I just opened the article/blog section on Concergens company web page with my post about information security trends especially related to embedded systems and IoT. More regulation is coming this year and next year. The blog post is available in English and Finnish languages. Information security requirements are increasing https://www.convergens.fi/post/information-security-requirements-are-increasing Tietoturvavaatimukset kasvavat https://www.convergens.fi/fi/post/tietoturvavaatimukset-kasvavat Earlier related post https://www.epanorama.net/newepa/2023/11/14/embedded-systems-and-iot-security ..read more

A massive solar storm rocked the Earth’s atmosphere with charged particles this weekend, triggering spectacular auroras in the night sky across a substantial swath of both North America and Europe. Over the last weekend, one of the strongest geomagnetic storms of the millennium was experienced. ‘Extreme’ solar storm triggers Northern Lights as far south as Florida Friday. Skies across the U.S. lit in a spectacular colorful glow not seen in years to decades as massive solar flares slammed into Earth on Friday, triggering “extreme” levels of geomagnetic activity. It was expected to be G4 level ..read more

This posting is here to collect cyber security news in April 2024. I post links to security vulnerability news to comments of this article. You are also free to post related links to comments ..read more

Depends what you want. I’d go with a microcontroller for starts so you can change it programmatically. I’d bet someone has done it with an Arduino or Pi. Here are some links to interesting looking projects. Those circuits operate mostly at safe low voltages and control low power LEDs. The same ideas can be used to control higher power lights with help of FETs or SSRS (if you know how to do that safely). Disco LED It is a simple tutorial on how to create disco lights. https://www.hackster.io/MightyProjects/disco-led-b261d5 The project is about the disco lights. Just upload the code to the ardui ..read more

A resistor is a resistor, a coil is a plain ol’ inductance, and a capacitor is a capacitor – or so you thought. Alas, life isn’t quite so trivial… There are non-ideal properties of real components. Capacitors have non-idealities that you should know about when designing electronics circuits. If you are building high frequency circuits or hifi audio circuits, you need to be very careful what capacitor type to use and what not to use. Here is an overview of discussion on capacitors distortion in audio applications. Capacitor Distortion Mechanisms http://stephan.win31.de/capdist.htm article says ..read more

Audio Engineer Shitposting on Facebook has a competition: Turn any famous song lyrics into a bad mixing advice. The original examples were those: Whoa, we’re half way there Whoa oh, don’t eq your snare She was a streamer girl he was a pirate boy? It gave me inspiration to make some of my own mixing parody versions of some known songs: Shot through to red And gain to blame You give LUF a bad name (bad name) I play my part and you play your game You give LUF a bad name (bad name) Hey, you give LUF, a bad name No promises (No demands) No demands (LUF is a battlefield) LUF is a battlefield Whoa ..read more

Happy birthday to Basic, possibly the most important programming language of all time! The Easy-to-use language that drove Apple, TRS-80, IBM, and Commodore PCs debuted in 1964. The BASIC programming language turns 60 article says: “Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college’s General Electric GE-225 m ..read more

Why??? They are so cheap these days compared to what they used to cost, why would you even bother to build your own fixtures? You will have more invested in parts and time then just buying them outright. I did build some disco lights in 1990′s. Nowadays you can buy many disco lights more cheaply than you could buy the components. DIY is makes often sense only as a learning experience or if you need something really special that is not available ready made (and can cost time and money to make). Here is my small light control board that consists of two 300W light dimmers. One device I used a l ..read more

Broken USB cables. This USB-A to USB-C cable from Biltema was cheap, but the quality and robustness could been better. I have several cables that have all broken exactly like this. I don’t remember many other USB cable that would have damaged like this. If they had used decent construction in the USB C connector, this would have been a good cable (because other cable features seemed to be good). Products in the pictures: USB-kaapeli tyypin C liittimellä USB-kaapeli tyypin C liittimell ..read more

Digitalization and software have made our lives easier and made our operations many times more efficient over the past decades. Data centers consume two to three percent of the planet’s total electricity usage now. It has considerable CO2 footprint. Various ICT solutions are responsible for 4–10 percent of annual electricity consumption and 3–5 percent of global greenhouse emissions (ICT industry climate and environmental strategy, 2021). By one estimate, consumption could jump to as much as 13 percent of the world’s total electricity demand by 2030. Everyone seems to be slowly convinced of th ..read more