My Olenka (the one running Linux Mint 8 Helena) started lagging terribly for some reason. I’m suspecting bug #12309, but I’ve decided to reinstall Mint anyway. At first I was thinking about downgrading — because the newer version 9 Isadora didn’t work out for me — it was saying something about the hard drive during boot, I don’t remember exactly what. And in version 7 Gloria there was still that X server under which the proprietary drivers for my ancient graphics card worked, and Compiz ran really nicely. However, just yesterday (or thereabouts) version 10 — Julia — came out. I’ll go with that one, give it a try. And specifically the GNOME edition. I thought about it — all I need from a computer is something to launch Firefox and a torrent client. So KDE or not KDE, what’s the difference? Alright then, let’s get started.

Set up LiveJournal syndication to Twitter, curious to see how it works. Still, the comment tree in LJ is the best — neither Blogspot nor Twitter can match it.

Having gotten used to multiple virtual desktops in X, I now can’t manage without them in Windows. It really is very convenient to leave the test database on the first desktop, toss the production one onto the second, and put the browser and bash on the third :)

In the evening I forgot to put my new toy on charge — and in the morning I nearly overslept because the alarm didn’t go off. The battery died completely overnight, even though around 10 PM I checked and it still had more than 50%. I was generally prepared for the fact that smartphone batteries last two days at most, one day at minimum, but I want to figure out the optimal battery care strategy. So here’s the question: I’ve come across recommendations to keep the phone plugged in as much as possible, the idea being that the battery will last longer that way. I’m curious how true that actually is. On one hand, my laptop lives exactly like that — always plugged in. On the other hand, its battery life is nowhere near 24 hours.

At some point I gave up on del.icio.us (when Yahoo bought them they went downhill, in my opinion). I chose this service instead — it did an excellent job of syncing bookmarks between home and work. And now this service is shutting down starting January next year. http://www.xmarks.com/about/shutdown

It was one of those extensions I would install in Firefox first of all. Too bad. I’ll have to migrate somewhere.

For my birthday I got myself a little Android phone — the Xperia X10 mini pro. A neat gadget with a 5-megapixel camera, a capacitive touchscreen, and a hardware QWERTY keyboard. I went for it based on my positive experience with Sony Ericsson. Turns out Android is a cool thing. You can install a ton of junk and useful software alike. Dropbox alone is worth it.

On the downside, the body creaks a bit, Wi-Fi drops when the screen turns off, and it runs Android 1.6.

Android reminds me a lot of KDE’s Plasma — you can hang all sorts of useful and not-so-useful widgets on it.

My greetings, colleagues!

Aideko has announced a contest again — in addition to promoting their software, they are promising valuable prizes. Even last year’s humorous certificate was very pleasant to receive. The contest is here:

Contest “System Administrator - 2010”

My rating — “Pro”

Pro — participants who answered 75–89% of the test questions correctly

And who are you? Find out!

• yakuake

• krusader

• kvpnc

• audacious

• dropbox

• teamViewer

• keepasx

• gPodder

• opera

• choqok

• qutim

• alltray

• archivers

• htop

• vlock

• tcsh

• Firefox plugins