So I finally got it. Ever since seeing the first concept video of Google Glass I wanted one. Badly. I went to great lengths to get one, failed, tried again, failed again, flamed Google on G+ and at the end somehow managed to get one.

It arrived on Thursday and I have been wearing it since. It’s awesome. It really is. And of course it has bugs, but it’s not a finished product yet anyway.

It’s interesting that I did not face more Privacy related discussions, given the fact that I was at 2 Software related events in the last few days: Our overdue X-Mas party and the Austria Game Jam.

Disclaimer: Everybody that ever talked to me about mobile knows that I prefer Android in almost all aspects. I don’t want to use Apple personally but I am grateful that they invented the Appstore, a business model which puts food on my table. I am sad that their “innovation” lately was based around new Icons and slimmer phones instead of ground breaking products like the original iPod and iPhone.

The new iPhone 5S

I did not expect any big changes. Seems like I was wrong. Most of the consumer specs are 1:1 copies of the last iPhone5 which is what I pretty much expected. The things that blew my mind are two: 64 bit (the positive change) and the fingerprint reader (the really bad change).

I implemented a small project using Android Studio to get an impression how it works out for me, compared to Eclipse. This post is not meant to start a flame towards IntelliJ, it’s meant as a discussion starter.

My Eclipse install is heavily customized, just like my OS. I use a VIM plugin, a ton of auto formatting and a lot of the settings that are by default turned off (some of them, like the auto complete popup delay are beyond any reasoning).

I invested a lot of time to configure Android Studio in the same way (using Google and the settings search bar) but I am still missing a few things. I also deliberately did not change the default keybinds - switching IDE but keeping keybinds seemed like a stupid idea to me.

The latest stories about governments spying on pretty much everybody sparked my interest on privacy and cryptography again. I will be writing a series of blog posts about tools and methods that make life a lot harder for NSA and friends, focusing on easy to use apps and easy to follow tips for everybody (and not just computer science experts). I will not go into much technical detail if it can be avoided (you will not see math at all!).

Problems with cryptography

I’ll start off with a list of problems that I see why cryptography is not used. This list is later used to evaluate the tools and methods that I will suggest.

As I have written previously I like analog things. For photography, I have pushed everything to a new level and develop the negatives myself and scan them using a Canon CanoScan 9000f MK II. I owe a lot to Jens-Michel Cramer and his excellent blog post on developing C41 film. I pretty much exactly use his routine, with a single change: I do a finishing rinse of the film because the stabilizer leaves stains on the film that I don’t want to have.

The camera I use (for now) is a self assembled Twin Lens Reflex that I got from Amazon. I am currently waiting for a Konstruktor and a Green Holga (black was sold out) to be shipped, then I will switch cameras around until I learn how to use each of them. The TLR shutter is a little tricky and I lost a few frames on the first film, but after tweaking it abit I only lose ~2 frames per film. I did not lose any pictures though because you get used to the shutter sound and can hear when It didn’t open and close correctly.

The film I use is standard Kodak 200 ISO 36 frames. It is easy to get and does the job well enough for my standards.