Mozilla Thunderbird is of those pieces of software I could say I am a fan of, but since I upgraded from TB3 to TB5 and recently to TB6, I’ve been experiencing various problems with the application’s overall speed and responsiveness. Using Thunderbird almost felt as if it was reading its data from the internet. Working [...]

Although I do not intend to run VMWare directly on a physical partition containing Windows any time soon, a recent discussion on a greek linux users group about the implications of such an experiment made me write a post about an article I stumbled upon today. The article author notes: VMWare is an incredibly useful [...]

Today, I noticed that it is no longer required to escape the backslash (\), known as the “escape character” on *nix systems, inside the pre HTML tag in order not to be removed by WordPress’ HTML filters. This bug has lived long enough to be considered as a WordPress feature, but the devs have suddenly [...]

Midnight Commander (MC) is a lean, but powerful, two-panel file manager that, admittedly, promotes productivity while working from a console. Among other features, it implements a user menu with pre-defined actions that can be performed on the selected files or directories. This menu can be further customized by the user on a directory-, user- or [...]

This post is both a tip about vsftpd‘s configuration and an example of what an error message should not look like. If you use vsftpd’s user_config_dir directive in order to set a directory that will hold configuration files for per-user customized server options, be warned that, if one of those files contains a directive whose [...]

I thought that sending a text file as a text message through the GSM network’s short message service would be a trivial task either it was performed from within the phone’s operating system or from a computer that runs a flavour of Linux. Once again, I have been badly misled. In 2007, this task still [...]

Hardware either works or does not work. Two pieces of hardware are either compatible or icompatible. This is the rule. However, when the incompatibility-gap between the two pieces of hardware is small, there is almost always a way to make these two pieces work together as if they were fully compatible. This generally involves the [...]

Kudos to the person who thought about this! This article describes how you can prevent comment spam with CSS. I am not sure how well this performs, but it sure looks like a decent solution. I would like to test if it would perform better than my trick of dynamically changing the form field names [...]

This is an interesting article by O’Reilly Hacks, which provides tips on how to watch a video stream in ASCII art. From the article: Good ASCII art can take time and talent to look just right, but you can skip through that effort with AAlib, a library devoted to converting any image into an ASCII [...]

Chances are that your removable media preferences in GNOME are set in a way so that CDs get mounted automatically. There is a usability bug that comes into play whenever you try to blank an already written rewritable CD or DVD with Gnomebaker or directly with the command-line tool (cdrecord). An error message that the [...]