Archives for Technical
Theming my Salient OS
In my previous post I was looking for more “purity” in Arch, and somehow my judgment led me to prefer Salient OS. But I won't be using it as themed by its creator: I have “impurified”…
Looking for purity in Arch Linux
In my previous installment, I decided to go for an Arch derivative, and the pseudo-scientific rating gave ArcoLinux as the winner. But is there any “purer” Arch, something with as few as possible additions and customizations,…
The Long Road to Linux-Only (Not Excluding a Bit of WINE)
Remember the undetected headphones issue I had with many Linux distros? I was wrong to be so stubborn as to try to fix it in the current and future distros--and to make it a key point…
How to download full-size scans from Gallica.BnF.fr
Online since 1997, Gallica is the digital library of the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France) and its partners. Among the 4 million available documents, some are scanned newspapers, magazines, and other publications that…
The Sorry State… and the Quick Fix
I was indeed wasting my time: there is a classic answer to the question “what if I want to run Linux instead of Windows on my laptop or desktop PC?” The whole time wasted with what…
Modern Times, Here I (Slowly) Run Away From You
Four months ago, I said I'll switch from Windows 7 to a pure Linux machine. At some point, I said I'll install Neptune (basically Debian 10 with a few tweaks), but here I am, still hesitating.…
Don’t trust the magazines on choosing an OCR
This covidiocy is so alienating that I wasn't in the mood of writing anything. Better late than never, a few notes on the free OCR software, simply because a stupid British magazine pissed me off. There…
73 Minutes That Define Linux on the Desktop Today—Rather Depressingly
I must be nuts to dedicate a blog post to a videocast by Bryan Lunduke, but there's a good reason for that. For the first time ever, I'm glad YouTube suggested me this particular video. Glad…
KDE and Debian aren’t exactly my cup of tea; or should they?
I'm disillusioned although not dispassionate about everything that's software; but when one sees the catastrophic crap that is Win10, whatever might be wrong in Linuxland becomes almost acceptable. Why are we still using Windows? Five weeks…
Linux Intermezzo: Buggy Indeed, But Win10 Is Worse
Some time ago I said to myself that I should definitely switch to Linux. Returning from Win7 to Win10 in the times of a pathetic 2004 (but which Windows update isn't buggy like hell?) isn't particularly…
Back to China
Qihoo 360, which now offers even a vacuum cleaner, and an expensive one at that; and whose antivirus is hated or at least not trusted by many. And yet, I've returned to it. I'll keep using…
What divides the Internet is not math
They swear by their PhD in maths or by their experience as a software developer. They invoke PEMDAS or BODMAS as the correct order of operations. Some of them admit that the mathematical expression (because it's…
24 h with Huorong, a week with Comodo 12, a year with Bitdefender 2019 (or not)
While not being that much in the mood for writing, I had to clarify that I put a halt on my CCAV journey. It worked well, but I wanted to try something else things escalated (sort…
Living Dangerously: CCAV 2.0 Beta
While I recommended Kaspersky Security Cloud Free to everyone—wife and friends included—as a much better choice than Kaspersky Free Antivirus (for it's much more customizable), I don't use it anymore on my laptop. For some reason,…
Nostalgia & Fun With Calculators
Despite having developed a dependency of my ~200 installed Android apps and ~150 installed Windows programs, I still use a hand-held scientific calculator. Most of the time I'm using it for innocuous tasks--making sense of the…
Crypto-mining is the new adware, only worse
When Emsisoft posted Is cryptocurrency mining malware the new adware? not long ago, I'm not sure they fully realized how serious this problem is. Of course they knew that At Least Million Computers Are Mining Cryptocurrency for…
Guessing the weather forecast
Weather apps: a tricky topic; most people wouldn't understand my obsession with weather apps and widgets. But I had to move the section about weather apps out of my post regarding the Android apps I'm using…
Finding happiness in simple gizmos
Every now and then I read reviews of Bluetooth speakers, and I'm baffled how a same device can have both eulogistic and vilifying reviews. I know that any other kind of technical product gets 5-star and 1-star…
Kaspersky is one more time a valid choice
To stop adding comments to old posts, here's a small update as a full-fledged post. Despite my temporary commitment to Panda Internet Security (for its features called Data Shield and Application Control) for my Windows 10…
How I Came to Hate Nova Launcher
This is nothing serious–take it as a grumpy rant on the opposite side of "Nova Launcher may be the best thing that ever happened for Android." Because I also hate all the other Android launchers! I…