Author Archives:

Grüße vom Paranal

Posted on April 16, 2011

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Sync your life

Posted on January 13, 2011

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in English | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Testing your memory using memtest

Posted on August 4, 2010

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in English | Leave a comment

IDL and page orientation

Posted on July 9, 2010

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” … Continue reading →

Posted in English | Tagged | Leave a comment

iOS 4 with free iPhone: Tethering still possible

Posted on June 23, 2010

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in English | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Opas Kartoffelsalat

Posted on June 20, 2010

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Deutsch | Tagged | Leave a comment

Most annoying feature of the month: autocomplete=off

Posted on May 10, 2010

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Convert multiple ps files into pdf using ps2pdf

Posted on April 20, 2010

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 ## ## Written by Leonard Burtscher (burtscher@mpia.de) ## 20 … Continue reading →

Posted in English | Tagged | 2 Comments

On the plural of AGN

Posted on March 24, 2010

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in English, Language | Leave a comment

Working in multiple locations

Posted on February 16, 2010

I guess it becomes more and more usual to work not only in one place but have your office wherever you are. Since years I find it extremely practical to have all my data on one mobile computer (a MacBook … Continue reading →

Posted in English | Tagged , | 2 Comments