Author: Sven Welzel

Endlich wieder ein deutscher Buchladen in Kapstadt

Endlich wieder neue Bücher bestellen, stöbern und online bestellen – es gibt wieder einen deutschen Buchladen in Kapstadt, wie schon auf Englisch berichtet. Zwar is Gruffel.com komplett online, hat aber über 5 000 000 Titel im Angebot. Man kann in ganz Südafrika bestellen, und bekommt die Bücher (oder nur das Buch) ins Haus, in den deutschen Kindergarten oder in die deutsche Schule geliefert.

Es gibt die Spiegel Bestseller Listen, Belletristik, Sachbücher, Romane, Kinderbücher, Krime und Thriller, Karten und mehr. Wenn’s noch zu haben gibt, gibt es das Buch hier bestimmt! Gruffel.com hat den Sitz in Kapstadt, und man zahlt in südafrikanischen Rand – Einfuhr und Steuern übernehmen sie für den Kunden.

March 31, 2021
Finally – a German bookshop in Cape Town

Hurray! Finally there’s a German bookshop in Cape Town again, albeit online. Gruffel.com allows you to order German books anywhere in South Africa and ships them to you. Or allows you to pick up your books at the German School or at the kindergarten.

Select from the Spiegel bestseller lists, fiction and non-fiction as well as children’s books, as well as most recently newly published works. If it’s in print, it’s probably available. Gruffel is based in Cape Town, so you pay in South African Rand by bank transfer, they take care of tax, customs and excise.

March 22, 2021
Some recent pictures

Nigel, the Cape genet, at supper time

Night sky over Algeria

Night sky animation created with the help of Time Lapse Assembler.

October 11, 2015
Add the Loadshedding Lookup Tool for Cape Town to your mobile

You can access the load shedding lookup tool for Cape Town to your mobile phone so that you don’t have to type the link, open a browser, or even navigate! You can simply add the page to your home screen, be on an iPhone, iPad, or any Android device! (more…)

July 28, 2015
Load shedding Cape Town – know when loadshedding is scheduled or active

Another quick update to the Cape Town loadshedding schedule site has been included – for quick and easy consolidation of what the City of Cape Town, Eskom and City of Cape Town Alerts are thinking.

(more…)

February 16, 2015
It’s here to stay: Cape Town loadshedding times, stages, schedules & tips

You may have discovered the Cape Town loadshedding lookup tool, with geolocation, areas, suburbs, stages and more that has been referred to in previous posts.

With its home at http://ldsd.co.za or, if you want to type more – https://blog.sven.co.za/shed/, it gives a view of where we are at in terms of load shedding – or, as some request, power non-provision, blackouts or power cuts. (more…)

February 7, 2015
Cape Town #loadshedding lookup tool updated

Load shedding Cape Town lookup tool updated

The loadshedding lookup tool for Cape Town has been updated! You can now select your suburb by name, and the schedule will switch to the new, updated 16-day rotational schedule automatically on 1 Feb 2015. The tools tells you when you will be load shed by day of the week (on the old schedule) and day of the month (on the new schedule) based on the area, and stage (stage 1, 2, 3a and 3b) of load shedding. This tool is *only* applicable to areas supplied by the Cape Town municipality, i.e. if you buy electricity from the City of Cape Town, or receive an invoice from said municipality.

If you are an Eskom direct consumer, you’ll have to visit the Eskom load shedding schedule. (more…)

January 24, 2015
Load shedding lookup tool for new #loadshedding schedule – Cape Town, 2015

A lookup tool for the new loadshedding schedule for Cape Town from Feb 2015 is now available at https://blog.sven.co.za/shed. Day is autoselected, choose your area and choose the stage. Beyond that, you are then given the times that load shedding is set to take place on that day.

Both the old and new schedules are now accessible, and lookups are based on the new schedule from midnight, 1 Feb 2015.

January 20, 2015
40mm impressions along 800km of the N7, South Africa
Some images from the N7 – 800km along the highway, with only a 40mm pancake lens.

And a camera. But you knew that already.
- 40mm – 800km: The N7, South Africa
  
  All images copyright © 2015 by Sven Welzel. All rights reserved.
  See images »
January 11, 2015
Your mobile number is being sent to web pages

Depending on the mobile network provider you use (MTN doesn’t seem to be affected in ZA at the moment, Vodacom in ZA leaks this information), and device used, your IMEI and MSISDN (mobile number) are being sent to each web server you access via the mobile data network. In addition, tracker headers are being added.

You can see this here: https://blog.sven.co.za/sniff/ (access the page from your mobile phone on 3G/4G/GPRS or EDGE). (more…)

October 29, 2014
Review: The Square, The Vineyard, Cape Town

Restaurant The Square

Location The Vineyard Hotel, Claremont, South Africa (@Vineyard_Hotel)

Date of Visit 27 September 2014

Overall rating generous 2/5

Perhaps the fact that the phone remained unanswered and was redirected to the switchboard should have been a warning. But with a Saturday morning breakfast rush, it’s possible that no-one could take the call. Having left my details, I was assured that I’d receive a call back within the hour.

That hour passed without luck. Perhaps that should have been the final warning. Unperturbed, I called The Square again, only to this time have the call answered immediately, and have a table for four confirmed. A non-smoking table at 7pm awaited, with the promise of culinary and service excellence, as expounded upon on the website.

On arrival, the faintly sketched mental images the web had created soon evaporated. Don’t trust the Internet. Ever. (more…)

October 13, 2014
Screenshot on a Mac (MacBook, MacBook Air or iMac)

It’s so simple, it’s almost not worth typing, but for the sake of those of us who need this as a reference point, capturing the screen and saving it as a file, or to the clipboard to use the screenshot later, there are only a few steps involved on a MacBook or iMac. This works on all Apple Mac machines that aren’t tablets or phones (where you just the home and power button together – it’s saved to your Photos). On Windows, just use the PrintScr key…

(more…)

October 13, 2014
`Shellshock` Bash Patch update – pipe directly to sh to secure your machine

Recently, I made the script to patch your BASH environment available on this site, but that meant a need to copy and paste.

Using a user with the appropriate rights, you can now pipe directly using a quiet wget to make the full recompile to most recent BASH version possible.

All you need is this line: (more…)

October 8, 2014
`Shellshock` bash vulnerability fix and update in case of slow or unavailable repositories

Updated to latest kernel patch bash43-30

You’ve heard of ShellShock, and the bash-exploits that are currently doing the rounds, across platforms, that make use of these bugs (CVE-2014-6271 and the volumes of additional updates including CVE-2014-6277, CVE-2014-7186, CVE-2014-7187 and CVE-2014-7169, but to name a few). Proofs of Concept are being collected here… The below works as a vulnerability fix for older Ubuntu LTS and non-LTS versions, Debian (eg Squeeze) as well as Fedora and RedHat/CentOS, and applies all up-to-date patches to Bash.

bash – as a shell – is a tried and trusted component. Some legacy systems’ repositories – be they apt, yum or other – may no longer be kept up to date. Alternatively, they may not be being kept up-to-date enough for your liking. And you want to close the bash issue in the best way you know how.

Easy workaround is a recompile of the bash shell yourself:

(more…)

September 29, 2014
How to block or drop attacker with null route
Quick note to myself, as I keep forgetting the syntax, though it is so easy — to block an incoming connection by null routing or rejecting the connection is as simple as
```
route add -host IP reject
```
To apply this to a whole subnet range, use the -net as you would with the /24 mask (or the appropriate subnet, /29 or smaller should do), eg
```
route add -net IP/RANGE reject
```
To undo this,
```
route delete IP
```
January 14, 2013
Twitter speed

Repeatedly getting this error on this Twitter.com site: (more…)

April 6, 2012
DSL Network speed and connectivity in South Africa – Feb – Apr 2012

It’s been a rocky start to the year of DSL connectivity with EASSY and SEACOM, among the major uplinks from Southern Africa, all were affected by outages.

After a network outage between Abu Talat in Egypt and Marseilles, France was reportedly cleared on Feb 8, 2012, rumours surrounding additional downtime of the SEACOM network (more…)

April 6, 2012
Rsync – copy file differences to third directory

So you have a snapshot of data on one drive, and the current state of data on the second drive. How do you copy the difference between the two drives into a third directory?

Rync comes to the rescue here. And it doesn’t take much:

(more…)

April 6, 2012
Some quick updates

Time for some housekeeping – WordPress, plugins etc all patched and back to where they should be (taken long enough) — some more updates on PHP, scheduler integration and large data transfer info coming up soon!

April 6, 2012
[SOLVED] Windows 7 fails after patch installation, hangs, cannot boot in safe mode

Windows 7 won’t boot up, Safe Mode hangs (typically at CLASSPNP.SYS), the System Recovery can’t fix (Bad Patch and AutoFailover errors) and there are no recovery points to revert back to. Sound familiar? There’s a working solution! (more…)

July 21, 2011

Restaurant	The Square
Location	The Vineyard Hotel, Claremont, South Africa (@Vineyard_Hotel)
Date of Visit	27 September 2014
Overall rating	generous 2/5

Author: Sven Welzel

Load shedding Cape Town lookup tool updated