Archive for May, 2012

Tip of the week: exceptional mobile offers

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

In recent times I had to do some more international calls, even including international calls to mobiles, than usual. Of course international calls are now the nearly only thing charged extra on bigger, e.g. office, plans. And they can be quite expensive, …

With some kind tip I was pointed to some Vodafone Germany Callya International pre-paid offer, that unexpectedly offers international calls, even including mobiles, into many countries as low in the single digit cent range per minute, …

So it really pays off to do some research, especially in esoteric situations, …

Tip of the week: Good old Unix knowledge

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

Being abroad over the May-day public holidays (in most of Europe), I had to compare some numerics without a spreadsheet at hand (traveling without my main MacBook, …). App Store hipsters would probably be lost, now, but knowing some good old Unix Kong Fu there was help around:

Cut’n paste the values (from an PDF, …) into raw txt files, and setup equations (with sed substitutions) to feed bc:

paste out in | sed ’s/\.//; s,[^0-9], / ,; s/^/100 * /’ | bc > res

And for the prettiness one can also paste together the table columns:

paste in out res