Encrypted backup to the cloud with rclone
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
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
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...
Paypal Payment vs. Micropayment comparison
If you sell stuff online and receive payments using Paypal you probably already know that you have two options for the payment fee with Paypal. One is the standard 2.9% commission + ¢30 transaction fee. The other is so called Micropayment Discount or 5% + ¢5 per transaction. The latter, as Paypal says, is better if your typical sales are less than $10. But how much better and what is typical? - are the questions that neither Paypal nor anybody else can answer for you. Here is a simple graph showing the total percentage you'd pay to Paypal from your merchant profit depending on the transaction amount. The graph is to help you understand your odds.
Below is my humble "analysis".
BLINK℠ and NFC, the swipeless credit card - what's the point?
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?