some miseries behind the scenes in Brazil now went a little more public

Laughterkey Tumbls Here • Hello, I’m from Brazil. You probably don’t know...

I started using WhatsApp last night

WhatsApp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
My 1st device to start the WhatsApp with was my Samsung Galaxy S2. I sat on the bus going through Hamburg St. Pauli, and my mobile phone Internet connection wasn't really all that stable. It changed from 3G (whatever variant of UMTS) through E (EDGE) through G (GSM), and WhatsApp kept saying "Initializing …" for ages. I looked the situation up on the Internet, once I was at my place, and I was a little  worried. I decided to simply end the respective active application, to go through Wi-Fi on the Android device this time,  and start it again. In other words: no I did not attempt to wipe the installation on the device. WhatsApp came back almost instantly and successfully, and I had a registered account from then on.

Is it true, (quoting from the Wikipedia article) "that WhatsApp required users to upload their entire mobile phone's address book to WhatsApp servers so that WhatsApp could discover who, among the users' existing contacts, is available via WhatsApp"? Damn WhatsApp, if they dare to spam my contacts!

From the WhatsApp FAQ: "Is my device supported?" [link]
… We currently do not support tablets, computers, or Wi-Fi only devices, and do not plan to do so in the foreseeable future.

It's hard to say, where WhatsApp is really going to (how they want to make money), and why to prevent non-phones to get involved.

I think, for the time being, I am going to start WhatsApp only on demand.

In theory using "a general XMPP client" is superior over using separate dedicated ones. But WTF why do people use WhatsApp? They don't need to enter passwords, they don't need to find and add their contacts, as their contacts are simply identified by their mobile phone number. Enough "pros"? Not that I really suggest WhatsApp because of these reasons.

using "calibre" for "e-book management"

calibre - E-book management

• I listened to colleagues nearby here in the office this morning.
  
  
• Colleague A had gotten a Kindle as birthday present,
• he "certainly" doesn't want to get the typical publications for the Kindle,
• instead he wants to get dusty PDFs and whatever from the 16th century,
• and his initial question to colleague B was, whether the Kindle would read them.
• Colleague B suggested calibre to convert everything interesting to the Kindle format.
• I got bashed "a little" and laughed about for asking why not simply purchasing the bestseller suggested on the radio or by friends.

I myself like PDF a lot. Their pages still look like in printed books, i.e. the text is not flowing completely dynamically. The human memory supports graphical associations, i.e. you (sometimes) easily remember on what page and in what area you once read a term or a phrase. 

Nic Wolff's password generator

Password generator

disk back-ups sorted, new scanning computer sorted – happily looking forward

Integrated my "new" Synology NAS into my back-up concept in practice; I can of course back up at home on the LAN, but I can also back up over WAN (which is the more crucial variant) – rsync-wise "of course", i.e. sort of "differentially". And for the time being rsync-ing to my NAS seems to work as well again. I can talk to the NAS Mac-wise ("AFS"), and through SSH / RSYNC / SMB, but I have not accessed it successfully through NFS yet – which would be nice for accessing it from (openSUSE) Linux.

I also manage again backing up to USB disks from my VirtualBox openSUSE guest OS.
But occasionally I install openSUSE updates, and they enforce OS restarts, which I usually delay for far too long, so in the meantime no back ups and no access at all to my "Encrypted Big Disk" outside my computer, where I keep all sorts of long-term data.

I got me a Mac Mini, that stays of course in the office room, and it talks to the printers and the scanner, and of course it talks to the NAS. So I can take, whatever comes in from wherever (I am referring to the letters in my mailbox, that I am supposed to take out on Fridays on my arrivals at home), and take that stuff to my "scanning facility" and get them scanned, move the files to the NAS, so I can pick them up from there from wherever. Even from outside over the WAN. If there's enough time, I can even name the files properly.

All this doesn't really do the work to be done itself, but it facilitates achieving things. It makes me look forward a little happier and more optimistic. I do know now, how to achieve certain things within my rather limited time.

How to access files on Synology NAS NFS-wise ...

How to access files on Synology NAS ... - Synology Inc. Network Attached Storage - NEW NAS Experience

Maybe I will have to play a little with the "Root squashing" next time, I have LAN access to the NAS. Remember: NFS goes over LAN, not WAN (AFAIRC).

using my old iPhone as secondary phone w/o Internet access over mobile network

How do I switch "Internet access over mobile network" off in my old iPhone3?
I may want to hook on the Internet over Wi-Fi once in a while, but I must avoid "Internet access over mobile network", as its current SIM card has no dedicated tariff for that any longer.

In my Android set-up I would go here:
Settings > Wireless and networks (More settings > Mobile networks > Mobile data (Enable data access over mobile network)

I have no idea, how to achieve the same with my iPhone3.

Any hints appreciated.

CPAN modules for generating passwords (remember "pwgen"!)

I started digging a little into this, when I faced the challenge to provide a customer with a password generator available on his platform. I myself had used Theodore Ts'o's pwgen for years, so that was my search keyword.

• Neil Bowers on CPAN modules for generating passwords [link] (looks like THE CONTEMPORARY REPORT on the topic)
• Neil's favourite: Sawyer X's App::Genpass [link] (it comes with a command line utility)
• Dominik Schulz's Data::Pwgen [link] (I guess, I found only this one, because it mentioned pwgen) 

more tips extracted from "The Pragmatic Programmer"

The Pragmatic Bookshelf | List of Tips

"find bugs once" – a tip extracted from The Pragmatic Programmer

The Pragmatic Bookshelf | List of Tips

Once a human tester finds a bug, it should be the last time a human tester finds that bug. Automatic tests should check for it from then on.

how to always boot Mac OS X in Verbose Mode

Always boot Mac OS X in Verbose Mode

As with Linux for me it's a must to see the thing working on something and exactly what, instead of staring at a graphical screen to indicating anyhow, why it forces me to wait.

following the HTTP dialog in curl and browsers like Firefox and Chrome

I honestly wonder, why curl and the browsers do not show you the HTTP status code during your web interactions "by default".

Usually I personally employ curl on the command line with --write-out '… %{http_code} %{url_effective}  …'.

Add-ons for Firefox:

• LiveHTTPheaders
• HTTP Resource Test

Add-ons for Chrome:

• HTTP Headers
• REST console
• Advanced Rest client
• this search will lead you to quite some different tools

Actually in Chrome you can follow the description here, it only employs internal means.

MTPuTTY = Multi-Tabbed PuTTY

[distribution link]

how to sort files by content

Same content, different names of 2 or more files –– how to identify the duplicates?

Use check sum utilities (like chksum, md5sum, sha1sum, …)  for this, and sort on their output!

Shlomo Sand's response to Carlo Strenger in Haaretz: on Israeli identity, Jewish democracy and oxymorons

On Israeli identity, Jewish democracy and oxymorons - A response to Carlo Strenger - Opinion - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper

Reading this article I noticed, he published another book:

• in English: When and How I Stopped Being Jewish (not yet available)
• in French: Comment j'ai cessé d'être juif : Un regard israélien [Amazon-link]
• in Hebrew: … = Matai V'aikh Hadalti L'hiyot Yehudi

linux - How to 'grep' a continuous stream - Stack Overflow

linux - How to 'grep' a continuous stream - Stack Overflow

• a had never heard of stdbuf before
• AIX grep has -u
• GNU grep has --line-buffered, its -u is not the same as AIX grep's

how to let cURL display the HTTP response code

How To Display Just The HTTP Response Code In Command Line Curl

Adding this to a curl command line is actually quite useful:

--write-out "%{http_code} %{url_effective}\\n"

Now I actually wonder why curl doesn't display the HTTP response code by default. In my scraping scripts (based on libcurl) I have always been making use of it anyway. But every now and then you have another requirement for your favourite tool.

David Farrell's article: Perl tokens you should know

Perl tokens you should know

GNU Emacs and case-(in)sensitive searching

Search Case - GNU Emacs Manual

Sometimes you are switching inadvertently to "case-sensitive searching" (by using an upper case letter within your search), and you want to switch back to "case-insensitive searching", i.e. case-folding. According to the manual, you have to set case-fold-search to t.