Getting the Most out of the Home Row

If you’re willing to exchange a bit of memory for a lot less strain on your wrists, let alone work speed, this is your lucky day. In this post, I will describe how I’ve tuned my everyday work environment to a point where it feels completely unnatural for …

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PSI Smilies in Gaim/Pidgin

Thanks to Debian, I got pidgin 2.2.0 today, and with it, its new atrocious smiley theme—eyebrows and all. This prompted me to make a smiley theme out of Psi‘s old smileys, which I still remember liking the most.

You can download that theme here: PSI Smilies …

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Rattle back, Rattleback!

As part of the course requirements for the mechanics class I took, a team of which I was a part designed a Rattleback. A rattleback is a top that appears to have a preferred direction of rotation, i.e. if you start spinning it the wrong way, it (unintuitively) will …

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Linux on an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R52

This post summarizes my experience of making the hardware in my shiny new IBM ThinkPad R52 work with Linux.

I initially tried Debian on this computer, but later on headed over to Ubuntu with a home-built kernel for a bunch of reasons on which I won’t elaborate here. Update …

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The State of 802.11g Wireless Networking in Linux

This entry describes my way to wireless LAN in Linux. It is an update of an earlier article. All I wanted was an 802.11g-compatible PCMCIA card with a reasonably open and functional Linux driver. I find it ok if the card’s firmware is not open source, but I …

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Just don’t use ACPI on old computers

A brief hint for those using Linux: If you have an old computer, and Linux chooses to disable ACPI, leave it at that. That is, do not use acpi=force. I just had a case of a computer that appeared to work fine with it. Only that the ACPI option …

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