to install on my phone before I leave (phone numbers of people I'll be visiting, for example), and if searched, a wiped phon...