Corp: let's have open-plan offices so people interact Employees: but it's loud Corp: here, noise-cancelling 'phones so you can't hear anyone

If you get an ugly rectangular dropshadow in Ubuntu Gnome 14.10 with the gnome-staging ppa (because Gnome 3.14 is so slick), install the Intel graphics driver from ppa:mgedmin/ppa; this ppa has a patched xserver-xorg-video-intel that fixes this for Utopic users. source

When your laptop is sitting on a table and you're doing some other stuff in the meanwhile, it might quietly be running out of battery. In that case, you likely want to be nudged to find it a power outlet before it has to shut down or hibernate. Wouldn't it …

Yesterday this weblog turned eleven. I haven't always been that faithful to it, having times I didn't post for months (my inspiration apparently comes in waves). However, even though I've been using social media like Twitter for ages (five and a half year it seems), I keep on posting here …

You have this interesting project, written in Django. Maybe even in the excellent Django Rest Framework. You want to run some tests on it to know how it will cope with load under stress. Or you just want to repeat a bunch of steps from the outside a lot of …

While I was standardising my dotfiles I wanted to have an easy and quick way to update my projects so repositories weren't out of date when I wanted to use them (for example when being offline on the train), and I didn't want to go through them by hand every …

I'm thinking about getting me one of those Chromebooks. Preferably a cheap, light, small one (the 11" Samsung for example), which I can almost literally throw into my backpack and take wherever I go. The first reason I'd do so is because I'm curious to the platform and the experience …

Work mail, every working person has it. I have it. Thankfully not lots and lots of messages per day, but it's still a part of my everyday routine. We each got a company-provided laptop with email (and Lync - the old Microsoft Communicator - for phone and instant messaging), which I installed …

To counterweigh my professional life in which I (thankfully) build nice things in Python/Django, I have hobby projects in which I can thinker with whatever I want to build. Python is still my preferred language, but Django is not a necessity. I have some legacy projects of my own …

Sixteen years ago I had a pda. Not one of those nifty Palm devices or expensive Psion's. No, a regular organizer; a little electronic device with a whopping 128KB of storage which you could fold shut like a litte book. Opened, it provided a nice little qwerty-keyboard and about 4 …

Lately my work laptop has been acting up a bit after installation of a graphical driver went wonky. As I'm running a beta of Ubuntu Gnome on it, I don't blame anything but the flux in which the packages exist for the moment, so I took it in stride and …

We've all been there. Well, I've been there at least; before discovering the virtues of a real version control system, I just created a snapshot of my projects by tarring and compressing the directory tree. That way I've a bunch of histories locked inside backup dir per project. When I …

I'm a fan of version control systems, as they allow me to thinker with my files (both source code and text files with notes and such) to my heart's delight without having to worry about thing getting lost. I can change and update programs, websites and such and can see …

I recently built a new at-home server, which basically is just a self-built NAS. Sharing via NFS worked immediately and other services were set up soon after. Then came Samba. Samba (or smb) is used for Windows shares, but in our home our Linux-based NAS speaks the protocol with things …

vim, the final editor. Well, for some people at least. People like me, we like to type their files, code and more inside of dark-coloured windows, mainly terminals and do not really care if those files are local on their laptop, on the server at their feet or on some …

Before the end of the year I won't be a fulltime geek anymore. I will be a fulltime example for a new member of our society and parttime geek. Though I see possibilities to combine the two without doing too many concessions ;) Our close family and nearest friends have known …

Over the years I seem to have made a point of saying I need to dust off this weblog and post more instead of hanging around on ethereal media like Twitter or getting sidetracked by real life. I'm still trying to figure out a way of getting dammIT in my …