I realized I haven’t written anything about VoIP yet in this blog. It is a very interesting subject and a great way to deliver your employer decent “buck for bang” once you get to know how it works. In this post I will explain how to configure a public DDI (direct dial in) number to […]
Device-as-a-Service from HP
Hewlett Packard have announced a new type of service called DaaS, or Device-as-a-Service, based on which for a fixed regular fee, enterprises could use PCs and printers. Makes sense to me, but what part of this service is actually new? Allowing others to use property is known for centuries under different names: renting, leasing, etc. […]
Is there a future for 3D printing?
I want to dedicate this post to innovation in technology and entrepreneurship. The question in the title is probably a silly one because a recent event taught me that 3D printing is actually already a 30~ year old idea. In the recent years however it managed to break into the mainstream, probably thanks commoditization and […]
A glance at modern Information Security
Who hasn’t wondered if they have chosen the right career path? During some self analysis recently, one of the areas I keep considering for myself is the Information Security path. Especially the position of CISO – after all I have a fair share of security engineering (not commercial) experience and some sense for organizing things. […]
Simple SPAM solution with auto-learn and recovery options
Perhaps you’ve come across those fancy, branded solutions that allow quarantining mail messages, delivery on demand (when you click a link of a suspected message), filtering incoming messages and so on. Upon some reseach it appears that these come with a price tag of over $60,000 in typical configurations. Expensive, huh? This got me thinking […]
Comment on vision & strategy in light of the Apple vs FBI case
Originally I published this on LinkedIn, here’s the comment. The [lost] ability to define long term [IT] strategy One thing I absolutely love about the US presidential elections is that the candidates are actually challenged to provide opinions on theoretic subjects that actually matter. This allows getting a decent insight into their ability to define […]
Jack and ALSA: sound through multiple devices
I have designed a simple audio-video solution for my entertainment room at home, where I have a: High quality headphones connected to a decent pre/post amplifier which connects to the computer through USB (and registers as USB audio device with my Windows10 and Gentoo linux). Not so high (but not bad at all!) on-board sound […]
Shell shock – impact analysis
The article below is my publication for the Polish IT magazine IT Wiz. Cisza po burzy? Wraz z nieustającym rozwojem oprogramowania, rozwija się również jego bezpieczeństwo. Luki o charakterze krytycznym nie pojawiają się już tak często, jak miało to miejsce chociażby dekadę temu. Idąc tym tokiem, dzisiaj administratorzy systemów mogli poniekąd oczekiwać spokojnego zakończenia bieżącego […]
Linux & ALSA on integrated sound card
I am moving various publications and how-to documents to this blog and found this one. In fact, many of these steps are still valid when troubleshooting issues, however the state of ALSA in kernel 4.4 is much better and in vast majority of cases, sound should work on new laptops right away. To setup ALSA […]
Mencoder: create and encode movies from files (frag movies)
Introduction This howto provides some usual information on creating frag movies (or any other videos) with a powerful command line tool called mencoder. Mencoder is a part of mplayer and is used to deal with multimedia streams. MPlayer MPlayer is a movie player for Linux (runs on many other platforms and CPU architectures, see the […]