all things end

daily life misc

some end well

testpost

misc

post

dd unix CLI command taking a while? Just ask how it is doing …

linux misc

It turns that you can ask a running dd command how it is doing.

In the terminal that runs it simply enter a CTRL^T command.

The dd will react to the SIGINFO that this sinds with statistics of the running process.

Quiet handy since dd can take a while if you start it with a lower block size.

deleting all photos from iPhone

Apple misc

Somehow Apples cloud based photo system got enabled on my iPhone. Which also meant that the delete button in the OS X application “Image capture” got grayed out.

To re-enable it had to turn off iCloud Photo Library and My Photo stream via Settings -> Photos & Camera

And then I had to reboot the phone (running IOS 8.1.3)

I am old enough to remember that any change on a Windows machine last century also required a reboot.

careful what you touch …

misc

In this study two small (25) groups of (mostly female) students were ask to keep their hands in ice water.

Their averages were 40.12 and 42.03 seconds. Which gets to show the range of variance with a small sample of 25.

They were told that they would do a different experiment after that: evaluating product design. One group handled Noodles, the other a bottle of Ibuprofen for 2 minutes.
After that they did another ice water test and now the results were:

45.28 seconds (instead of 40.12) for the Ibuprofen group, while the Noodles people lasted for 41.83 second instead of 42.03.

I wonder what would happen if one would repeat this experiment. As much one would want to have that handling pain killers will reduce pain the actual difference is so small that it could easily be part of noise to be expected in a sampling size of 25.

Good Bye Firefox

internet misc

OK – I really am a laggard. Using Firefox in 2014 was not really the best thing to do. But it got me where I needed to be. Other browsers are of course always part of the mix of things to use. Comes with the job.

But with Firefox 29 today they finally pushed me over. As usually it is a minute detail: I like to have around 20 things 1 click away. Firefox used to be able to ONLY display those bookmarks without the favicon.

Since I identify those things by 1 or 2 letters it makes a big difference if I have the favicons visible or not. With Chrome I never found a way to get rid of them. Now with Firefox they just poppped in.

So I might as well use Chrome, and maybe look for a way to get rid of them there. There is no way that I will invest any of that into a browser that it is declining. These days Internet Explorer actually causes less troubles than Firefox.

Turns out there is a solution for Chrome:

Remove Chrome Bookmark Favicons

It is not ideal since it leaves the space AND the site itself looses the favicon as well, but it is never the less better than Firefox.

I doubt I will ever look back …

assemble images randomly

linux misc

Want to assemble images randomly into one? That’s easy in the command line if you have imagemagick installed:

Assuming you have all pictures in the current directory:

for i in *jpg ; do mv "$i" $RANDOM.jpg ; done

this renames all files ending in jpg into files that have a random number. Files might get overwritten should the random number come up again.

Assembling is as well:

montage *jpg -mode concatenate outputfilename.jpg

If you would run this again outputfilename.jpg would be a used as source image as well.

Stupidity

misc

In some -older- javascript code I found the following today:

Within 4 lines the author manages to look not so smart himself: the regular expression to find the Internet Explorer version assumes that it remains in the single digits.

With Internet Explorer 10 the match starts failing. The code that follows has no idea how to deal with that.

In German a person who is not the brightest is sometimes been titled as ‘can not count to ten’ (“Kann nicht bis Zehn zählen,”)

big bus

free of any reason misc

Sometimes I wonder how big that bus must be that one can throw an entire country under. A pretty pretty one in this case. Not the bus. The country. Love it.

Apple

Apple misc

“Designed in California”

Made in China

Taxed in Reno