The Flag's a Plus

A small computer success story: I have a Synology NAS at home. For those who aren't familiar with them, they're small computers that are set up to make storing and sharing files easy. They keep your data across multiple hard drives so that if a hard drive fails, no data is lost. Or, at least, that's the theory. After we moved last year, I set up the NAS and ran all of the status checks. It reported that one drive was still working but starting to have problems. I bought another drive, plugged it in, and set it as a "hot spare" (basically, the system knew about it, but it wasn't being used). I also turned on monthly disk checks. Months passed with no more problems. ...until last Tuesday. On Tuesday night, the system automatically sent us mail to tell us that The troubled disk had finally failed. Since we had a hot spare, it would be used as a replacement disk and our data would be copied to it. When everything was finished, the system would let us k...

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...

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...

This has nothing to do with Switzerland. It's a leftover from when this was a personal blog. I'm leaving it here anyway for my own reference. I'm a fan of Podcasts. For those who don't know, these are something like radio shows that you download to your phone or computer. They often focus on a small area where they have passionate interest. They're perfect for long walks, drives, or bus rides. These are the podcasts that I've been listening to lately: NPR Hourly News Summary  because radios are hard. I own a dozen computers and cell phones, but there's not an FM receiver to be found in the place. The ISC Daily Stormcast is a daily brief overview of current events in computer security. Planet Money tries to figure out why financial markets work the way that they work.  Hidden Brain looks at some of our less-than-rational decision making processes. 99% Invisible  covers the reasons and impact of design decisions. Futility Closet discusses unusu...