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By John, on April 13th, 2010
If like us, you have the feeling that flying with Ryanair is no longer the bargain it used to be, you could be right.
The Sydney Morning Herald has just published a report showing Ryanair’s charges have increased by 700% since 2006.
You can avoid part of the increases by using a prepaid MasterCard (NB: prepaid Visa cards are not OK for this purpose) to pay for the bookings.
You save 5 Euro per person on each flight (ie. 10 Euro if you book a return ticket). Since we plan to be flying to Valencia quite often this year, I have just ordered a prepaid MasterCard from the Commerzbank. (You can also get them from many Sparkassen (Building Societies) in Germany). The cards cost the usual 30 Euro per year issue-fee from the bank, so it only pays to apply for one if you plan to travel by Ryanair several times in a year.
By John, on April 13th, 2010
 Alice in Wonderland on the iPad The iPad seems to have quite a potential to shake up the market for eBooks.
(Click the pic to view).
On almost the same subject – we saw the Alice film in 3D at the weekend – and thoroughly enjoyed it!
(Via Daring Fireball)
By John, on March 27th, 2010
I have seen several articles over the years indicating that there are no problems in using a standard / client version of OS X as a server instead of using the OS X Server version, which is a darn sight more expensive. And indeed I have used a Mac mini with a client version of OS X for several years as a file and music server. It needs very little power, is small and just sits there unobtrusively doing it’s job 24×7.
However since I migrated all our Macs, including the server, to Snow Leopard (OS X V10.6), the Mac that I use as my work station has been driving me crazy. Any time I connect it to a network drive, it hangs itself up. Not straight away, but often after it has gone to sleep for a while. After that, as soon as I access a network drive again, the Finder hangs with a spinning beach ball and all the other processes become unresponsive. Usually the only solution is to reboot. Very frustrating, and bad enough to make me think seriously whether I wouldn’t be better migrating to Linux, since Apple has in the mean time issued two updates to Snow Leopard and the problem is as bad as ever. Ruth has had similar problems, but not so bad.
Three weeks ago I saw someone offering a new copy of Snow Leopard Server on EBay and I decided to bid for it. I ended up getting it for 177 Euro instead of the list price of 499 Euro. I installed it on the Mac mini server and to my surprise, all our Macs are now running rock solid again. The problems accessing network drives that Ruth and I had have vanished completely.
So, although many experts confidently insist that you can use the OS X client version as a home server (I don’t think anyone would propose to run it in a production environment), that doesn’t seem to be true in the case of Snow Leopard, although I have previously had no problems whatsoever for several years using the Tiger and Leopard clients as servers. I thought I would post this, as I haven’t seen anyone report this experience previously – maybe it will help someone else having similar problems. (I suspect a cheaper alternative might be to migrate a problematic Snow Leopard home server back to a Leopard client, but haven’t tried that.)
By John, on March 15th, 2010
The Mac mini I set up with Snow Leopard Server had previously been acting as a server using the client version of OS X. While I was setting up the server again after installing the Server operating system, I decided to also combine the existing external data drive with a second drive and make a RAID array. That meant reformatting both drives before they could be mapped as a RAID set. So I backed up my data (to a third drive) and then created the RAID set and copied my data back onto the new RAID drives.
I only realised some time later that I had used different names for the data partition before and after setting up the RAID array. So the iTunes library was full of little grey exclamation marks, indicating the track can no longer be found. If you double click on the track, iTunes will allow you to navigate to the new location of the music and will re-link the meta data in iTunes to the file containing the track. But with over 1000 albums and a lot of podcasts, that was not practicable:
The easiest way to fix the problem, that I am aware of, is to export the complete library as it is to your desktop.
 How to export your library
This produces a file containing XML statements, however, you don’t need to be able to do more than identify your path to the tracks in this file. You need that because you are going to substitute the new path for the old one wherever it occurs. You can edit the XML file using, for example, TextWrangler and simply make a global replacement of the old path (up to, but not including the file name) with the new path. This might take several minutes – in my case the library file was 37 MB and that does take a time to substitute all the occurrences.
When the file has been edited and saved, you can import it into iTunes.
 How to import the edited XML library file
The only small problem is that you will now have all your tunes listed twice, once with an exclamation mark and once without. However that is no big thing – you can eliminate the “wrong” tracks (with exclamation marks) by downloading and running the Super Remove Dead Tracks script from Doug’s Apple Scripts web site.
Being a script it is very slow, taking about 4 hours to run in my case. However, once it has finished its magic, you will have a clean iTunes library again.
By John, on March 15th, 2010
I picked up a new copy of OS X 10.6 Server on EBay for 177 Euro (instead of the 499 Euro it costs if you buy it new from Apple) and have installed it on my 2006 Intel Mac mini. I had one issue at the start of the installation, whose solution is not obvious.
I started a headless installation from a second Mac. To do this, install the Server Admin application from the Admin Tools disk on the Mac you will be using to control the server from, and insert the OS X Server disk in the DVD drive of the server-to-be. The Server Admin tool will find your other Mac and ask for a serial number. Apple’s documentation says to enter the first eight characters of the server hardware serial number, which on an Apple X-Serve is on a label on the server body.
In the case of the Mac mini, there is no label, but if you can display the serial number using the “About This Mac/More Info” menu point under the Apple logo in the main menu. See the screen shot below.
 Showing the serial number of the Mac mini
However entering the first 8 characters just produces an error message saying the the serial number is invalid. In cases where there is no hardware serial number, you are supposed to be able to enter “12345678″, but this also produces the same error message.
I eventually hit on the idea of entering the complete serial number, which in my case was 11 characters long, and bingo! The installation started correctly. After the initial installation is completed, you can remotely access the server via the Server Admin tool using the first eight characters of the server’s serial number
By John, on March 10th, 2010
Digital Inspiration has an interesting idea for people who have to log on to multiple web sites from public computers, or just for people who want secure passwords even if they don’t spend a lot of time in internet cafes. It uses paper.
If you use the same password for multiple sites, you have a problem if one of the sites is compromised – your ID these days is often your email address and if the password is also the same, there is a real chance that the bad guys could use the compromised information to impersonate you on other sites.
The suggestion is quite neat and worth thinking about if you don’t currently use different passwords on each site.
By John, on March 10th, 2010
What makes supermarket employees work harder? Why do rats drink more tonic water, when it becomes more expensive? (Rats hate tonic water, they don’t like the taste of the quinine in it), and why is your boss overpaid?
It’s all down to the logic of economics, according to Tim Harford, or as he calls it The Logic of Life. I discovered Tim Harford when I picked up his first book (The Undercover Economist), in Spain a couple of years ago – it looked interesting, and I started reading it in Spanish, but I got frustrated at the number of words I had to look up, and bought it again and finished it in English.
He is an economist who believes much seemingly irrational behaviour is actually completely logical if you think about it. Which is what both his books illustrate.
He’s got a knack if explaining complex ideas with clear, simple examples, and both books are great fun to read and pick up an understanding of how economic pressures affect everyday life. Both books are a good read, the first one explains the basics of economic theory; the second one looks at why seemingly irrational behaviour is to be expected, and explains some common phenomena in terms of economic logic. You don’t need to read them in the order he wrote them, and you don’t need any maths either.
By John, on March 1st, 2010
The German Post has implemented some innovative services which either haven’t been copied abroad, or only took off in other countries quite a bit later:
Continue reading Innovative Post
By John, on February 28th, 2010
Recently Ruth asked me to set up a new website for her and some other textile artists who she has met. So I set up Use Your Eyes for them. Ruth was quite taken with the design, and decided she wanted her own blog Sew2Speak changing to use a similar skin, which is what I spent this weekend doing.
Both blogs use WordPress, which makes changing the template that defines the appearance of the blog very easy, while maintaining a very high level of flexibility to make individual changes.
One template which has become quite widely used is the thematic template, developed by Ian Stewart. This can either be used directly, which is what I did for this blog (developing some visual ideas from the Bible Scholar theme), or you can use templates which build on the thematic template itself. I used the Atahualpa theme from BytesForAll as the starting point. This theme is so customisable that you can change the appearance extensively without having to know hardly any CSS. If you compare Ruth’s blogs with the standard appearance of Atahualpa, you can see how much the appearance can be changed.
By John, on February 10th, 2010
If global warming hasn’t frightened your socks off yet, then take a look at these two news items:
1. The UK is likely to run out of soil in the next 60 years. Other countries are similarly affected:
An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming land “moderately or severely eroded”…
2. The world production of phosphorous probably peaked in the late 1980′s (phosphorous is used to make fertiliser):
According to a study by Patrick Dery peak phosphorus occurred in the US in 1988 and the rest of the world in 1989. Others think we’re still 30 years away from the peak, but it doesn’t matter who’s right. Either way, unless we change what we’re doing now, we will have depleted our supply of the central building block of life within a few hundred years of discovering it, and we do not know how to make more.
Both articles are interesting reading and are quite short. Better not to think about oil or water either.
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