www.musings.ch

Caroline Criado Perez: Invisible Women

https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/

Required reading for all those who’ll never read it. Sadest book I’ve ever read. Infuriating, enlightening and absolutely worth your time.

Liv Strömquist: Der Ursprung der Liebe

Epic. Recommended.

Salman Rushdie: Die satanischen Verse

Awesome book. Easy read. Beautifully written. Recommended.

Google Finance: CHSPI broken

Update, 2023-12-15: investing.com rendering is super unstable – I’ve resorted to using ishares.com directly. The new snippet for CHSPI:

=SUBSTITUTE(importxml("https://www.ishares.com/ch/individual/en/products/264107/ishares-spi-ch-fund","//*[@id='fundheaderTabs']/div/div/div/ul/li[1]/span[2]"), "CHF ", "")

Update, 2023-06-19: investing.com has changed some of its html. The new snippet for CHSPI:

=importxml("https://www.investing.com/etfs/ishares-core-spi","//*[@id='__next']/div[2]/div[2]/div/div[1]/div/div[1]/div[3]/div/div[1]/div[1]")

As we all know, Google Finance and ETF (at least ishares) import* in Google Spreadsheets has been broken since December 2022:

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/262157479

So if you use =GOOGLEFINANCE("CHSPI","price"), in your spreadsheet, all you’ll get is the following error message:

Error:
When evaluating GOOGLEFINANCE,
the query for the symbol: 'CHSPI' returned no data.

Since we all also know, Google Finance isn’t the fastest in fixing bugs (as evidenced by this bug, but also several others prior to this one), and their feeds (latency,..) are best-effort-at-best.

To fix this in your spreadsheet, head over to investing.com, enter whatever stock/currency/etf/.. you want to import data from, copy the url and use that combined with importxml:

Say you’re looking for SWX:CHSPI:

Go to investing.com, enter CHSPI, click on the search result.
This takes you to https://www.investing.com/etfs/ishares-core-spi, where you’ll copy the url ("website address").
Open your spreadsheet, head to the cell you like most, enter:
=importxml("https://www.investing.com/etfs/ishares-core-spi","//*[@data-test='instrument-price-last']") to get the latest price.
Silently thank investing.com

* Note that not only importing in spreadsheets (using =googlefinance) is broken – none of the symbols show up on Google Finance itself either.

Alexandra Zykunov: Wir sind doch alle längst gleichberechtigt!

Excellent read. Eye opening. Slightly annoying writing style. Required reading for those who’ll sadly never read it.

Susann Pásztor: Und dann steht einer auf und öffnet das Fenster

Amazing book. Piece of art. Absolutely worth reading.

Brandon Sanderson: The Stormlight Archive

I’ve spent^Wwasted the last 150 days of my life reading The Stormlight Archive (up to, and including, part 4), and it’s been the greatest waste of time and brain cycles in a long time.

The tl;dr: whenever something inexplicable happens, the author will simply invent a new plot twist/random magic. I do expect the series to end with a “remarkable” finish, but only because it’s predictable based on the first book.

Don’t read it. Not worth it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stormlight_Archive

(and yeah, my bad for not being able to stop reading half-way through, but I always tend to think “the problem is me, not the author. this must end well, I just don’t get it yet”)

TIL: Self-declared messiahs

There’s a list of self-declared messiahs on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Self-declared_messiahs

and from that, I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alleged_extraterrestrial_beings

😂 I’m amazed.

(seems like the list of messiahs has one common thread: lots of them are accused of sexual abuse…)

iptables performance blocking aws, gcloud.. and ipset persistence

I love those days when I look for a solution to a problem (today: iptables performance using large net blocks) and I find some kind soul out there has spent their time to fix this already.

https://selivan.github.io/2018/07/27/ipset-save-with-ufw-and-iptables-persistent-and.html

Thanks Pavel ❤️