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Today, we made history·

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12.11.2014: boldly bringing @philae2014 where no man-made object has been before. Thank you @ESA_Rosetta for letting philae piggybacking and for waking up on time. Thank you @philae2014 for getting us a comet, no less! We are so proud! Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t that romantic? People often say Engineering is aseptic. I beg to dissent. This is … Leggi tutto

Usb Device Driver not found

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Now and then I used to come in touch with a PC (a laptop) of a friend of mine. This PC used to display a rather strange behavior.  This PC, running Windows 7,  would not correctly mount any usb hard disk or pendrive, except for a few new USB 3.0 drives. This Asus laptop had a really convoluted installation history, as even specifying the precise model it is not very easy to uniquely determine the specific driver to install for a given device. It turns out that every re-installation is made is a sort of trial-and-error procedure and the final outcome is, as one can see, not very nice.

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HTC Cricket missing menu button and Taskos

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I believe Taskos [play.google.com] is a a great way to sync with Google Tasks. I usually suggest this to my customers when for any reasons they need to an  alternative to the otherwise excellent Gtasks [play.google.com]. Taskos  has a clean and handy interface, and it’s usually quite bug-free. So I was quite surprised when one … Leggi tutto

UFRaw and Gimp 2.8

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UFRaw is a decent and opensource RAW file utility. It works on many platforms and despite the ’80 looking site works quite well with NEF file from Nikon cameras. Moreover, it is fairly well integrated with The GIMP, thanks to a dedicated plugin.  Setting it up on Windows may be tricky, especially regarding the Gimp integration. I found out … Leggi tutto

Biometric on iPhone worse than Snakes on a Plane?

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Apple has recently spur some controversy with the introduction of a biometric sensor onboard its last flagship product, the iPhone.  When it comes to this topic (governments stealing fingerprints…anyone?), I think that most people are overseeing some  other interesting issues. In my knowledge, available and affordable biometric sensors are known to be quite easy to … Leggi tutto