Ups and downs of the iPad
So I got an iPad. Again. I had the iPad 1 not too long after it came out and started to explore the technical possibilities of paperless paper-reading, commenting and synchronizing. With Dropbox, which is really one of the best “cloud” services around, this worked pretty well. However, the iPad 1 was heavy and slow and so scrolling through papers was not a very enjoyable task and after a while you simply wanted to have a rest for your arms.
This has changed with the iPad 3. It is fast, it is only slightly lighter, but the great display makes you want to hold it maybe a little longer. So for paper reading (with GoodReader) and synchronizing (still with Dropbox) this is really great. Also watching movies or reading newspapers (the Süddeutsche Zeitung of Munich has a really good app for their newspaper) is fun, although the glossy screen limits the use of the iPad to really dark locations.
Right now, I am at a conference and I thought I try using the iPad as a conference notepad. Tomorrow I will switch back to my MacBook Air that I also brought with me. Writing on the iPad is just too error-prone. I tried it digitally by using the built-in keyboard in its various variants (fullsize, split, movable), but it is just not the same if you don’t have feedback from the keys that you press. This is not just an aesthetic difference, but I think it is the main reason why the texts I write on the iPad sometimes look like they’ve been written by a monkey. When I write on a real keyboard I don’t have to use the backspace key very often and can type much faster than on the iPad. I think the reason for this is mainly that my fingers’ positions get re-adjusted (unconsciously) to the correct position of the keys after each letter whereas this feedback is missing for the electronic keyboard of the iPad. For this reason it is also nearly impossible to type on the iPad and not look at the screen (like I often do to follow a conference talk) because you would probably write so many typos that it would be hard to recognize what you’ve written. The built-in auto-correct function also doesn’t really help in this respect as it over-corrects at least in an astronomy setting where it cannot know about most abbreviations and names. It corrected a slightly mis-spelled “unobscured” (as in unobscured quasar) into “uninsured” (which is even slightly funny) and of course it dressed up a blazar into a blazer. Nevertheless it helps a bit to correct some mis-spellings if you follow closely what you write to notice any wrong corrections.
Apart from that I also find it hard to navigate in the text using my fingers: When I just want to move the cursor to the beginning of the line it always selects the first word and I have to point again with my finger to deselect the text.
I also tried with an iPad pen (a cheap, but highly rated one) for hand-written notes, although I believe that notes should be digital so that they can be searched. But irrespective of hand-written notes being “analog”, it is also not very convenient or fast to write them.
And last but not least, the support for international characters is missing if you’re not an English-only writer. While it helps that you can input ä, ö, ü, ß in a fast way by just sliding over the letters a, o, u, s, respectively, it is annoying that you cannot choose your keyboard layout independent of the auto-correct language. For an English text, I of course want to have the English auto-correction dictionary, but I don’t want to give up my German keyboard layout for that since I am used to it.
Grüße vom Paranal
Buenas tardes señoras y señores,
anbei ein paar Fotoeindrücke aus Chile, wo ich gerade (zum vierten Mal) beim Beobachten bin. Heute konnte ich das neue VST (VLT Survey Telescope) besichtigen, ein “kleines” 2.5-Meter-Teleskop das für Himmelsdurchmusterungen verwendet wird (um neue interessante Objekte zu finden, die später mit den großen Teleskopen angeschaut werden sollen). Danach bin ich zu Fuß vom Berggipfel zur “Residencia” runtergegangen (ca. 40 Minuten Spaziergang durch die Wüste). Das erstaunlichste an der Wüste finde ich immer noch, wie ruhig es hier ist. Man muss ab und zu einfach mal stehenbleiben und hören: Es ist still, absolut still. Mitunter hört man ein bisschen den Wind, aber ansonsten wirklich gar nichts.
Mittlerweile ist es auch wieder recht trocken geworden. Das merkt man zum Einen beim Wandern draußen (man kriegt sehr schnell einen trockenen Mund und trockene Augen) und drinnen merkt man es daran, dass man schon nach drei Schritten elektrisch geladen ist und bei jeder Berührung einen kleinen Schlag kriegt…
Das Wetter ist zur Zeit sehr gut, praktisch keine Wolken und sehr ruhige Atmosphäre. Ich hoffe, es bleibt die nächsten Tage noch so (und ich hoffe auch, dass ich von der Erkältung, die hier gerade rumgeht, verschont bleibe).
Jetzt lege ich mich mal noch ein bißchen an den Pool zum Ausruhen :-), in einer guten Stunde geht’s zum Essen und dann steht einen lange Nacht bevor (bis ca. 4 Uhr habe ich heute Beobachtungen).
Also dann: Hasta mañana!
Leo
Sync your life
If you would like to sync contacts and calendar entries wirelessly between your Mac and your iOS device(s) (such as iPhone, iPad, …), you can either subscribe to Apple’s “MobileMe” service at 79 € per year or you can manually set up sync solutions, e.g. using Google’s services. While “MobileMe” is certainly the much more convenient solution, it is also expensive. (more…)
Testing your memory using memtest
Not yours, actually, but your Mac’s memory. I recently got two 4 GB modules (yes, that’s 8 GB of memory… wow!) and wanted to see if they are OK. Faulty memory modules may cause system crashes and all kinds of weird behaviour. The program that can be used for this purpose is memtest which seems to be freely available with a GPL license but the official download website asks to pay a small amount for downloading it. However, there are alternative download sites and even alternative frontends to the memtest command line tool.
IDL and page orientation
In case you ever want to rotate a postscript file that’s in seascape orientation into ordinary landscape orientation, e.g. because IDL produces postscript files that are seascape, you can use this command for ghostscript:
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sOutputFile=pstest.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite "-dAutoRotatePages=/None" -c "<< /Orientation 1 >> setpagedevice" 0 rotate 0 0 translate -f pstest.ps
iOS 4 with free iPhone: Tethering still possible
I didn’t find on the internet whether Apple’s new iOS 4 would still allow Tethering for free iPhones, e.g. iPhones bought in Italy (like mine) and used with any SIM card. So I had to try out myself to find out: It does.
Opas Kartoffelsalat
Auf mehrfache Nachfrage hin poste ich hier das Rezept nach dem ich Kartoffelsalat mache. Ich habe es von meinem Opa, Kurt Brüggeller.
Zutaten
- 4 mittelgroße speckige Kartoffeln (pro Person)
- rote Zwiebeln
- Essiggurken, süß-sauer
- Senf
- Kren (Meerrettich), am besten pur also kein” Gourmet-Sahne-Meerrettich” o.ä.
- Salz, Pfeffer, je nach Geschmack etwas Petersilie
- Raps- oder Sonnenblumenöl
- Apfelessig
- Evtl. mit Garnitur: hartgekochtes Ei, Schnittlauch, (Cocktail-)Tomaten
Zubereitung
Kartoffeln kochen, auskühlen lassen, schälen, fein blättrig schneiden. Zwiebeln und Essiggurken fein schneiden, alles gut mischen. Abschmecken, mindestens drei Stunden in den Kühlschrank. Dort ziehen die Kartoffeln viel Wasser, daher darf der Salat vorher ruhig recht feucht sein, damit er am Schluss nicht zu trocken wird.
Guten Appetit!
Most annoying feature of the month: autocomplete=off
Thank you, dear browser developers, for trying hard to protect us innocent web surfers from the evils of the web. While features such as phishing protection might really be helpful, another very widely used, but seldomly recognised, feature isn’t. I am talking about the “autocomplete=off” feature here that prevents website to save login credentials in a system-wide password-manager (such as Keychain under Mac OS X). Meant to protect banking websites and other high-security sites, some webmasters apparently feel a need to use it for trivial-use websites such as Google or Deutsche Bahn. This is both annoying and dangerous. Annoying it is of course because it requries you to look up the password everytime you want to log in to that website. Dangerous it is, because people then might store passwords again in un-protected lists and / or copy-paste their login data to the form thereby making the data more easily accessible by intruders.
Solution? As in many cases: Use Firefox. While there seem to be some work-arounds to fix this annoying feature for older versions of Safari, newer versions of WebKit (the HTML engine underlying Safari) don’t seem to be patchable this way. However, with Firefox together with the add-on Greasemonkey, you can use scripts to enhance your surfing experience. The script re-enable_password_manager by andunix did the job for me. Now the Deutsche Bahn website opens again with login data pre-filled — as it should. 🙂
One final note about Greasmonkey: Don’t let yourself be confused by the options that it offers you when adding a new script. In case it did nevertheless, this Stackoverflow webpage might help clarify things.
Convert multiple ps files into pdf using ps2pdf
Unfortunately ps2pdf doesn’t allow that. But with a script as simple as that it will convert all ps files in your working directory into pdf and delete the original files:
#!/bin/bash filelist=`(find . -name \*.ps)` for i in $filelist; do ps2pdf $i rm $i echo 'Converted $i into pdf, deleted original file.' done
On the plural of AGN
In the current view of galaxy formation and cosmology most galaxies undergo phases of high nuclear activity, where they accrete lots of matter (compared to their Eddington accretion rate) and shine brightly. Such an object is then called an Active Galaxy and the thing in the center that actually shines and where lots of other stuff is happening is called an Active Galactic Nucleus or AGN.
Now how would one call two such objects? Certainly they are Active Galactic Nuclei, since the latin word nucleus (Second declension, “o-Deklination”) has a plural ending of -i in the nominative.
However, this does not mean that the plural of AGN necessarily must be AGN, AGNi or some other funny, but counter-intuitive, abbreviation.
AGNs is also a the only grammatically valid plural form of AGN. This is because the term AGN is so widely used that it itself has actually become lexicalized, i.e. it has become a word by itself. In other words: People actually say “The galaxy has an A-G-N” (instead of “The galaxy has an Active Galactic Nucleus”). And since standard English words get an ‘s’ in the plural, the plural of AGN is therefore AGNs.