My name is Tobias and I've always messed or had something going on with computers. I use the majority of my time with computers; mostly invested in programming and trying out new ideas. This site functions as a personal hideout and as a place where I present some of my projects.

The Venus transit
7/6/2012 Filed in: News

It has been a while since I last made a post. So here I come!

I watched the Venus transit on the 6th of June and what a great sight it was. I viewed the transition through my Celestron C8-SCT. The pictures aren't the best--mainly because of the atmospheric disturbances at the time and my own tiredness. The transit was from around 4 in the morning to 6.49. So I was up early, and I'm not that kind of type.

Here is one of the shots I got: 

My little ad-blocking tool; adblock-c
24/12/2011 Filed in: Programming

First of all, Merry Christmas to whomever is reading this article! ;)

 I hate ads, and only tend to enable them on pages I use frequently (to support the page). I've been using various ad-block extensions/plugins with the browsers I use--I only use Chromium for the time being. I like the extensions, but with Chrome the ad-block extension does not actually remove the ads--it only hides them--fair enough you may say, but I like not using bandwidth on ads or material I never actually see. Therefore you can go back to use your machines /etc/hosts file. This is actually much better, because you can then "blacklist" the domains that hosts the ads; affectively never using bandwidth from these domains/hosts. This is easy, you just add the hosts to your /etc/hosts file and set their pointing IP-address to your localhost... problem solved. This is tiresome to do manually because there are so many different hosts handling ads. Therefore I decided to write a little tool. I made the tool in C, rather than a shell-script, this is because I like C, simple as that.

The C program grabs ad-block hosts lists that are provided by third-party providers that frequently updates these lists--you can also add addional ad-block hosts sources to a file yourself and then fetch this file to the program. The C program then merge these hosts to your /etc/hosts file... and voila... ads are gone! You can add this program to your crontab and have it update your host-file on a regular basis; ie. every day or week. You are never dependent on a browser extension/plugin after this.

The source is freely available and I invite you to tamper with it as much as you'd want. You can of course just download, and compile it yourself, then use it on your machine.

• You can grab the source here; https://bitbucket.org/Tobiaswk/adblock-c/

Please fork it and make changes/additions/fixes, I'd appricate that! Or just give it a spin ;)

Over and out! Merry Christmas and a happy new year! 

My new keyboard: Unicomp SpaceSaver 104
30/5/2011 Filed in: News

Hello,

Time for a new keyboard. I wanted a new keyboard, my old Logitech G15 was just disgusting to look at and a bit worn on some keys. I wanted a new keyboard, but with the old IBM Model M feel; in other words... buckling springs! 

These keyboard are not made by IBM/Lexmark anymore, but I found a company called Unicomp, they are located in the states. Turns out Unicomp bought the rights/patents and tools for building the Model M keyboard; a.k.a buckling spring technology. 

          This keyboard is absolutely amazing, and I do not regret my purchase in any way. It's not exactly the cheapest keyboard -- but I find the price reasonable. All in all, if you are a programmer, or just a person who use a keyboard a lot, then you aught to get yourself a decent keyboard. The buckling spring technology is amazing. Also, the build quality is actually pretty good, it does not look particularly well built, but it is build to last! A tank in disguise. It's a LOUD keyboard, makes the feedback even better, but not in a uncomfortable way in my opinion -- guess I'll hear from my neighbors sooner or later :D

   If you want to make a purchase yourself then you can head over to Unicomp's webstore.