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Recursive Folder Copying on Windows

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Last week, I had a rather simple task – copy a user-folder from an old laptop to a new laptop – preserve folder structure and keep all metadata (such as file-creation date, last edited etc.).
Right-click copy and paste does not fullfill the needs and usually is rather slow, so I tried to use Windows‘ built-in robocopy.

Doing a quick read over the documentation, I came up with

robocopy C:\SRCDIR D:\DSTDIR /e /dcopy:dat

which I thought would do, what I want – it should copy all files recursively and preserve file attributes and timestamps.

I started the process and expected it to be done after a few minutes – however, the process ran and ran.
The destination directory grew in size, way beyond what it should – according to the size of the source directory.

This prompted me to stop the process and investigate – the source folder was around 5GB, while the destination folder already was over 60GB – what happened?

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Morgens um 8 in der U-Bahn

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Morgens müde Menschenmassen,
Sitzen, stehen, dicht an dicht.
Individuen verblassen
unter kaltem Neonlicht.

Unterm Zug da rattern Räder,
zischend schwindet die Station.
Im Zug Stille, denn ein jeder
schaut stumm in sein Telefon.

Schneller, mehr und digitaler –
Online herrscht das wahre Leben.
Wirkt viel bunter und realer
als der Mensch direkt daneben.

Daumen hoch heißt „mir gefällt“.
Jeder zeigt sich online jedem,
doch in der realen Welt
haben wir verlernt zu reden.

Morgens müde Menschenmassen
und zum Reden fehlt der Wille.
Wenn wir uns in Ruhe lassen
bleibt im Lärm der Stadt nur Stille.

Crypto-Scam and the exponential function

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Since several years, I’m interested in crypto-currencies. I’m active in some chat groups on the topic on several platforms, one of them being Telegram. Every once in a while, I get messaged by people with very professional profile-pics, a trustworthy name („Stan“) and a very creative opener („Halo!“[sic!]). The person I am, I usually reply to spam and go with the conversation. Recently, one of those conversations brought up a homepage, where you can supposedly make A LOT of money by automatically investing in crypto currencied and other. But how much is a lot and can that actually be true?

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Using spot-color in LaTeX for print-post-processing

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I like to use LaTeX to produce nice looking PDF files for printing. So far that has worked pretty well, but in a recent project I ran into issues, so I want to document the solution here. In some printing jobs, there is post-processing involved e.g. when cutting stickers, when putting gold-foil over certain parts of the design or when embossing. In that case, the files need to follow a certain scheme that this areas can be correctly recognized.

In my use-case, the cut-contour lines of a sheet of stickers needed to be given as a separate colour with a certain name. All solutions that I found, where tailored towards proprietary PDF creators like the Adobe Suite or something in this direction. Even harder, if you search for the german words „Volltonfarbe“ in combination with „Latex“ (or even „LaTeX“), you will end up with results offering to buy latex based paint which is not very helpful. „Volltonfarbe“ in this context translates to „spot-color“ and it is very well possible to use spot colors in a LaTeX document.

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Figment – Not just a kid’s game

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I had some free time yesterday and saw a new game on the free Stadia Pro section, so I gave it a try. And boy was I surprised. The game is called Figment and takes place in the mind of a person, where you stroll trough different areas of the brain. The protagonist is a clumsy little something who would rather enjoy a cold drink than being controlled by you. Together with an overly optimistic bird, the duo has to chase down a sinister enemy, solving riddles on the way.

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