Quarter Life Crisis

Haldern Pop 2010¶

Just like in the past years, this summer included a trip to the Haldern Pop festival, camping there with a few friends, meeting several more and seeing a bunch of nice bands. To top things off, the weekend in question managed to have almost-perfect weather without a single drop of rain – surprising when taking into account that there has been rain pretty much every single day for the past weeks.

Trends this year seem to be the clever ‘self-building-in-two-seconds’ tents which Dan introduced us to a few years ago and which were ubiquitous on the campground now, as well as accordions on stage and moustaches/Pornobalken in people’s faces. I am not sure whether the latter two are good trends.

Thursday

Haldern visitors are a great crowd, have interesting musical tastes and are usually pleasant to camp next to. One problem with them is their enthusiasm. We tried to be there fairly early, arriving on Thursday afternoon, and the campground was already well-filled. So well-filled that we had to put our tents up thirty metres or so from our usual location. Ah well, we’re getting old, I guess. Haldern only started doing gigs on Thursday night a few years ago. And apart from The Flaming Lips’ gig in 2008, they never used the main stage but only the small-ish Spiegelzelt on that day. With so many people already being there and enthusiastic to see some bands, that creates the problem that the Spiegelzelt’s capacity is way smaller than the number of people wanting to enter it. Cue a lot of queueing and plenty of frustration for the people who don’t make it into the tent. Particularly when the sound system of the screen they have to show what’s going on inside the Spiegelzelt is so quiet that you can’t really follow the music.

Knowing about this problem, I was eager to get into the tent quickly as I wanted to see Seabear again. We did manage to get into the tent, but soon learned that the schedule I printed from their website the same morning was wrong and Seabear were going to play much later in the evening. A fact that was stated correctly on their printed schedules, so I guess they just fucked up their website. Grand.

Thus, instead of seeing Seabear, we started the festival with Cymbals Eat Guitars. I wasn’t overly impressed by them. The music started off boring, then there were a few interesting moments and, instead of sticking with those, they reverted back to boring before long. But boredom didn’t last long because Beach House came on next and played the nicest gig I saw at the whole festival. Their music is excellent, they played wonderfully, and it seems likely that I secretly want to be a hippie.

And that was as close as we got to the music on Thursday. We needed to leave the Spiegelzelt for food and the queue was far too long to get back in in time for Seabear later in the evening. And seeing them on the screen in front of the Spiegelzelt didn’t make up for that either as you could hardly hear the music there.

Friday

Friday started with our usual camping breakfast which includes plenty of coffee and fried eggs. Then we went to town for lunch in the Doppeladler where the food was fine but the staff seemed a bit overworked (on what I presume is the the only weekend in a year with many people coming) and we had one of their waitresses tell the head-waitress something along the lines of working from 9 in the morning till midnight: my ass! while the head-waitress was taking our order. Ah well…

Back from that excursion, we had a quick glimpse at Detroit Social club and then saw Fyfe Dangerfield (of the Guillemots) play a lovely gig in the Spiegelzelt.

Next we went outside and saw a bit of the mystery band which was marked with a question mark in the schedule. It turned out to be Philipp Poisel who, with his boyish charms seems to be an up-and-coming star of German indie music, but whom I didn’t find particularly interesting (sounded like a Grand Hotel van Cleef band to me). Then came Rox, who seemed very ‘professional’ and whose music style I considered rather out of place for Haldern. She was followed by Delphic whose more electronic sound may not be mainstream for the Haldern audience, but whom I consider different in an interesting and pleasing way.

Next on were Mumford & Sons whose nice songs and quirky instruments made a great gig and were perfectly complemented by Beirut who followed them on stage (and whose middle-east name always seems at odds to me with their Balkan sounds – they really sound like they came from a Emir Kusturica soundtrack – with a bit less joy an extra hint of depression, perhaps).

We concluded the evening by seeing Thus:Owls in the Spiegelzelt. Nice music, but we started being word out at the time. So worn out that, unfortunately, we couldn’t muster the energy to stay on and see Junip at twenty to three.

Saturday

Saturday began and still there was no rain. Even better: the sun was shining and it started being a little warm. Warm enough to enjoy a swim in the lake next to the festival grounds. A good way to ‘chill-into’ the day.

We tried to see Nils Frahm do some piano magic in the afternoon. But thanks to the poor information on the schedule we thought this was happening in town, just to be sent back to a place right next to the campground from there. When we arrived, the tiny sound studio was packed, hot and oxygen-free. All we got out of it was a lengthy walk. A real shame, because I thought the music was nice. We also missed Portugal, The Man because of this.

After that somewhat rocky start, we enjoyed most of the day at the main stage. Starting off with Fanfarlo whose music I found as enjoyable as I found the band members’ moustaches freaky.

Next up were Frightened Rabbit, who deserve praise for their cool band name and played a nice gig. Then Blood Red Shoes played. People seem to adore them for their ability to blast away an audience as a duo with just a guitar and a drumkit. Unfortunately they seemed to have left that magic at home this weekend and appeared rather indifferent to me. They were followed by Efterklang who played a cool gig full of their great songs.

After some pizza and seeing a bit of the Bear in Heaven gig in the Spiegelzelt, Sophie Hunger played on the main stage. I have to admit I don’t care too much for her music, but she did a great job taking the piss of the music ‘journalist’ guy who interviewed her a bit before her gig. Speaking about interviews, Yeasayer who played later at night did a good job mocking him as well.

Music on the main stage closed with one of the festival’s highlights: The National playing a full ninety minute gig. The National keep amazing me, they may look like your typical old men’s ‘rock’ band and their songs have the speed to match that cliché. Yet, there’s that certain intensity and tension in their songs – and their singer’s voice – which make them unique and enjoyable. And which made the gig pass rather quickly, ending the festival for us.

And that was Haldern 2010 for us. See you there next year!

23:59 • Feedback (0+0)

Latvian Opening Times¶

In Rīga I noticed that most shops had interesting signs for their opening times, Darba Laiks. Those had a little list of the days in the week, with the respective opening times behind them. Frequently each day was also represented by a circle which was filled for ‘full’ opening times and semi-filled for reduced opening times on Saturday and empty when the shop was closed on Sundays. I thought that was an interesting way of giving people a quick idea of what’s going on in a graphical way in addition to the written information. While not every shop had exactly the same design, they seemed so widespread that I started wondering whether there’s some kind of regulation behind it.

23:02 • Feedback (0+0)

Rīga¶

In an attempt to visit another country I hadn’t been to before, I found myself in Rīga. Situated at the Baltic Sea and with its history in both the Hanse and the Soviet empire, I perceive Latvia to be vaguely familiar but also far away – situated between the East and the West. In fact, my main awareness of the city comes from the computer game Hanse which we played a lot on C-64s in the 1980s. As a bonus, the city promised a Northern feel, possibly with a Scandinavian touch, but also manages to be reasonably warm and have nice beaches nearby.

Getting There

Travelling to Baltic countries used to be a bit tricky in decades past, with few flights being available, plane changes being required and prices being high. These days, however, many airlines, including some on the affordable side, fly to Rīga. For example, Ryanair offer a few flights a week from Bremen. But eventually we picked a flight with Air Baltic from Hamburg. It turned out that booking with Air Baltic was pretty much as annoying and full-of-upselling – including extra charges for checked-in luggage – as buying flights with Ryanair is, but apart from that, things were a bit more civilised (a tamer colour scheme, the plane not being plastered with ads on the inside and the ability to pick seats during the online check-in).

After a short stop in Hamburg on the way to look at the ugly-ish (I’d say uninspired, serving architect-vanity at best, and without doubt expensive) new buildings in Hafen-City along with the new Elbphilharmonie concert hall they are building there, we were off from Hamburg Airport which I haven’t used in ages. Despite Hamburg being a big city, it seems to be a quiet airport. It’s conveniently connected to the city by S-Bahn, seems quite spacious, and the inevitable queues for ‘security’ checks were so short that the ordeal took but a few minutes. Once you enter the boarding area, they provide a number of restaurants on a balcony in the top floor in what looks like a nice setup for an airport.

Air Baltic’s performance wasn’t perfect. Their staff seemed mostly disinterested in their work and annoyed about having to work longer because the plane arrived half an hour late. The flight, however, was fine and uneventful, as was the arrival at Rīga airport, thanks to everything being in the Schengen area.

At Rīga airport, it also became apparent that Air Baltic really make an effort to get the most profit possible from their customers as they operate both shuttle buses and taxis from the airport to town. While probably being a bit more expensive than their public transport or regular taxi equivalents, that turned out to be a nice service as they offer fixed rate (9LVL) taxi rides with people at the airport making sure you get on a cab with a driver knowing the place you want to go to and no need to discuss the rates, potential detours &c in the middle of the night.

Albert Hotel

Just as for flights, the internet is a great resource when shopping for hotel stays. I quite like using Kayak for this as they seem to compare offers from a wide range of airline and hotel sites and let you compare options and prices with not perfect but reasonable ease. [For fun’s sake, they also have an iPhone app; I didn’t quite understand how they make money, though, as they seem to refer you to other hotel booking sites, rather than performing the actual booking for you.]

It seems that a reasonably nice room with breakfast in Rīga costs around €40 a night (of course you can choose to spend less for hostel-style accommodation or significantly more if you’re into bigger luxuries and brand names). Leaving out the choices with poor reviews (the internet is an evil bitch) about Soviet-style unrenovated bathrooms and keeping an eye on a new-ish look and free WiFi on web sites, we ended up with the Albert Hotel. It’s a modern-ish building in Dzirnavu street, not in the old-town but next road to those with the main Art Nouveau area.

The hotel’s name is a reference to Albert Einstein and it is fully themed in that way. While that’s as tacky as you expect it to be when designers try to turn science into marketing, the styling is done in a refreshingly thorough way with the hotel font being used on all signs, each level having a board with a ‘formula’ on it and many parts of the hotel being equipped with an ‘atom’ logo: e.g. as the pattern on the carpet or etched on glass in the bathrooms.

The room wasn’t particularly big but came with everything that’s needed, ranging from a bathroom with a walk-in shower, to a LCD-telly with a number of international channels and, invisibly, a working wireless network. Given how difficult it is to create good wireless network coverage, and how frequently people fail to provide it at all, let along at no extra cost, I was delighted to find such a good signal right in the room – even strong enough for the notoriously poor reception of the iPod touch.

Food and drinks were nice as well. That was true for the complimentary self-service breakfast which offered food on the nice side of hotel breakfasts, including particularly nice fried tomatoes, as well as for the 11th floor bar which offered a nice view over the city from its balcony. Staff were friendly and the hotel had no problems storing our luggage in their luggage room on our departure day. All in all the hotel may not the cheapest or most ‘authentic’ (whatever that would mean) stay you can book, but it seemed like a really good choice while we stayed there.

Sights

Of course a bit of sightseeing is obligatory when visiting a city like Rīga. While they have no world-famous Eiffel-tower like attractions, there is plenty of stuff to see nonetheless. Starting from the city itself with its nice and green park around the car-free old town with many old houses and a number of churches from different eras. The St. Peter’s-church has a lift going up into its tower and offers a great view of the city from there, the cathedral is quite plain and has nice cloisters attached to it, containing plenty of interesting historical exhibits.

The Roland and Stadtmusikanten are fun things to see, particularly if you’re from Bremen, the Schwarzhäupterhaus is a historical must-see and plenty of other buildings like the National Opera, National Theatre, Three Brothers or the Freedom Monument are must-sees as well.

Another really-nice must-see are the numerous Art Nouveau buildings in town. There are plenty of them left, mostly in good shape, and the Rīgans claim that their town offers the highest density of those buildings. The Art Nouveau style seen in Rīga seems a bit heavier and more solid than what I saw before. Some of the buildings are highly decorated with the typical plant-like ornaments as well as with plenty of faces. A few buildings even featured odd ‘mechanic’-looking faces on them. I can recommend visiting the Art Nouveau Museum in Albert street which is a flat the city rented in one of the Art Nouveau buildings, trying to restore the original design and filling it with original furniture. Both the building is very cool and the museum guides gave an excellent tour (in German, even) and seemed to be very knowledgable about everything in the museum.

Passing the railway station, one arrives at the central market. It consists of five huge halls which have been repurposed from Zeppelin hangars, featuring separate halls for meat, fish, dairy and general stuff, while having a fruit and veg market outside. Certainly interesting, particularly the one with the fish, but not as cool as the market in Athens, I thought. Behind the market comes the Soviet-style Academy of Sciences (with a fun TV test-screen piece of art in front of it) and what seem to be Russian quarters, advertised for their old-fashioned houses which weren’t overly impressive.

A final treat we went for was the TV tower. It’s a bit (four bus stops and a twenty minute walk) outside the old town on an island in the Daugava river and looks like a spaceship built by a James Bond supervillain. Soviet architecture at its finest, coming with a 200 year warranty and a few centimetres taller than the Berlin TV tower in summer as its steel construction grows in the heat. Arriving at the TV tower it looked pretty much abandoned. But once we passed the foutain with a fun ‘satellite’ artwork and entered the impressive entrance hall, we met an employee or two, one of which sold tickets, went 100 metres up with us in a lift and gave us a tour. The whole building seemed a bit sad, having seen better times in the past, with fancy decorations and a restaurant up there, and now having a few visitors a day. The view would be better with clean windows as well. Our guide was a friendly lady who pointed out a few sights. She spoke German but no English, so we were in luck but this might be more ‘adventurous’ for others.

Jūrmala

A further treat in Rīga is that it is quite close to the Baltic sea. And while the Baltic sea isn’t as nice and blue as the Aegaean Sea, say, they do have nice long beaches in Jūrmala, a half-hour (and cheap) train ride outside the city. They also had beach-worthy weather with all-day-sun and temperatures above 30°C during our stay; something I hadn’t expected, given the location further up North than Germany is. We picked the beach in Dubulti because the walk from the station to the sea is just a few hundred metres there. The beach is conveniently split up into areas of active recreation and those of passive recreation and there are little bars which also sell snacks every few hundred metres. Quite inexplicably there seem to be a number of unused beach-side hotels as well.

History

Latvian history has been rough for a while. They seem to have been invaded by pretty much every country that had a remote opportunity, including Sweden and Poland. In the Occupation Museum they tell the history of the last few decades which saw them being occupied first by the Soviets, then briefly by Nazi-Germany and then – after the Second World War was lost – by the Soviets again. Quite ironically/tragically they first welcomed the Nazi occupation as it seemed like liberation from the Soviets. But it didn’t take long for the true face of Nazi-Germany to show.

In fact, I remain struck by the sheer speed and efficiency with which the Nazi and Soviet regimes fucked countries over. People usually need months or years to finish a tiny project. Yet, in the same timeframe, those regimes migrated/killed/replaced sizeable parts of the entire population. They established new control structures and moved some of their own population to the country, thus completely shifting the balance of power. As we overheard a guide in the museum say: unlike other people Latvians don’t go and protest in those situations, they usually start singing and hope the situation improves. In Soviet times, apparently many of them worked in the cultural sector.

A remarkable detail concerning the end of the Soviet rule in Latvia is that it only happened in 1991 under Jelzin. Gorbatchev, who’s generally considered a good guy in Germany for the role he played in opening up the East Block and helping with German reunification, was against Latvia’s independence, tried to enforce that with military power and killed a few Latvians in the process. Not a way to win friends.

Language

The consequences of these population moves are still very apparent today. More than a third of the population is of Russian origin, thus you see and hear a lot of Russian as well. Not that I’m terribly good at actually recognising and distinguishing the languages as I understand pretty much nothing in them.

For the Unicode-nerd, Latvian is a feast of diacritics featuring plenty of macrons, hačeks and cedillas in the writing. This includes the curious G with cedilla ‘Ģ’, which ingeniously puts the accent atop the small g because it has a descender: ‘ģ’. Rather tragically, however, these letters also mark a Unicode tragedy as they are named ‘cedilla’ – and can be created by using cedilla combining accents – but really should be ‘comma’ accents, which was only pointed out to the Unicode people after the standard had been set.

Food

Food was all right during the stay. Neither particularly bad, nor remarkably good. Ads at the airport suggests that Latvians are proud of their rye bread, but the bread I tried wasn’t overly remarkable beside the fact that it contained traces of caraway – as Latvian dishes seem wont to do.

What absolutely delighted me were the countless bakeries in town – pretty much one per block – all of which were stocked with amazing collections of small baked sweets (‘Teilchen’ as we say in Germany). It was hard to restrain myself to not eat myself to death-by-Teilchen there.

Returning Home

Looking at Google Maps for Rīga, I noticed that ferry lines to Lübeck are drawn in the water and so the idea to return by ferry was born. Unfortunately it turned out that those lines are a bit outdated and the previous ferry line has been shut down. Instead, Latvian Aveline seemed to operate to Travemünde now. Although they do have a web site, booking with them was a bit tricky as their booking form seems to do nothing, in particular not sending you a confirmation of your booking. It took a week and some phone calls to get that sorted. Strangely we weren’t charged for the tickets beforehand but we were told we’ll pay on check-in and we could pay by credit card. While basically right that turned out to be a bit of a rip-off as you can’t just pay by credit card but have to go to the ‘bank’ counter in the same building which accepts cash only. And which will point you to the cash machine outside the building to get said cash. Thus, despite explicitly asking beforehand, we were brought into a situation where we were ripped off by banks twice. Once to convert the amount on our booking confirmation from Euro into Lats and once more to convert it back from Lats into Euro when paying the credit card bill.

The whole setup wasn’t particularly convenient either. It seems that Aveline focuses mainly on freight and don’t care that much about passengers. Their schedule sounded like fun: Check in starting at three on Sunday morning would leave us with Saturday night in Rīga and then time to catch up on sleep on the ferry. Reality, however, looked more like them letting everybody sit in their check-in building in the freight harbour which is a bit outside town until four, then let everybody get on the ‘Baltic Amber’ ferry and then let people queue for two more hours to hand out cabin keys to passengers. All done rather slowly without much concern for our (or the other passengers’) comfort. That did give us the opportunity to watch the sunrise and see the departure of the ship after the last lorry had successfully reversed onto it, but it also meant there wasn’t much rest before seven in the morning.

We had a nicely situated cabin with a window out to the front. But generally, the ship wasn’t too attractive in terms of what you could do or where you could rest. Russian television was running everywhere, probably to please the majority of travellers who seemed to be Russian truck drivers (mostly dressed in shorts and Badeschlappen) and the dinner – while looking fairly priced – was so ridiculously bad and handed out by their impressively disinterested staff, who (partly) couldn’t even tell what they were serving, that I felt quite disgusted.

The ship itself seemed to be originally Italian and now featured labels in a mix of Latvian, Russian, Italian and English everywhere. Signage on ships may be an interesting topic to study as no metre of that boat managed to exist without emergency exit arrows and other signs on it. Frankly, after walking through a few metres of this, I felt completely disoriented and confused rather than having a good idea about the way to the next exit. What was quite amusing as well were the smoking regulations. Smoking was forbidden, except in the smoking areas. Of which they created around a dozen, marking them by painting the floor yellow. Which meant the outside of the ship was full of yellow colour and, given that there is wind, people mostly smoked where they could anyway.

There was slightly shaky sea during the first half of the trip with the horizon moving impressively (in what translated to a meagre 2° in angle or so) and with waves splashing all over the front-facing restaurant windows a few times. All in all things were quite uneventful, though. And thanks to not sleeping the night before, quite a bit of the 28 hour journey could be spent at rest. An interesting experience. But not nice enough to justify the added inconvenience over flying.

18:57 • Feedback (2+0)

New hard drive vs Time Machine¶

I exchanged the hard drive in my (2008 white) MacBook. On the hardware side, that is a very quick thing to do. The MacBook is well designed for these kinds of exchanges: A coin removes the battery, three Philips screws need to be unscrewed to remove the cover of the RAM and hard drive, with the nice touch that the screws are actually part of the cover and cannot fall out and get lost. Which means that 20 seconds after starting you have removed the hard drive which is pulled out using a little plastic tab.

Next comes the hardest step: Removing the hard drive from the tray holding it inside the MacBook. You can see Apple’s only poor design decision here as they – once more – chose Torx (T8) screws for that. Meaning that you will be cursing at this step if you don’t have the matching screwdriver. In fact, the screws on my hard drive sled are already quite blank and shiny as I loosened and fixed them a number of times using pliers already (doable but rather annoying). As my brother gave me a nice T8 screwdriver last christmas, I could actually enjoy this step this time around and finished it in a few seconds. Reversing all the steps leaves you with a new hard drive in your MacBook.

The really time consuming part of the hard drive exchange is the software side, though. Copying hundreds of gigabytes of data takes a long time and will use a whole day or night. As I didn’t want to waste even more time by doing a fresh install and going through the lengthy migration progress and the software reinstallation it necessitates, I cloned the old drive to the new one and took it from there. Everything worked fine, just Time Machine insisted on re-adding the complete drive to my backup – which would have exceeded the backup drive’s capacity. Luckily I messed around with Time Machine before and the resulting knowledge along with some googling and adapting techniques for Mac OS X.6 let me fix the issue.

I think it’s fair to say that this is an ‘issue’ rather than a problem as it is caused by Time Machine internally identifying volumes by their unique identifier, rather than by their name which is the right thing to do. It just comes to bite you when you clone a drive. The new volume has a new identifier, hence Time Machine fails to recognise it as the same volume as the one you had before. You can see the volume’s identifier by selecting it in Disk Utility and using the Get Info command:

Terminal lovers can also use the diskutil command to achieve the same, e.g. for the startup volume (or any other volume by using its path instead of /:

ssp% diskutil info / | grep UUID
   Volume UUID:              F9E4B5DA-BACC-3BEB-B4A9-D59041E58A78

Now that we know the identifier of the new startup volume, the next step is to let Time Machine know about it. Time Machine’s usual way of storing technical information is using extended attributes. That is also the case for the identifier which is stored in the com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID extended attribute of each volume’s folder inside the backup’s folder hierarchy. It can be read using the xattr command. I am assuming that your backup volume is mounted at /Volumes/Backup, that the machine you are backing up is called ‘Machine’ and the volume you want to change is named ‘Volume’ in what follows. You need to adapt that to the paths on your machine when using the command there.

ssp% xattr -p -l com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/Latest/Volume/
com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID:
00000000  34 30 44 37 43 46 37 32 2D 42 33 39 35 2D 33 46  |40D7CF72-B395-3F|
00000010  43 42 2D 38 34 32 31 2D 35 46 45 42 45 44 43 34  |CB-8421-5FEBEDC4|
00000020  34 39 35 36 00                                   |4956.|
00000025

As Time Machine protects its backup volumes rather well from the user messing with therm and there seems to be no way to turn that off in the graphical interface, the next step is to remove ‘access permissions’ from the backup volume (which in my case is on a disk image as I prefer my backups encrypted). This can be done using the diskutil command with administrator rights:

sudo diskutil disableOwnership /Volumes/Backup

It seems like a good idea to not mess with the volume in any unnecessary way in this situation and just do what we came for: set the extended attribute to the identifier of the new volume.

sudo xattr -w com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID F9E4B5DA-BACC-3BEB-B4A9-D59041E58A78 /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/Latest/Volume/

If you observe things closely, you’ll see that the original extended attribute ended in a trailing NULL-character like a C-string does, while the newly set extended attribute does not. This difference doesn’t seem to matter for anything but the display by the xattr command. As it’s a bit tricky to actually get the NULL-character into the extended attribute, I just stuck with the easy way.

Finally ‘lock’ the volume again by re-enabling access permissions:

sudo diskutil enableOwnership /Volumes/Backup

Actually it seems that Time Machine will automatically restore access permissions for you the next time it is running if you forget this step. Still, doing it seems like a good idea.

And that is it. Backups from the cloned new hard drive in my MacBook seamlessly continued the previous series of backups just like I wanted it to. The only difference is in the extended attributes (both their value and, for technical reasons, their format) – before and after:

ssp% xattr -p -l com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/2010-07-14-094357/Volume/ /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/2010-07-14-104415/Volume/
/Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/2010-07-14-094357/Volume/: com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID:
00000000  34 30 44 37 43 46 37 32 2D 42 33 39 35 2D 33 46  |40D7CF72-B395-3F|
00000010  43 42 2D 38 34 32 31 2D 35 46 45 42 45 44 43 34  |CB-8421-5FEBEDC4|
00000020  34 39 35 36 00                                   |4956.|
00000025
/Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/2010-07-14-104415/Volume/: com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID: F9E4B5DA-BACC-3BEB-B4A9-D59041E58A78

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20:11 • Feedback (3+0)

Hard Drive breakage¶

Until recently I had been lucky enough to never have suffered from hard drive failures, which many people are running into these days. But, finally!, last week the kitchen PowerBook stopped working and after a quick check this wasn’t due to my flatmates pressing the wrong buttons on the machine but to its hard drive making clicking noises.

As the machine is only used for web, video, and music, it’s luckily not a real problem that I don’t have a backup of it. The main issue was that its installation DVDs seem to be at my parents’ house and had to be mailed to me first, as I seem to have Intel-only installation DVDs around my place these days.

Unfortunately Aluminium G4 PowerBooks not only look blatantly mediocre but also suffer from a rather user-hostile design which puts a gazillion little screws between you and the hard drive you need to exchange. Low-points of that ordeal were needing an extra tiny Inbus (hexagonal) screw driver and all other screws being simple Philips ones despite me now having a great Torx-8 screwdriver for the Torx screws which Apple tend to use for fixing hard drives in computers otherwise.

All that said, replacing the hard drive in my plastic MacBook is significantly easier and quicker. It doesn’t require me to carefully collect the screws of each step, so I can reassemble everything again later on.

Now I’m thinking it may be interesting to disassemble the broken hard drive but I could only remove its logic board. I’d need a Torx 6, I think, to open the case itself.

19:40 • Feedback (1+0)

DHL Packstation Design FAIL¶

DHL started deploying automated parcel offices Packstation a few years ago. They can be used in two ways: Like a P.O. Box for receiving parcels which sends you a message when a parcel arrives and at which you can pick your parcel up at the time convenient for you rather than the post office’s opening times. And as a DHL office for shipping parcels as well. You can walk up with your parcel, enter the address, pay the postage, get a little sticker and put your parcel into a little compartment that opens.

I like the idea. Post office workers seem to hate it as they see their jobs vanishing there. And, given the ‘Beamtenmikado’ low speed and extreme grumpiness of the people in Göttingen’s main post office, I can’t wait to see them go: their colleagues in the downtown post office or on the delivery vans simply do a much better job while being friendly. But I digress.

I didn’t really get to use the Packstation so far as I rarely send parcels and our neighbour tends to accept the stuff arriving at home which is much more convenient than having to go and pick it up. When having to send a parcel this week, I wanted to play with the Packstation – guessing that the version 1.0 problems should be solved after a few years in use.

Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. My single, dead-simple interaction with the machine, exhibited a number of downright design flaws. The first being the weather: It was a sunny day and the touch screen on the Packstation is shiny. Without any light protection around it, I mainly saw myself on the screen and had to hold up my parcel to cast a shadow, so I could try and read the small text on the screen.

The software in the machine is quite clumsy. Buttons are small-ish. Text is small-ish. The interaction speed is glacial. Each of these points makes the Packstation harder to use.

In addition to that, the software seems to have been created by brain-dead monkeys. While it does manage to automatically fill the sender information if you have a card for the Packstation and insert it, it wasn’t even able to automatically fill in the city name of the destination after I had entered the post code. That just seems insanely incompetent.

After winning that fight against the software the machine duly printed the sticker with the addresses and magic barcode which I could put on my parcel and then scan with the built-in barcode scanner. Sure, there needs to be a scanner in case people print the stickers out at home or so. But if the machine printed it a moment ago, why make me scan it, instead of offering a button to ‘post this item’? Particularly if the scanner is so poorly adjusted that it took ages of waving the parcel – luckily mine was a light one – around before it was accepted. The total lack of feedback given by the machine, along with its slowness didn’t help either.

None of this left a good impression. I like the idea as it simplifies sending and receiving parcels. But the solution DHL have right now seems a bit half-assed and severely lacking in both polish and basic respect for the user.

10:28 • Feedback (5+0)

Burgers!¶

I like beef, I like burgers and ever since running into The Burger Lab I’ve wanted to try a few more things with barbecuing burgers. As the weather is nice and warm (or even hot) at the moment, barbecuing seems natural and I finally got to barbecue my own burgers. I didn’t go through all the moves of buying the meat and grinding it myself, but they did that for me at the butcher’s and I avoided squeezing the meat on my way home.

I tried to shape the burgers with as little pressure as possible and overcooked the first batch a little. The second batch ended up perfect though, with the meat being lovely red and juicy in the middle.

This is addictive. I’m already wondering when I’ll get to make the next batch.

9:42 • Feedback (1+0)

MacBook Pro Battery Life¶

Despite all their technical deficiencies, a positive trend in Apple’s products of the past years was that the battery run-times claimed in their promotional materials weren’t just made up, but could actually be achieved or reasonably approximated in day-to-day usage. Simple devices like iPods actually sometimes managed to exceed the claimed run-time in practical usage. That’s how things should be.

As a consequence I thought that Apple’s decision to go without a user-replacable battery in their current laptops seemed justifiable, not only because only few people actually need long battery run-times (and those ‘pros’ can easily use a ThinkPad, or a Pismo powerbook for good results, I guess), but also because they claimed a larger battery size and 8 hour run-times as a result. Meaning that the change could actually be a significant advantage for many people.

A friend of mine had the 2008 unibody 15″ MacBook Pro and was very happy with its battery run-time. Based on that both him and my mum got themselves a 2010 13″ MacBook Pro, expecting similar results. But they are both very unhappy with the battery performance. Power seems to run out after a bit over three hours of light usage (e.g. web surfing, playing 2D games, 10 minutes of Flash video).

The numbers I saw in System Profiler looked reasonable to me: 0,8Ah of current at about 12V, should give almost 7 hours at usage with the 63Wh battery that Apple claim is in the machine (which the numbers given by System Profiler seem to confirm).

So what’s going wrong there? What are your experiences with those machines? Have Apple gone the route of lying about battery run-times again?

22:22 • Feedback (9+0)

South Africa 2010¶

The past weeks were dominated by the FIFA world championship in South Africa. People around here didn’t go as nuts as they did in 2006 when it took place in Germany, but it was hard to find a pub not having huge tellys around showing the games. And the roads were literally empty during the games of the German team with people being annoyingly enthusiastic after the games for someone who isn’t the biggest fan of football or Germans.

Just as during the previous football tournaments people decorated their cars with German flags (ugly, and pretty useless if you ask me: the statistical chance that a random person on the road is an idiot and supporting the German team is pretty high anyway, so they don’t need to put flags on their car to drive home the point). The bonus of this tournament were of course the cheap plastic instruments known as vuvuzelas which appear to be popular in South African football stadiums [as well as in concert halls] and which the spectators there used with great endurance.

Obviously German football fans had to use this opportunity to spend money on something cheap and plastic to be loud and annoying and you heard a fair bit of vuvuzela noise around here as well. Strangely it was much more in the first rounds of the tournament. Apparently playing those things is strenuous. While the vuvuzela is in no way ‘traditional’ or a ‘cultural’ artifact but just the cheap bit of plastic it appears to be, one must say that the South African spectators managed to use it to dominate the whole event.

And that’s quite cool if you think about it. You have a multi-billion enterprise by a huge mysterious corporation with all the business and TV dirt that naturally comes with that and the fans take over the audio track of the whole event by spending a few Rands on a piece of plastic. Well done! In addition it seems that the South Africans made the tournament work well, no matter what people predicted beforehand.

That said, the sound was annoying and apparently some of the ‘experts’ at German TV stations even declared filtering it was impossible (which of course meant that everybody who did attend Signal Processing 101 implemented the necessary filter and put it on the web) and just turning down the volume surpassed their competence as well. Walking past pubs with the games on turned the city into a vuvuzela-zone during the games as a consequence.

As I have no clue about the actual football, I found that letting one game run in the background with Greek commentary (Greek television was able to just turn down the vuvuzela volume it seemed) was good background noise for sleeping, particularly as I couldn’t understand the stupid commentator types. I actually watched the first half of the Germany vs Serbia game in which my football-ignorant self thought the German team looked like it had a lot of fun and played nice moves while the Serbian team scored a goal. I also saw the last few minutes of the North Korea vs Portugal game at the airport in Athens which increased the score from 0:5 to 0:7 I think and apparently made the Korean propaganda people a bit unhappy. The Portuguese travellers cheered, though.

All-in-all, people said the German team left a surprisingly good impression. But my friends said them losing in the semi-final was equally deserved. So, no hard feelings I guess.

Now let’s enjoy the four two years of quiet before the next football tournament…

10:50 • Feedback (0+0)

Travel Notes¶

Going to Athens last month, I was reminded that unlike most people I really like travelling per se. Moving by train or even by plane is nice in my book. I collect the mental notes I made – and didn’t forget – here.

• By sheer luck my travel plans saw me leave Göttingen with the first train of the day at 4:07 in the morning which was perfect to catch the plane at the airport in Hannover at 7.
• This time I really benefited from the online check-in as I managed to cram everything in my rucksack and didn’t need to give up any luggage. The check-in site run by swiss/Lufthansa was surprisingly nice and well-working. It let me pick my seat for one of the legs of the flight and handed me over a PDF with the relevant barcode and even gate information within a minute. Much better than I expected.
• Of course I have come to expect very little from any software in the airline sector. And, obviously, they fucked up my name to SVENS once more because hyphens are just too rocket-science for their booking systems.
• Hannover Airport is a convenient 15 minutes by S-Bahn from the main station. And it’s not really big, so it’s relaxing to fly from there.
• In an attempt to please international visitors they make announcements in German and English on the airport S-Bahn. The English announcements are mostly just repeating the name of the station. So I wondered whether they’re really that useful, seeing that the airport is the end of the line and our English visitors are usually smart enough to get off there. In particular I wondered whether it helps to make the English announcements for all the stations on the way as well. If you get off at Langenhagen-Pferdemarkt, say – which is just copied as Langenhagen-Pferdemarkt to English and not translated as Langenhagen-horsemarket, by the way – it’s probably German hinterland enough that you’d better speak German anyway.
• The final bit about announcements that keeps irking me is that they started announcing the side of the train you need to get off on with the station name. I am wondering whether that really helps (are there studies?) It effectively doubles the length of the announcements to bring you some information which you would have figured out at a glance anyway. In addition to that many people, myself included, confuse left and right from time to time and those words are only meaningful when you’re supplied with a frame of reference. Hence, to provide that tiny bit of information, we end up with a statement like Exit to the right in the direction of travel. Doesn’t seem worth it to me.
• That said, on one busy metro station in Athens – Ομονοια IIRC – they had a similar announcement. But there it made total sense as on that station they opened the doors on both side of the train and wanted people to get off on the right while new passengers were entering on the left.
• As I was changing planes in Zürich, I had a (little) bit of time to spend there. Well, it seemed very Swiss. Not spectacular, but very reasonably. Except for the silly prices they have. Not only that it’s in the funny currency of Swiss Franken, also that everything’s reassuringly expensive. There comes your 30 Franken box of chocolates or your 5 Franken bottle of water.
• But, Switzerland or not, that whole airport shopping thing keeps confusing me. OK, I can see how the busy business traveller needs to buy some perfume or that expensive box of chocolates for his wife when coming back from those important whore-laden negotiations. Likewise I can see that people want to buy a book or a snack before a long flight. But what about all those luggage, clothes and electronics stores? In terms of choice, price, and – quite likely – staff competence, I’d suspect an airport shop to be pretty much the worst place for buying a suitcase, a suit or a laptop. Yet, those businesses seem to work, so people must be leaving their money there.
• On my way back I had contracted a nasty little cold which blocked my ears and made the air pressure difference in the plane rather painful. I decided to get some painkiller in Zürich so the flight to Hannover would be more tolerable. And people were very helpful and friendly. The assistant at the next kiosk apologised for not stocking them and explained the way to the next pharmacy to me. I happened to be far away, at the very entrance of the airport. I still decided to go, despite the inconvenience of having to go out of the security check and back. But eventually I didn’t need to as one of the friendly security people just gave me one of her painkillers, which was a great help at the time. The internet later said they’re more for rheuma, but – by chemistry or psychology – they still did the trick for me.
• Speaking about security, I remain baffled. On my way to Athens I didn’t need to show an ID once. Which seems perfectly reasonable, of course, but isn’t what I expected in these paranoid times. I still couldn’t take a coffee through the security check though, which I’d consider equally reasonable. Yet, my luggage was checked twice on my way to Athens, once in Hannover, and again in Zürich, with me having to unpack all the toothpaste, and electronics and so on. Despite me asking I didn’t need to unpack my 1970s SLR camera but then they wanted to x-ray it again anyway, commenting that they didn’t see many of those these days. When being re-scanned in Zürich I then automatically unpacked the SLR but forgot to unpack the MacBook. Which was no problem as those people just politely asked whether there’s a computer in my bag and then let me take it out.
• Checks in Athens were even more relaxed. They scanned everything, but turned down my offer to unpack the electronics from my bag, scanning it in one go. No need to take off the belt either. Reasonable travelling. Rather oddly, I was not checked when changing planes in Zürich on the way back. Either they have a weird scheme of doing things or I walked the wrong way the first time (which I doubt because everything was quite simple).
• Once I arrived back in Hannover, I was happy to see our plane was very punctual, hoping I could catch the train an hour earlier than I had planned. But friggin’ German customs prevented that plan from working. The thing is that German customs have a history of loving to dig through my dirty clothes. I don’t know which of their profiles I match but got in my way quite regularly in the past. Of course their incompetence wasted taxpayers’ money every single time. As I was a bit drowsy at the time, I had forgotten my scheme of refusing to speak to them (my experience shows that whatever I say, they’ll search my luggage anyway, so I can save some time and hand them my dirty clothes right away with a note to enjoy digging around in them) and didn’t quite ‘get’ what they were after anyway. Turns out that stopping over in Switzerland makes you suspicious of money laundry and whatnot. They cleverly asked whether I had more than 10000 Euros in cash on me, all I could say was I wish I had and there they dug through my dirty clothes with the uniformed state employee’s eyes starting to sparkle when he found a little film tub in my bag. Of course I had a film in there – and someone with a brain might have figured that after seeing the camera a few seconds earlier – but German customs probably just enjoyed this to much to let it pass. I, of course, missed my train by a minute because of that, giving me an extra hour with a headache at cold railway stations. Well done.

19:36 • Feedback (4+0)