Mikhail Kyraha (Posts about technology)

Encrypted backup to the cloud with rclone

Mikhail Kyraha — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 22:13:00 GMT

Choose a dirt cheap cloud storage. Setup encryption with rclone. Boom - you have got a fast and flexible file backup system with strong, open-source grade end-to-end encryption. You can start backing up your precious files: family photos, private videos, secret documents, anything. Dirt cheap, end-to-end encrypted.

Amazon Web Services II

Mikhail Kyraha — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 00:13:00 GMT

This blog keeps moving from one web hosting solution to another like there is no tomorrow. I already wrote about moving it up to the Amazon Web Services once. Then the website was moved onto Google's Blogger platform. Then, if I remember it correctly, onto Wordpress. Now I'm moving it back to AWS again. But this time it is a static content hosting on S3. How do you host a blog as a static content - if you ask me? Then here is how.

Guess text encoding with scalar product

Mikhail Kyraha — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Playing with an 8-bit to multibyte text converter recently I came across with a rather interesting problem. The converter is intended to help with converting legacy text data encoded with older monobyte character encodings into UTF-8. Yes, the converting process itself is not a big deal. In fact it's a very basic and straightforward program a student would usually challenge him- or herself just after they accomplished the "Hello World!" one. However, the interesting part here is the fact that that "old encoding" can be one of a bunch of variants of slightly different ad hoc character sets. And to make things worse, the user doesn't usually know which code page exactly the original text was encoded with. And as always the user is reluctant to make any effort to find it out before using the tool. Where such ad hoc code pages came from and why they been used at all is a whole different story but it's not the point here. The point is how having only a piece of plain text to determine which code page it is encoded with. So...

BLINK℠ and NFC, the swipeless credit card - what's the point?

Mikhail Kyraha — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:02:00 GMT

Hearing all this buzz about cell phone manufacturers starting to offer credit card services using the near field communication (NFC) interface in their devices, I noticed that my Chase credit card has the BLINK℠ thing in it. It's not that I didn't know about it before, I remember (vaguely) how I received some years ago a renewed card with a colorful booklet describing a bunch of benefits the new BLINK℠ technology carry. Although the booklet was designed in a mood how it is impossible to stay alive anymore swiping credit cards old school, I was not very convinced that time. OK, I tried the new card once at a fast food register's BLINK℠ marked reader to make sure it works. Well, it worked. And that's about it. The question is, is it really "Fast, Easy and Secure" as it is advertised?

Google+ circles

Mikhail Kyraha — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:25:00 GMT

OK, as far as I could find so far the major, if not the only, advantage Google+ have against Facebook is their circles concept. But I'm still a little confused what would be the right way to use them. The circles are great, I agree, they prop your networking up into multidimensional space. However in my opinion it's still a half-way solution. And here is why I think so.

Amazon Web Services

Mikhail Kyraha — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:10:00 GMT

I know that to have your own personal blog is cool, but to have it on your own web host is double cool. That's true. However what can be even cooler to have your web host running in your own Linux virtual box? No, not running it in a real box in your garage. It was cool, even geeky, but some years ago. These days everything more or less advanced goes into... clouds. Yes, cloud computing they call it. Is it a right thing? - Yes, I want an answer on this question too. And there is only one way to find out - to try it on.

Blogging without compromising

Mikhail Kyraha — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 00:17:00 GMT

What people usually blog about? What is not there on the Net yet? How to be more useful and less boring? These are probably very common questions beginner bloggers ask themselves. So do I. Well, I don't think anybody would be excited to know what I had for lunch today or yesterday. And Barack Obama most likely knows better then I what he and his administration should and shouldn't do. So let's skip those.

I thought perhaps I could blog about what I know best - the information technologies, the newest breakthroughs in the most bleeding edges of the technologies I'm currently working on. That would be fascinating. That would be fresh. In such topics I could go on and on. But if I go for it there might be a risk of exposing the know-how of my employer therefore a possible breach of the non-disclosure agreement I have signed with the client. Bummer... Well, this is something to think about then. OK, I need to do some research on how other fellow bloggers deal with this dilemma.