H. Mijail's Blog

I bought recently a Tchibo Cafissimo espresso machine. I had been pondering about Nespresso, Zespresso and some other, but this one finally convinced me. There was preciously little information online about this particular machine, so I thought I could help someone. These are the things I would have liked to know before buying it and/or which helped me decide. My requirements were coffee capsules and milk frothing. I would have liked to have the option to use non-capsule coffee, but looks like there is no such machine. Also, I preferred having a steam wand for frothing the milk myself instead of the frothing unit of other machines (since I wanted to be as close as possible to "the real thing"). Frothing devices seem to be good-but-not-the-same, from the opinions I have been reading online. Also, they seem to have a tendency to stop working. Coffee from capsules of course is also "not-the-same", but everyone seems to accept that it is pretty good, and I since I ...

I am having to translate a horribly old program (1992?, DOS' Turbo Pascal)… and in german, to make it funnier… to an only-slightly-less-horribly-old environment (Delphi 4, circa 1999). To think that I was complaining about how outdated Borland's C++ Builder 5 felt… oh my. I guess/hope/fear that later there will be a more modern target. But that will be easy, given that by then I should understand everything and the program itself is not complicated.

I remembered something like "the eyes still looked like asking if, whatever it was the universe was doing to him, would it please stop doing it". Douglas Adams, but ... where, what exactly? Some googling shows that the correct fragment was from "So long, and thanks for all the fish": "Only the eyes still said that whatever it was the Universe thought it was doing to him, he would still like it please to stop."  I can't remember why I thought the best book was "Hitch Hiker´s Guide to the Galaxy"; simply thumbing through SLATFATF has made me want to read it again. Perhaps it was the most... humane of the lot. The love story was so touching. The descriptions of the fish bowl, of how Arthur sensed the strangeness of the new Earth. And Fenchurch's disappearance was so… suddenly cruel.  I love so much Adams' style. Just recenty finished (finally!) "Thief of time" by Pratchett, and tried to stop comparing him to Adams and let ...

Finally one day I force myself to get almost 8 solid hours of sleep. Too many things to do, big and small; to many cracks for them to slip through. Enough times of wanting to stop and... think... and... feel. In the morning I find Mail.app crashing. WTF? I remember about haxies, inputmanagers, the works. Should be clean, but recently found and deleted an unwelcome Smart Crash Reporter. Check. There it is again. Trash it. Google for it; how to avoid them in the future? Nothing definite (will try folder actions for alerts + file named "smart crash reporter" so it can't be created; if that trick worked for a trojan, should work for something less evil). But meanwhile I found that in the list of programs using Smart Crash Reporter is Quicksilver, which I am perennialy running. (too easy / out-of-the-blue to be reliable, but Mail is not crashing any more...) Quicksilver. So much time w/o updating, and it never seems to do automatically. (still didn't finish watching the...

Por fin me he dedicado a jugar un poco con el driver oficial. El resultado esperado, como Nexus había comentado antes en otro post, era que el G450 sólo funcionase si estaba enchufado desde el arranque. Pero en mi caso era peor: ni siquiera así funcionaba. Además he visto por la red más gente con el mismo problema. El "Toshiba PC Tool.app" que se instala junto al driver simplemente dice que no encuentra el modem, y ni siquiera aparece montado el disco USB que debería aparecer al conectar el G450. El Perfil del Sistema muestra sin embargo que en el bus USB está conectado un disco de Toshiba, y la Consola muestra que diskarbitrationd no ha podido crear un disco ("unable to create /dev/disk2"). Esto se mantuvo así aunque reseteé el G450 y reformateé el disco con el propio menú del teléfono/modem/bicho. Pero he encontrado una solución, que aunque no es ideal, tampoco cuesta mucho. Cuando el G450 está apagado y es enchufado al ordenador, la pantalla muestra una a...

Finally I have had the chance to play a bit with the official driver. Remember, the expected result was that it would only work if plugged since the booting of the Mac. That would be unfunny, but in my case it was even worse: as a lot of other people has reported, it didn´t seem work at all. The "Toshiba PC tool.app" reported that no modem was found, and no USB disk appeared, even though I tried resetting and reformating the G450 internal disk (through its own configuration menu). But finally I have found a solution. Not ideal, but not too painful, and it works. The problem was that the modem would remain in the disk mode - which in my Mac at least doesn´t even work properly, since it doesn´t get mounted as a disk. The only way I can see that it is supposed to behave like a disk is because it appears in System Profiler.app, in the USB devices list. And Console.app shows something about diskarbitrationd "unable to create /dev/disk2". When the G450 is turned off ...

Looks like finally Toshiba published a Mac OS X driver for their G450 3G modem . The only problem is, it doesn't seem to work. It installs, but nothing else happens. And the Toshiba PC Tool app it installs always complains that the modem can't be found. I'll take it as a warning that I'm letting too much time pass by without working on the subject... although I still think about it and read the needed docs whenever life's DDoS leaves me some room to breathe. (In the last 3 weeks I finished the polish course, passed the exam with good marks, started the new course, enjoyed the trip, finished my previous job – with still some rough edges to be taken care of, did the paperwork to end my previous self-employment in Spain and start the new job in Poland, did the paperwork relating to spanish telephony and bank accounts, and started the new job. Now I only have to finish the flat moving and basic set up...) (Hm, surely I should write some short article about all...