1 My computer problems

On Wed, my main laptop computer's power brick failed (2 hours before chairing a virtual session of ACM SIGSPATIAL 2021). I've never seen a power brick fail before. Oh well, that's what backups and extra laptops are for. Concerning them, the question is, am I paranoid enough?

So I could create Thursdays's blog page on another machine, and showed it in class, but couldn't sync everything enough to get it on the web server and update gradescope. I'm now using an old power brick while Lenovo ships out a new one. Things are mostly back to normal.

Concerning backups, for a serious installation, it's insufficient just to copy all the files. The HW is too expensive to have a spare just sitting around, and various licenses and passwords are keyed to the particular HW and have to be reset. I've considered going virtual on AWS but that has other problems.

2 Quantum communication, 2

1. Theoretical Tutorial: Quantum communications (40:00) May 19, 2020

   Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) Program Manager Prof. Tim Ralph from the University of Queensland presents a quantum computing theoretical tutorial on quantum communications.

   We'll start at minute 15, which starts a new topic, Quantum repeaters.

3 Quantum secret sharing

1. Secret Sharing Explained Visually (7:56). Oct 22, 2019.

   The IEEE Information Theory Society presents an overview of Adi Shamir's 1979 paper on secret sharing. This is part of our series on the greatest papers from information theory.

2. How to keep an open secret with mathematics (10:35). Dec 31, 2019.

   This is a little less technical. You can watch on your own.

3. Oblivious transfer (14:14).

   This educational video is part of the course Quantum Cryptography available for free via http:/www.online-learning.tudelft.nl ©️ TU Delft, released under a CC BY NC SA license.