I’ve lost at least 5 hours of my life to the frikking euro key on my Microsoft Natural (old-style) keyboard. It seems that Gnome 2.10 on Ubuntu 5.04, otherwise a great combination, enjoys torturing its Dvorak keyboard layout users with the euro-symbol on the “5” key. It simply doesn’t work, no matter what you try.

After sacrificing the prerequisite 5 hours to the Linux gods of Ultimate Non-Usability, I came up with the following solution. Make the following change to your /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/pc/dvorak file:

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So, as some of you might know I had a sort of make-over on monday morning, september 12, 2005. Here are some before and after photos: Before and after.

The first photo shows all the wonderful people that showed up to watch me defend my work and the esteemed gentlemen (in fancy garb) who opposed me. The second photo was taken right after I received that red thingy. The red thingy means that you may now call me Doctor Charl if that sort of thing takes your fancy.

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You will remember that a while back I asked you to do me a favour and ask GMail to add the possibility to change the “From:” address on outgoing mails. Well, boys and girls, it seems that they’ve gone and done this!

Read all about it here.

WHOOOOOOOP!

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If you’re wondering what kind of music you should try next, and you’re in a post-punkish dance-punk-funkish mood, you could do much worse than try History, the debut album by Canadian Controller.Controller.

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Coffee on a rainy summer’s day.

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I just realised why I don’t really LIKE my keyboard at home… I used to type on Microsoft Natural Elite keyboards, at home and at work. These were great: split layout, great feel and affordable.

Eventually, it was time to replace my keyboard at home. I bought the Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard, thinking it would offer more of the same typing goodness. Unfortunately, as is the case with good things, and especially good things in Microsoft’s possession, they come to and end. These keys have the new patented Spongy Feel(tm). The major feature is that it sucks.

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Yesterday morning, my laptop refused to start up. No bios, no boot, not good…

Fortunately the HP NC6000 is a business laptop, so it came standard with a 3-year international on-site warranty. I phoned HP support and within 10 minutes they had scheduled an HP engineer to come by today. This morning the engineer appeared with a new system board. In no time flat he had disassembled the whole laptop, replaced the system board and re-assembled the whole dang thing. Kaching, one working laptop.

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Because I’m ever-so-slightly WABbing and because I like this software: Coperinic Desktop Search 1.6 has just been released. An important new feature is the “pause indexing when running on battery power” option, especially useful for laptop users.

I used GDS for a while, but Copernic offers finer-grained control over what’s indexed and what isn’t. Together with the laptop-friendliness aspect, Copernic makes a convincing pitch.

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Now I can bore you to death by sending these senseless MMSes directly from my cellphone. procmail picks them up, passes them to moblog.py (a little script that I slapped together) which then parses the mails and posts them to my weblog via the xmlrpc interface.

Yes, I know moblogging was hip 3 years ago. I *like* being behind the times.

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It’s 19:00, you’re at home and relaxing with the family. The telephone rings and someone does his or her best to sell you something that you REALLY don’t want. The only effective way to get rid of the caller is to be nasty, as these telemarketers are paid and trained to be irritatingly persistent. In any case, your perfect evening is somewhat blemished…

As is the case in many modern countries today, the Netherlands has an opt-out or no-call list. It’s not the easiest thing to find and it isn’t 100% effective, but it’s there. Go to http://www.infofilter.nl/ and opt out of mail and telephone marketing! There’s also a form to opt out of telephonic market research. This link has more information about the status and rules of telemarketing in the Netherlands.

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