How can a country afford to be so unready all the time?

I am talking about Greece. We were the centre of the world for a while some days ago for the 4 month bailout extension we got in February. And of course for our controversial Minister of Economics, Mr. Varoufakis.

As for a little context, Greek people voted for a Greece in Euro and out of the crisis minus the austerity. Maybe it is a fool’s quest, maybe not.

ICP Sensors are nice!

The last two days I was frustrated with an ICP (Integrated CircuitPiezoelectric) vibration sensor not working.

There were glimpses of uptime but it was just that. Glimpses…

I literally wrote the title at the start of the Apple Watch announcement at Apple’s “Spring Forward” event. It was “The new MacBook is awesome”.

Then I changed it.

I am not an Apple fanboy by any means. I bought my 13” MacBook Air at the end of 2012 because it was the best computer for the money and my needs at the time of buy.

The world nowadays works in teams and as you may know I’ ve been involved in many teams around this time.

This team can be a startup, a group, a hackerspace or even you and your friends. When some people do something together they are a team. And a good team acts like a good piece of machinery.

Working in teams is hard but also very efficient. If a team is managed correctly, many extraordinary things can be done.

This is what I’ve understood about being in teams and learning from my mistakes and others’.

There is a new breach boy in town and this time is called ShellShock.

Researchers claim that it is a lot worst than Heardbleed.

It is a Bash bug that allows almost anyone to execute commands to a remote machine.

For more about that here.

I hate mess… So I like remote solutions!

One thing that bothers me is the USB cable that I always have connected on my computer. On it’s other end, lies a 1TB Hard Drive that stores my Time Machine backup.

From time to time I stream movies via Plex from the same hard disk. That’s because I don’t want to store movies on my low capacity Macbook Air.

Since I got my Chromecast, Plex has gone to the top of my “Useful Software” list as it supports Chromecast and I can stream the Movies without connecting a HDMI cable.

I just got my hands on my long waited Spark Core!

It is a tiny Arduino board with a built in WiFi module. Besides that and the obvious possibilities of the Core, there is an API making it possible for the Core to talk to the internet.

Let’s say I want to check the status of the Hackerspace of Patras (0 or 1).

This simple bash script that runs on my computer does just that:

After a couple of months around this project it reached a stage where maybe it is not super stable but it is usable and pretty ok for my needs.

It provides:

• UI that is simple and I like.
• Ability to commit a new post through Github API.
• Keeps a draft.
• A list of the user’s posts.
• Ability to edit previous posts.

Here are some screenshots:

From Wikipedia:

Mr. Freeman is a Russian animated web series named after its main character. The series appeared on YouTube on September 21, 2009 and got considerable popularity in Runet. The main content of the series is monologues which in a harsh manner criticize the lifestyle of modern everyman. As of August 16, 2012 there are 19 episodes published. The total number of views is more than 35 million.

I discovered Mr. Freeman by this video last year which I saved on my Favourites list on Youtube. Today as I was cleaning up this list, I rediscovered it and felt like sharing.

You may say you are not that guy for whom he is talking about but chances are you have a lot in common. Agreeing or not with him and his opinion of you there is sure some food for thought in his words.

OMGUbuntu! had an article recently about the well known text editor Sublime Text 2.

This editor is fantastic! It can be customised in any way you imagine to fit your needs and taste. There is also a great community that builds plugins and you can build your own pretty easily. It also support some great features and you can see a demonstration at their homepage. Please go! I can wait!

You saw it? Good!

If you follow the web for the last two weeks you probably know about that little (ugly) leaked PowerPoint that explains a NSA program called PRISM.

It was a guy named Edward Snowden that found out and left a job that provided a great income at the NSA because he didn’t wanted to be part of this.

Here is an interview at the Guardian.

Whether we believe his motives or not, PRISM exists more than 5 years now.

I am getting mad of the remote controller in the house.

Actually I use three:

• The TV remote
• The Radio/iPod/CD Player remote
• The Air Condition remote

Some time ago I fell on this post. It is an IR receiver & emitter circuit attached to a Raspberry Pi. I had some spare time so I decided to build it!

I had a task to translate a big Greek address book in English.

Due to the fact that Greek Language is full of special characters, a problem occurred when passports where to be created. There should be a fixed way to translate names from Greek to English. So the ELOT-743 standard was created to solve the confusion.

Here you see most of it: