Believe it or not, I was editing this week a document that I received by email. After 3 minutes Word Mac 2011, Version 14 crashed, leaving only a temporary file back on my OSX 10.7.4 desktop.
As restarting Word did not work, I used disk utility, that recommended to be started from another disk.
When doing so, it recommended to reformat my hard disk (which I did). Continue reading A Word file that crashes the Macbook hard disk
Here is a new MIT video software, that constructs first a backbone of an object showing minor movements while then amplifying these movements to a ridiculous extent. Not clear what I try to explain? See a video at SPON. Although the idea behind Continue reading Making the invisible motion visible
When visiting other institutes, I frequently see scientists wearing headphones ( I only use my Bose headphones to make noise – only yesterday I couldn’t resist t download the free Goldberg variations from Kickstarter ). entertainment.slashdot.org now details what I already feared Continue reading Wearing headphones at work
While all that sync’ing works quite well, I still have different desktops on my MacBooks.
Here is a solution that is based on some undocumented feature of the iCloud that I have found at macstories.net. It basically needs to activate the iCloud settings also for files which will give you in Lion access to a magic 5 GB ~/Library/Mobile Document folder very much alike to Dropbox.
I am rsyncing here now my Desktop folder by an automator action as described at banana.com. Can be done in less than 5 minutes…
This is a new Edge conversation with Mark D Pagel.
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. Continue reading Infinite stupidity?
I have tried out the new sync function on my mac books and it works (nearly) perfect. There is not so much information out there, how this is working, that’s why I am describing here briefly my strategy.
The master machine is sync’ed first Continue reading Sync macs over iCloud
or in his won words
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
I have seen recently a TV documentation about the Dabbawalas in Mumbai who deliver freshly cooked food to the workplaces and return the empty boxes back to the customer’s home. According to Wikiedia.
In 2002, Forbes Magazine found its reliability to be that of a six sigma standard. More than 175,000 or 200,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality Continue reading Less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries
The screenshot below shows my desperate search why my Macbook wouldn’t boot again (following a cold reset writing a large Photoshop CS5 file for more than 15 minutes).
The verbose boot mode (APPLE+S) showed some error with the journalling system, basically an error as described at the currently non functioning Apple Support Board
jnl: replay_journal: bad block list header @ 0x4bra50 (checksum 0xega0fee1 != 0x927a5993)
jnl: journal_open: Error replaying the journal!
hfs: early jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0).
Unfortunately nothing helped. Booting from an external disk just showed a normal, error-free HD in disk utility. Continue reading A Mac OSX journalling error can inhibit the boot disk to be mounted
A longstanding wish has become true – a useful graphical interface for R. While recent versions still had major problems on my Mac, the most recent nightly build works as expected, thanks Josh!
Having now a SSD in use for more than one year, here are my accumulated tweaks. The first one is Smart Sleep which greatly enhances sleeping/wakening time. Disabling the motion sensor (“sudo pmset -a sms 0”) doesn’t hurt but is isn’t really necessary. Mounting the SSD noatime , however, gives a measurable performance gain. And at the end, I dropped that RAM thingy as it breaks with every system update.
A recent article on WPA hacking using the Amzon EC2 cloud computing facility let me wonder whether there couldn’t be more useful projects. For example gene-gene interaction testing would be nice – indeed somebody has already setup a possibility to use R: Robert Grossman, director at the Informatics at the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology. Great, many thanks!
What’s even better, a
… 60 Genomes dataset can be found here, as part of the public data that Bionimbus makes available to researchers. With the Bionimbus Community Cloud, the data is available via both the commodity Internet, as well as via high performance research networks, such as the National LambdaRail and Internet2 … If you are a member of the Bionimbus Community Cloud, then you don't need to download the data but can compute over the data directly with Bionimbus. Currently, we are not making the Bionimbus Cloud generally available, but expect to do so beginning in approximately June, 2011.
I have still dozens of Falk paper maps in my cabinet. With the small Garmin 60 CSX, however, that includes most US and European cities, I don’t need them anymore.
But what about more remote locations where conferences are now so often located? Continue reading For the travelling scientist
I have just subscribed to the junkchart RSS feed that I found during the preparation of my forthcoming talk about data visualization. Well, and here is another spin-off – a picture how wordle sees this blog’ front page
Do you want to know what the large figures on my desktop mean? These are the counts of important emails (with sender in my addressbook), all other unread emails as well as unread RSS feeds.
It turned out to be a bit tricky what to enter into the Geektool shell window – here is my solution:
|wj_geektool.sh|