Hack a bike · 4 February 2008 by Alex Beregszaszi
This is at least 3 years old news, but still very interesting. Members of the Chaos Computer Club managed to install a back door into 10% of the bicycles offered by Deutsche Bahn’s Call a Bike service.
This backdoor makes someone aware of it able to use the bikes for free.
I am wondering anyone managed hacking the similar bikes in Vienna or Barcelona.
Antonov An-225 at Ferihegy, Budapest · 19 January 2008 by Alex Beregszaszi
Today one of the worlds biggest aircraft, the An-225 landed at Ferihegy (Budapest Airport) and will leave tomorrow. For this special occassion, the airport opened some view decks at the terminal for the interested parties. It is said that tomorrow it will carry some kind of earthquake equipment to a destination in Asia.
A complete itiner at detailed description is available in Hungarian at Airportal.
The New Yorker style · 19 January 2008 by Alex Beregszaszi
According to wikipedia The New Yorker magazine has a distinctive typography style: One uncommonly formal feature of the magazine’s in-house style is the placement of diaeresis marks in words with repeating vowels—such as reëlected and coöperate—in which the two vowel letters indicate separate vowel sounds.
Well, Hungarian and German have these kind of marks by default.
VectorMagic · 29 November 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
VectorMagic is a vectorizer tool from Stanford: This site converts bitmap images to vector art – it’s an online auto-tracer.
It produces really good output, and is reasonably fast. Kudos.
(via plastik)
China Radio International · 5 October 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
CRI has been founded in order to populate chinese culture among non speakers of the language. They operate broadcasts in several languages.
More interesting to me is that they have a Hungarian channel. This has been featured on Index.hu (hungarian only). The footage reveals that the crew has hardly any native speaking personnel, but more local universities do offer Hungarian studies – which is loved among students – thus the number of speakers increases every year.
I had listened to the latest broadcast, and it is not bad at all. Funny at some parts, but mostly understandable for a hungarian listener.
Now they plan to buy broadcast time in Hungary.
Legacy of Voyager · 15 September 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
Some days ago a Seven Wonders of the IT World article was posted, where Voyager 1 was named as ‘Computer farthest from Earth’. This started an interestin browsing for me.
Looking at the Voyager FAQ reveals a lot of interesting stories. Some are:
- when the satellite reached the border of our solar system, the cameras were turned back and captured the first pictures how it looks like from outside
- the data about the earth which is contained on golden phonograph records was released as a book and on cdrom too. see Carl Sagan: Murmurs of Earth
- part of the original team was frightened about sending so much information about us on the discs out there, however we are already giving life signs with the pollution our satellites create
and the most relevant part:
There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft and there are two of each kind. Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K.
Computer Command System (CCS) – 18-bit word, interrupt type processors (2) with 4096 words each of plated wire, non-volatile memory.
Flight Data System (FDS) – 16-bit word machine (2) with modular memories and 8198 words each.
Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) – 16-bit word machines (2) with 4096 words each.
According to my calulations, that’s a total of about 541KB, or small potatoes compared to today’s microprocessors.
(Well, I think that is only ~541 kilobits or 66 kilobytes)
Apple uses Windows · 28 March 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
Before I sold my iBook, I have been curious about the Apple EFI implementation. Downloaded the EFI firmware update for the MacMini and looked into the binaries, with my favourite first-line-reverse-engineering tool: string.
For my biggest surprise, it contained C:\... path names among those
“All Rights Reserved” fear Apple lines.
The path names definitely looked like, that the BIOS, err, I mean EFI was compiled on Windows.
Isn’t that depressing for an Apple fanboy? :)
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Online law · 27 March 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
One could think, in our modern internet driven world, accessing full texts of acts and other law documents should be a basic right of the citizens, because the simplicity of putting the texts online.
Most acts are written already as digital documents and most time they are published in official journals. These journal should be accessible online.
However, when someone needs to search for a specific act, journals may no be the best choice, as they only publish newly added or changed texts. No, I cannot imagine that governments can make it searchable :)
The sad case in Hungary is that there are no freely searchable law sites. I have found one, that looks like the most usable on the market: Opten Törvénytár Light. Törvénytár means law collection.
A bright, followable example is Germany, where the Minsitry of Justice together with a private company made it all freely available to citizens. The site is available at bundesrecht.justiz.de.
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Tesco secrets - the book · 11 November 2006 by Alex Beregszaszi
Tesco joined the Hungarian market ten years ago. As pioneers they opened the first hypermarket, and probably they are the leading hypermarket chain in Hungary.
As a big company everyone knows day by day, every now and then rumours rise and fall about how the employees and customers steal, what kind of bogus price anomalies customers discover, and so on.
Since some weeks or months, a presumably ex-tesco-employee started writing a blog (first on the hungarian Blogter blog provider, now moved to Blogspot) about the inside of Tesco. Now she/he released a book unleashing everything. Will see.
Of course it is banned in Tesco and rumour is that the concurrent Auchan stores ban it too, but online stores started selling it some days ago: Fokusz, Bookline.hu and Libri. The printed version costs roughly $10.
How many “Wal-Mart Secrets” books are on the market?:)
Kirowski · 6 September 2006 by Alex Beregszaszi
Kirowski is one of the biggest web and “new media” foundries in Hungary (carnation being the other big player?). Kiro (the nickname of it) had its 10th birthday party a few weeks ago, thus gained some appearence in blogs.
Why do I write about this? Do you notice the name? Its a bit Polish, but the people behind it are Hungarian and noone of them have a similar surname or nickname.
The light came when reading Pollner’s (again, a nickname) mediablog. An insider revealed that when choosing the name, their pointed to a map, and selected the name of a city nearest to that point. The city was the Russian Kirovsk.
That’s it.
Update: pictures of the city and its mine