elkemental Force

What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? –Richard Feynman

5 Years Anniversary: When My Phone Got Hacked

I like to play with phones. 5 years ago my cell phone decided it wanted to play on its own. It did participate in a TV voting – so the provider said and the itemized bill proved. This was for a music show I wouldn’t even watch if somebody paid me for doing so. The…
What Learning about Feynman’s Path Integrals Was Good for

I have gone to great lengths on this blog in order to explain how and why a degree in physics prepares you for seemingly different careers, or at least does not hurt. But it would have been so simple. I will now illustrate this – using just two incomprehensible images. Actually, I have a hidden…
Grim Reaper Does a Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation

I have a secondary super-villain identity. People on Google+ called me: Elke the Ripper or Master of the Scythe. [FAQ] No, I don’t lost a bet. We don’t have a lawn-mower by choice. Yes, we tried the alternatives including a reel lawn-mower. Yes, I really enjoy doing this. It is utterly exhausting – there is no…
I Picked the Right Blogging Platform! (Book Review: The Year without Pants)

Before starting this blog I compared blogging tools in 2011. These two facts about WordPress and Automattic did win me over: Now I have read the book on Automattic’s corporate culture: The Year without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun Scott is a former Microsoft manager and long-term author and speaker.…
Network Sniffing for Everyone – Getting to Know Your Things (As in Internet of Things)

Simple Sniffing without Hubs or Port Mirroring for the Curious Windows User [Jump to instructions and skip intro] Your science-fiction-style new refrigerator might go online to download the latest offers or order more pizza after checking your calendar and noticing that you have to finish a nerdy project soon. It may depend on your geekiness…
Automatic Mapping of Logon Certificates to Users in Active Directory

This post has originally been published to my other / ‘archive’ website in 2014, first as a PDF, later converted to a HTML article. I am publishing it here on my WordPress blog in April 2022, using its original publication date – as it predates most of the other articles in my PKI UPN AD…
Art from Plastic and Wood

After the musings on Life, the Universe and Everything you deserve a break – and a post with not too much verbiage. I am borrowing some images from a series of posts the Chief Engineer is currently running on our German blog. (My job title is Science Officer, but we don’t have a Captain). This…
Career Advice – Borrowing Wise Words from a Sailing Hacker

On researching SSL-related hacks, I have stumbled upon the website of notable security researcher Moxie Marlinspike. Marlinspike is also a sailor and working on diverse projects, such as Audio Anarchy – a project for transcribing anarchist books into audio format. On his About page he says: I like computer security and software development, particularly in the…
I Am Too Googleable!

What a letdown. I wanted to report on near completion of The Website Resurrection Project – but I had a mind-altering experience. On the upside, I am not afraid of identity theft or surveillance anymore. My dentist had to cancel an appointment the day before. I showed up some minutes before the appointed time. The…
Diffusion of iTechnology in Corporations (or: Certificates for iPhones)

[Jump to technical stuff] Some clichés are true. One I found confirmed often is about how technologies are adopted within organizations: One manager meets another manager at a conference / business meeting / CIO event. Manager X show off the latest gadget and/or brags about presents a case-study of successful implementation of Y. Another manager…
Blog Cleanup – Raking the Virtual Zen Garden Again

I am proud owner of a full season of Monk on DVD, and as a child nobody ever had to tell me to tidy up my room. I indulged not only in cleaning my Lego(*) world with a fine paint brush but I rather re-organized all my belongings in Feng-Shui-meets-OCD-style quite often. (*) Lego is…
Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Strange Loops: Nostalgia and Random Thoughts

I am curious – who read the book, too? Did you like it? I read it nearly 30 years ago and I would also tag it one of the most influential books I read as a teenager. [This might grow into a meandering and lengthy post with different (meta-)levels – given the subject of the post I…
Measurement Data for Our Heat Pump System – Finally Translated Documentation

In an earlier post I said Although we have very innovative, and if I may say so, geeky / nerdy customers it is rather unlikely that we will plan heat pump systems in Australia via sending checklists or doing ‘remote support’ in the same way we work in IT projects. OK – now we really…
Search Term Poetry – Spring Edition

Dear Google, you do still encrypt your search results. As a security enthusiast I should like this but I rather suspect you want me to use your AdWords tools. Please stop showing me ads for your “starter package” on all social networks, and give me the raw material for my poetry back. For now I…
Hacking the Biological Clock

I need to rant before I will borrow one hour of my life to some technocrats tomorrow – that will give it back to me in October. So the subtitle is: I hate Daylight Savings Time! Daylight Savings Time was inspired by a whimsical essay by Benjamin Franklin (probably not the first time that politics fell for something…
Carl Sagan’s Glorious Dawn: The Promise of Cosmos

This is a reblogged post:https://samirchopra.com/2014/03/24/carl-sagans-glorious-dawn-the-promise-of-cosmos/ Trying to catch up I am wading through social media streams and notifications. I am delighted to discover a post that echoes EXACTLY what I feel / have once felt as a teenager and high school student who had just decided to become a physicist. In his reflections on Carl…
The Strange World of Public Key Infrastructure and Certificates

An e-mail discussion related to my recent post on IT security has motivated me to ponder about issues with Public Key Infrastructure once more. So I attempt – most likely in vain – to merge a pop-sci introduction to certificates with sort of an attachment to said e-mail discussion. So this post might be opaque…
The Web As I Want to Remember It

This title might be due to unknowingly plagiarizing dejavu.org – The web as we remember it. I haven’t visited dejavu.org in years, but I did now as I felt I need to wax nostalgic. This might be due to my recent tinkering with my websites‘ layouts. As a child I crafted 200-faced paper polyhedra whose…