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…
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…
#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…
God should be in the centers of our lives. But is it really so? I can often observe silence. When we communicate with our friends or other people, we usually chat about children, everyday matters, work, weather, politics, sometimes about things like computers or math. And something important is missing. Will our Savior come to…
I’ve heard nice things about the band Neočekávaný dýchánek for several times, but I’ve never got an opportunity to listen to any of their recordings. I’ve found their are available at Indies Happy Trails now. Good music indeed.
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)…
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…
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…
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.…
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…