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Random Bits

Folding@Home

Recently I’ve started “folding” again, to give a small contribution to science and research on important topics such as Alzeimer’s disease among others (as the above video shows). After 2 previous failed attempts (the old computer could not handle it), I’m currently on my longest streak and have just completed the first 100 work units. […]

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Technology and Internet

Please do not let your SSL certificate expire

Please avoid what is happening right now with the student’s platform of my university, that is, letting your SSL certificate expire over the weekend. Initially it will raise suspicion and distrust based on the alert showed by the browser and if the issue lasts too long it will expose lots of users to phishing attacks, […]

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Technology and Internet

Lenovo and men in the middle

Another week, another scandal. The general public might pass by without noticing the recent news about Lenovo computers but the tech community in the Internet is incredulous. What we witnessed was serious and a betrayal of the customer confidence, so in this post I will try to briefly cover everything that I’ve read about the […]

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Random Bits

Laura Poitras’ CITIZENFOUR Awarded Oscar for Best Documentary in 2014

Laura Poitras’ CITIZENFOUR Awarded Oscar for Best Documentary in 2014 by EFF

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Technology and Internet

KDE Connect

The KDE ecosystem is filled with great applications, an awesome DE and great tools to develop computer software. I’ve been a satisfied user for a couple of years and I’m still learning and discovering new features and capabilities of this software collection. The last one was “KDE Connect“, available since 2013 (I’m late to the […]

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Technology and Internet

Now running over HTTPS

2014 was a year where we witnessed a huge amount in Internet related security incidents, in the previous years, the world understood that our Internet usage is not only accessible to us and our service providers but to every middleman in the way as well. So it is natural that the recent trend is to […]

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Random Bits

Why Privacy Matters

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Portugal

Raw Open Data

Last month I attended an interesting event here in Coimbra, about the concept of Open Data, which is described in Wikipedia like this: Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. During […]

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Personal Portugal

RubyConf Portugal

In the beginning of last week, during the days 13 and 14, I and some guys from Whitesmith went to Braga for the first RubyConf Portugal. I’m not a huge fan of Ruby but since i work with it from time to time, i took the chance to learn a little bit more about it […]

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Technology and Internet

On buying new hardware

When I was buying my laptop some years ago, I wished I knew of a website with a database of hardware that works well with free software. Specially with any operating system based on Linux, so I wouldn’t get into too much trouble to get everything working. Instead I ended up purchasing a machine that […]