According to a very euphemistic mail sent out by Star Alliance today, Miles and More are going to be even more oriented at the “value of the flight ticket.” Now of course we know there’s no such thing as a free lunch (if we’d even dare to call an...
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How to open Preview or Skim from DEVONThink
Unfortunately, DEVONThink utilizes its own PDF preview application. If you’d rather want to open Preview, you can utilize BetterTouchTool and set up a custom action for DEVONThink for a keyboard combination to use.
Continue reading...Triple the USB Speed on a MacBook Pro for 10 $…
I recently got one of those awesome Western Digital MyPassport USB Drives. And then noticed that my 2010 17” MacBook Pro (running on OSX 10.8.4) has a USB 2.0 port only, which means it is slow as in
Continue reading...Apple Time Machine – get back in the Driver’s Seat!
Background Maybe it is just me again overcomplicating things. Yet I recently noticed that when I went on my VPN, using my IPhone to connect to the Internet, and then OpenVPN, at some point, TimeMachine decided to run a backup. Not the best idea in the world even if...
Continue reading...Some musing on scientific writing…
Some notes for my fellows at University of Liverpool. Quite often we’ve to manage a lot of content, which means get it, digitize it, and manage it to finally end up writing something about it. Let’s see it from where we want to have it: All content should be...
Continue reading...Export from VitalSource Bookshelf
Every now and again, my University gives us a reader through the DRM black hole software that they deemed useful to license: VitalSource bookshelf. And of course, that means you’ll get encrypted content, which your operating system and document management system of choice won’t index. And just as with...
Continue reading...Small Cloudy Musings about Big Data
If we develop the topic of cloud and big data in a more general context, the first thing to understand is that this is not about any particular vendor. We’re talking open source here, the moment you remove lock-ins—see Flume, Hadoop, Hive, Impala, to name just the Apache stack...
Continue reading...How to Fix an APC UPS that’s not charging its Battery
I recently had my APC Smart-UPS 3000 RM report to me that I needed to replace the battery. Sure thing, I ordered a replacement from Ebay, plugged in and thought everything should be just fine. Well, it wasn’t. The battery was not charged, and neither reset nor power cycling...
Continue reading...apt-get upgrade failing after moving from vmware to virtual box?
Moving to VirtualBox is just a great idea when you’re coming from VMWare Server 2.0 which is no longer supported. VirtualBox is a lot more modern, also allows for a headless setup, and it is a lot faster. The only drawback I saw is that VMWare Server allows for...
Continue reading...Pay attention to disk space when you’re running unattended upgrades on your Linux boxes
Today’s one of those days where you start with a clear plan of what you want to do, and then you end up fixing something entirely different. Since I’ve built most of my virtual machines based on a small set of templates, at some point I got bored by...
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