Do you know, dear subscribers, what happens to you when you move the SIM card of the carrier “MechanoTractorStation” into a different phone? I am currently living through the consequences of exactly that, and I would like to share them with you.

First of all, an annoying service gets activated on your device — SILENT notifications that pop up even on the locked screen. Those notifications have two options, “YES” and “NO”, and their purpose is to subscribe you to extra services, pictures, and ringtones at cosmic prices of 5–10 hryvnias per item. The notifications appear spontaneously and are noticeable only visually — no sound, no vibration. It is very easy to accidentally tap one of them while navigating the phone and end up paying extra. So don’t be surprised when a few messages follow, along the lines of “Sports Forecast” or “Horoscope”, as happened to me — you will never be able to prove to the carrier that you did not order them, since you might have tapped something by accident. The only way out is to pay, and then try to disable all this “happiness”. By the way, those silent notifications are called “CLICK” by the carrier, and supposedly can be instantly disabled through the SIM card menu. But if you are as naive as I am and believe these liars, let me disappoint you — it does not actually turn off through the menu (even though it says “Disabled”). In my case it only stopped after the second consecutive call to a live support agent — apparently the first time around the command was to NOT disable it.

The Americans have freedom, The Germans — beer and bacon, The French have haute couture, The English — the finest stadium.

But your average Ukrainian Excels at something else instead. He has a long and elastic Patience, like none you’ve seen.

Say those up top get a whim To slap a tax on trousers — The Ukrainian’s patience won’t snap, Pull it for three hundred years.

Or the gang leads him astray: Invites him to a bank — it’s a brothel. The Ukrainian will fetch his patience, Sigh — and step on the rake again…

Written on 2011-11-11 11:11:11. Spotted at a very respected BSD guy’s. (Thanks to him, and also — to the Earth’s rotation for the time zone difference) Such a parade of ones won’t repeat for another hundred years, though next time there will be one extra unit.

My long-held, if somewhat forgotten, dream of setting up a home NAS was rekindled by a post from Tivasyk.

I’ve been puzzling over this: why didn’t the phone’s manufacturer give it the ability to act as a Bluetooth receiver?

I’d happily lie on the couch and watch a movie through my favorite wired headphones — without a cable running across the entire room.

I’m hoping to find some app that can at least receive audio over Wi-Fi. But Bluetooth would be more elegant and more efficient.

UPD from 2024#

Roku TV has a somewhat similar feature: you install their app on your phone, and the TV routes audio to it — I’m not sure how exactly, whether over Wi-Fi or via the internet. But in the general case, the problem still has no solution.

We’re not afraid of any crisis — we’ve stocked up on salo!

True, it might not last the whole winter, but still — when there’s a little box like that sitting in the fridge, somehow your soul feels a bit lighter and warmer.

Radio Rocks was so great when it first appeared — pure music, no shows or ads. Just music. 24 hours a day of proper rock. Can you imagine?

But little by little ads started showing up — taxi companies at first, then more and more, and now it’s simply impossible to listen to: wall-to-wall vodka, hangover cures, and other needs of the average rocker. That got me thinking about the alternative Radio Rocks — the original one, from before it went nationwide and bought a local FM frequency. It now calls itself “Radio Klassik” and broadcasts only on the internet at http://hosting.express.net.ua:13000/listen.pls I only found that address buried in the settings of an old radio-player app; internet searches turned up nothing. And the quality leaves something to be desired — mono and quiet at that. Here’s hoping that’s temporary.

A huge desire of mine, once I go on vacation — to flash my Xperia with some alternative firmware based on Cyanogenmod, there’s just so much tasty stuff packed into it.

Found in the code of an official developer:

 **KvoSpisuem** = Min(RowNU.QuantityNU, **KvoSpisuemBU**);

It should be either “Spisuemo” (Ukrainian) or “Spisyvaem” (Russian).

But here you go — a surzhyk mashup right in the variable names.

I got fed up with Mint running slowly, especially compared to the beast of a machine at work.

Added the noatime,nodiratime options to /etc/fstab and ran the following command I found:

tune2fs -O has_journal -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda5

to disable the journal on the root partition. Waiting for Dropbox to sync and then I’ll try rebooting.