After every call, popups started appearing offering to install Facebook or Yandex.Taxi. I read around online — people write that a lot of junk like this comes pre-installed in the phone’s firmware.

I decided to check one suspect — TouchPal — as what seemed to me the most brazen app. I blocked its access to calls — the popups seem to have stopped for now. I’ll keep watching.

Got an invitation to a corporate chess tournament — I had marked somewhere that I enjoy chess, so they found me and sent an invite. The game is online. Haven’t played in a while; curious how chess affects work, life, and decision-making.

Need to catch up) Not expecting any prizes, but I’ll take the enjoyment from the process, in the spirit of the Coubertin principle.

I’m taking an ITIL course and remembered that I once invented my own CMDB without knowing any ITIL practices or recommendations.

It’s hard to say whether it’s a good thing that I’m so clever, or a bad thing that I hadn’t read up on it when I should have.

Installed Docker on the laptop.

Had been afraid of it locally for a long time — figured it would eat up all the space and thrash the SSD.

But eventually had to bite the bullet. Moved /var/lib/docker via a symlink to the HDD, will keep an eye on the space usage.

As a small preamble to the upcoming article about debugging bash scripts via Eclipse, here’s a note that there is a port called win-bash — a console for Windows.

Yes, everyone knows about Cygwin, but it has certain quirks. Here we have an archive that you just unpack, add to PATH (and then plug into Eclipse and debug, debug…)

The Nook has its uses: as a tablet it doesn’t justify itself much — pages are awkward to flip through, and browsers don’t recognize the standard Nook buttons — but as an e-reader it’s excellent.

Bought myself a Nook Barnes&Noble Simple Touch Reader.

Started a small pet project on GitHub, the main driver being learning collaboration. And also a chance to brush up on some Java.

Dear readers, and also those who follow my other blog — the one that isn’t about life but is supposed to be somewhat technical. I moved it from the Tumblr platform to Blogger, and discovered that the RSS links on these two platforms are different. So, dear geeks who read via feed readers and other aggregators — if you want to keep following, please drop by and resubscribe. Sorry for the inconvenience; in return I’ll try to write some interesting things about XBMC. Thanks in advance for your attention.

LiveJournal has pulled this trick on me more than once: I’m browsing subscriptions in Google Reader, and the posts I like and want to read in more detail I open with a middle-click in a new tab. And often instead of the page I get a prompt to log in to LJ. What’s more, if I notice it right away and open the address again — it loads correctly. But if I scroll further through the reader and switch to that tab a few minutes later — instead of an interesting article, there’s that… unwelcome login screen. So damn annoying!