Today I wrote the fourth round of my “Best of Web” series. As some may have noticed, there have been no posts in this series for the last two weeks, even though I really wanted to bring up a contribution to the series on every Monday.
However, as I noted in the first article of the series, I have reserved the right for me that, depending on the workload and quality of the links I found in the last week, I suspend the series sometimes – and that is what happened the last two weeks. But this week I’m back with a new article.
Today there is (again) a lot about programming and hardware(-hacks) and of course again a small video clip at the end of the article. Let’s go into the fourth round!
Bus departure times in real time for your home
The first topic, which I want to draw attention to today, deals with the departure times of buses. I think everyone knows the display panels at bus stops, which give an information on when the bus(-line) departs and how much delay it has. Oona Räisänen has determined that this information is transferred to the information panels via FM radio. She has taken the matter, decrypted the protocol and built a small display/board for her home, so she every time knows exactly when the next bus arrives. I find this is quite interesting project and I’m not averse to look deeper into my local bus stop display technology in the upcoming months.
A simple do it yourself YubiKey
The YubiKey is a small USB device (stick) that serves as a key for two-factor authentication. Also, the mastermind behind the BCH Professional Engineering blog, had procured one of these YubiKeys, he got his sample only to find out that this was both, impractical and already broken even after a few months of use.
Without further ado, he decided to build his own small USB security token. Both, the idea and the implementation, have done it to me, so that I like to share his project with you.
What you should know (as a programmer) about character sets
The article by Joel Spolsky has now been around 10 years in the internet, but in my opinion, lost none of its topicality. Joel looks at the basics of character sets and encodings and does away with one or the other misunderstanding. I share his opinion and say, “Yes, what he has written in this article is basic stuff, that really every programmer should know.” What I would like to know – did you already read Joels article in the past and if not, do you still have learned something new?
Parallel programming in .NET 4.5
A few days are gone since the .NET Framework 4.5 was released to the market and I’m still learning almost every week a new trick, a new feature or get a few handy knacks to know.
Sure the terms “Async” and “Parallel” are no strangers to me, but I liked the overview on the topic of parallel programming in .NET 4.5 – which is given in the Visual Studio blog, so I would like to recommend this article to you.
The Simpsons in Breaking Bad – Breaking Bart
Finally, as already done so in the last rounds of my “Best of Web” mashups, I’ll share a short video with you. As a fan of The Simpsons and beeing a friend of “Heisenberg”, I decided for the following clip this week.
