Software developer, non-robot
Your clipboard can hold your short term memory much longer than your brain. Here’s a crazy idea: why not use your clipboard as a short term memory aid. Every so often you need to remember a short piece of information for a very short time. For example: somebody dictates a phone number or an address over a telephone …
NoMachine NX is a perfect solution to connect to your remote Ubuntu desktop. But ever since Canonical introduced Unity, NoMachine doesn’t seem so perfect anymore: client successfully connects to the NX server, but the menus never show up, and there’s no Unity side bar. Here’s what works in 12.04 Precise Pangolin: On the remote machine …
More often than not, I will find myself sitting at the desk, staring at the computer screen for hours at a time. When I work, I always strive for razor sharp focus, or to put it in a more common term: the zone. I’m usually not even aware of time. Hours begin to fly by …
Luckily so do @rifeljm, @dgurnick and @morphix, the authors of envelopa.com. I just used their fine (free!) service to print 24 envelopes for season greeting cards I helped craft, together with my son and wife. The service lets you import addresses with no sweat, using CSV or pasted from a spreadsheet. Select your addresses, pick an envelope …
If you use passwords like 12345 for anything else than maybe your luggage, you probably don’t need to read this post. If you’re smarter than that and you use proper passwords, you might be interested to learn how to store them safely while having them handy at all times. KeePass is a very popular cross-platform …
Update, 31. march 2013: this article is now out of date. Microsoft now offers free virtual machines and hosted virtualised solutions for cross browser testing at: http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools (thanks to Graham Ashton for the update). Like many, I ditched Windows for other operating systems a long time ago and never looked back. But being a web developer I need to be …
If you administer Linux systems, it’s a pretty good idea to keep an eye on the logs. A handy tool that parses your system’s logs and sends you an email report is well known logwatch. By default it sends daily log reports. But to me this is too often. I want weekly reports. This is …
Alexander Kmetec wrote an interesting story, about how a noisy workplace brings productivity down, and how this makes some developers desperate enough to look for cover in light-forsaken places, worthy of Office Space’s Milton Waddams himself. I agree with most of the premise of the piece, however: It doesn’t take two… It only takes one …
Not so long ago I complained how dreadful video transcoding is. Turns out I was just using the wrong software. Thanks to a simple Ubuntu Software Center* search I stumbled upon this gem: Arista Transcoder. I’ve only been using it for a couple of minutes and that was enough to pick the video to transcode, …
Like many of you, I’ve been closely following the story of WikiLeaks. As it struggles to stay online after their domain-name provider had withdrawn service to the site yesterday – only one day after Amazon.com booted the site off its servers – the whistle-blowing website’s co-founder Julian Assange is on the run from Interpol. Julian’s …