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They sold me a used hard drive
I bought a few new hard drives recently. Before installing them into the computer I decided to test them a bit (good idea!). I noticed that one of the drives was packed in a non-sealed wrapping and its manufacture date was last July. I looked at its S.M.A.R.T. information and it reported 4390 hours on…
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Getting organized
I’ve never been successful in keeping really useful and up-to-date diaries and todo lists. Well, one can think: “If it’s really important I won’t forget about it and the other things don’t matter much.” But if nothing else then family life can cause semi-chaos making really difficult to get anything done. Nevertheless an important change…
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Usable web browser
#Gecko problems: keyboard navigation, Meta key, button8, printing, Acid test, form security The Web is a common platform for many everyday activities today. But working with it is still often annoying, one reason being lack of a good end user client. We’ve got Emacs for text editing, organizing, communication, programming, file management, calculations, etc. But…
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Maps for car navigation
I had an opportunity to watch Garmin nüvi GPS equipped with CN maps while travelling by a car some time ago. I was curious about how good those maps are compared to OpenStreetMap. By my observation the Garmin maps are worse. They tried to navigate us through fields (despite unpaved ways were disabled in setup)…
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Stockfish
Do you know which PC chess playing engine became the second strongest one in the world after Rybka this year? It’s Stockfish, a free chess engine distributed under the GNU General Public License. It may look surprising that a hobby program with publicly available source code can beat all the proprietary engines with their secrets…
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Moving to Org-mode and Chronicle
I’ve started using Org-mode some time ago (more on this sometimes later). Consolidation of my personal information management and complete move to Org-mode applies also to my weblog articles. They are now part of my Org and all I additionally needed was to publish the resulting HTML texts. I looked for something simple and available…
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Fonts in Emacs 23.2
When my Emacs was upgraded from 23.1 to 23.2, I got negatively surprised: It changed font rendering, making fonts significantly less readable. I quickly identified the corresponding NEWS entry: *** On X11, Emacs reacts to Xft changes made by configuration tools, via the XSETTINGS mechanism. This includes antialias, hinting, hintstyle, RGBA, DPI and lcdfilter changes.…
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Smart phones one year later
When I was looking for a new mobile phone and looked at smart phones more than a year ago, I’ve found there has been no working smart phone equipped with a truly free operating system providing rich set of applications and nice development environment. It seems there happened at least two important changes in this…
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New hard drive
In the last years adding new hard drives to desktop computers running GNU/Linux used to be very easy. The drive was just connected to the computer, partitioned, formatted and it worked well. It seems it may not be that easy now again. I’ve bought a new Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive some time ago.…
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How to prevent collaboration
I tried to make OpenVPN working in a Linux-VServer environment about a year ago. I couldn’t find a straightforward HOWTO nor answers to all my questions. So I described what I had done and sent my questions to the VServer mailing list. I expected that I get answers to my questions and then other users…