Amazon is going to sell their new e-book reader. Sure, I wouldn’t buy a proprietary device that serves as a purchase tool for a particular seller. But a more interesting thing is that they advertise access to Wikipedia several times in their blurbs. I’m curious whether Amazon is going to support Wikipedia, e.g. by donating […]

Some Czech spammers are completely impudent and ignoring Czech law forbidding spamming activities. Europe should be civilized enough to be able to prevent such behavior here. I’ve received another piece of spam from Hotel u Lípy today. Enough is enough, so I started looking for possibilities to retaliate, resulting in posting a grievance against them […]

I’ve successfully finished my first year of distant study of civil engineering. Some fun, some hard work, as the distant study is mostly based on working out a lot of exercises. You can either actually make the exercises or you can copy them (which is formally disallowed of course). IMO the first way, although sometimes […]

KMa s.r.o. – Levné knihy is a Czech publishing company specialized on publishing and selling cheap books, especially classic literature with expired copyrights. Now they publish cheap movies on DVDs as well, for a price of 3-4 €, that is about 1% of common salary here and easily affordable. They publish various kinds of movies, including […]

OSA (The Performing and Mechanical Rights Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) was successful again with their lobbying. The upgrade of Czech copyright law brings great news for them: While it’s now illegal to make any copies of a protected work (so you can’t make backup copies of your CDs anymore!), we not only still […]

Perhaps the first non-commercial TV broadcasting has started in Czech Republic about a month ago. It’s called TV Noe (Noah TV) and it’s a Christian broadcasting focusing on positive values and supposed to be financed mostly by voluntary contributions from its viewers and by broadcasting short messages from sponsors. Unlike other TV broadcasters in Czech […]

Our second son was born. Photos at http://marek.zamazal.org.

There is an interesting story by Petr Kaňovský at katolik.cz (in Czech). When facing the problems of our society caused by our sins we have to fight with additional temptations such as to give up, to join the crowd, to fall into hatred or to accept the thirty pieces of silver. We may be forced […]

I’ve been already annoyed enough by computer web shops that present their prices without VAT and one has to click more to find out the real price. Now, when recycling fee was introduced several months ago, some of the shops present prices in an even more confusing way. Recently I was going to buy a […]

Phone calls are notoriously expensive in Czech Republic. Despite the former communication monopoly is officially gone, the company still owns the landlines and you pay them high fixed monthly fees and high call rates. Fortunately, VoIP started to expand here recently. I’ve already been using VoIP for some time, but only at the PC-to-PC level […]