… the executors and anyone else needing access to the documentation about my estate could have several problems. The same applies in the case of my wife, Ruth:
a lot of our insurance policies, contracts and so on are in German
the remainder are in English, so an understanding of both languages will be helpful
our computers at home are Macs, (many people have no idea how use a Mac, even if they are happy using a Windows PC)
Quite a lot of key information on our hard disks is encrypted
We have set up documentation of how to access the data on our Macs for our relations, but I think we need to do more. The situation will become more fraught for our family if / when we move to Spain, which is our long-term retirement plan – if global warming hasn’t turned the Iberian peninsula into a desert by then. Then they can add Spanish to the list of necessary languages.
Cory Doctorow, writing in The Guardian yesterday covers the last point on my list in his article “When I’m dead, how will my loved ones break my password?“. Worth a look if you use password managers or encrypted hardware on your home computer. And it underlines that providing secure data protection while you are alive, while allowing others access to the necessary passwords when you are no longer around or have become senile is not a trivial exercise.
And family, if you are reading this – we promise to improve the situation, but learning German will undoubtedly make life a little less complicated when the time comes!
I read Molly Wright Steenson’s blog girlwonder on an irregular basis – she has lived in Italy, India and several other places – which is pretty unusual for an American, and she’s interested in modern architecture, various aspects of using the web, and design. Which are all things she blogs about.
She published a short video a few months ago of an ignite eTech talk she gave (these talks are limited to 5 minutes and the slides advance automatically every 15 seconds!), about the use of pneumatic tubes in Paris and the USA in the period from the mid 19th century until the mid 20th century. You might have seen these in use in banks, chemists and businesses delivering money and paperwork, if you are old enough. I can remember seeing them in my childhood, but they died out in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
These tubes were surprisingly widespread. In Paris in 1945 they had a 450 km network of tubes running along the walls of the sewers delivering telegrams all over the city. The screenshot in the picture above shows just how many there were in some sewers.
I didn’t know that if tube-post got stuck in the tubes, they could identify to within a couple of meters where the blockage had occurred by firing a pistol down the pipe work and measuring the sound-waves! An interesting talk, worth investing five minutes to your time to listen to.
We’ve seen copy protection for CDs and DVDs; we’ve seen ink-jet printer manufacturers add chips to their cartridges to make it difficult or impossible to refill them with cheaper ink.
If you have looked at online suppliers, you will have noticed that you can order replacement batteries for your digital camera much cheaper than the manufacturer’s originals. So it should be no surprise that Panasonic has issued firmware updates for several of their digital cameras, which prevent third party batteries from being used in their cameras:
For the protection of our customers Panasonic developed this technology after it was discovered that some aftermarket 3rd party batteries do not meet the rigid safety standards Panasonic uses.
Of course, they only have our best interests at heart and any effect on their profits is a completely secondary consideration…
Apple’s OS X has one “feature” which periodically causes me a lot of grief. Not often, because once I have fallen over it, it takes several years until I forget and make the mistake again. I use Windows PCs at work, and there, if I copy a directory’s contents into another directory, it effectively merges the source directory files with those in the target directory.
OS X however treats each folder as a single object and replaces the complete contents of the target folder with the contents of the source directory. This usually catches me out when I decide to update my local (test environment) Wordpress installation with the latest and greatest version of Wordpress. The standard way to do this is to copy the new kit containing all of the Wordpress files and sub-directories into the folder where the test site is installed. In the target folder containing my test installation there are, however, a few extra files that aren’t part of the Wordpress installation kit – configuration files, the site favicon.ico file and one or two other files and folders. An OS X copy command deletes these without even stopping and asking if that is what I intend to do. Time to be glad that I run Time Machine in the background and can usually restore the missing stuff in a couple of minutes. But very annoying.
The solution is first of all to remember about this nasty difference between Windows and OS X. Then, I ideally need a way to perform a Windows type of copy, which OS X considers to be a folder-merge. The best solution I have found is to download the mergefolders script. This little script can be stored anywhere and dragged to the dock where it sits, waiting to be run. It asks the names of source and target folders and then performs the necessary merge into the the target folder, just like Windows.
If you want to read up a bit about this difference between the way the two operating systems perform a copy, then look here and if a summary of all the differences between OS X and Windows Vista is what you are looking for, you can find that here.
Since the German telecom has been calling our fax number and then disconnecting after 1 second for the last several weeks, I set up a re-routing in our Fritz!box router of calls originating from their number back to their own call center.
The calls continued, so today, I have blocked their number completely. Incompetence deserves such treatment and if they want to tell me something, they have my address and can write a letter.
There’s a good, short piece by Maurice Saatchi in today’s Times on how the property bubble crept up on us without being noticed. It criticizes the focus – at least in the UK – on the consumer price index, which measures the rate of inflation on the weekly shopping basket, but doesn’t take account of the price inflation of assets, such as housing. Not good if the population is following the mantra:
I borrow money.
I buy an asset.
The price goes up.
I exit the asset.
I repay the loan.
I keep the profit.
Of course, we can’t all get rich by buying and selling houses to each other using other people’s money. Inflation on house prices ran at six times the target set for the CPI inflation rate in the last five years. Debt inflation was running at over four times the target rate. It should have been obvious that we were heading for trouble, but it wasn’t on most people’s radar.
Not everyone was blind, by the way:
Max Otte predicted the current crisis in 2006 (Der Crash kommt)
Nassim Nicholas Teleb warned in his book “The Black Swan” published in 2007, the year the current crisis started to unfold, but a year before Lehmann Brothers collapsed, of the likelihood of a massive financial collapse, due to the way banks and governments ignored certain types of risk
And there have been other warning fingers, such as Mike Adams, warning back in January 2006 that the US property market was ripe for a collapse.
It annoys me that governments in many countries charge you an involuntary license fee for public service TV, whether you actually watch it or not. This might have been a good idea many decades ago, when the infrastructure for TV broadcasting needed to be built up. But these days, when public TV largely duplicates programming provided by private channels, which are quite capable of producing and marketing high quality cultural offerings, it seems as archaic as subsidizing dying industries such as coal mining in Wales or Germany.
Search engines, download giants and broadband users could face levies as ministers seek to fund public service TV and the roll-out of broadband…
…Insiders say that the tax on search engines would be the most politcally ‘tenable’ of the three ideas as it would less directly hit consumers in the pocket.
It is suggested as well as Google and Yahoo, a search engine tax could also be extended to things like YouTube, which people use to find information…
Yes – if anything is successful, tax it to subsidize services which are no longer relevant or which are not able to compete with commercial offerings. Why not allow them independence and the possibility to sink or swim like any private enterprise?
The Eschborn-Frankfurt City Loop is the new name for the 190 km long bike race “Rund um den Henninger-Turm“, which had to change its name after the last race in 2008 when the sponsor, the Henninger Brewery, dropped their sponsorship of the race (which has been run annually since 1961).
It takes place on the 1st May each year, and passes a few hundred meters from where we live, so we walked up to watch the bikes go by.
The bike racks on the support cars are quite something, taking four or more bikes on the roof or a large number of spare wheels.
Not only birds appreciate our bird-feeder!
