Since a little while I use headphones at home, so my housemates are not bothered by my music and I'm less distracted by other noises in my surroundings. However, I realized that I often miss phone calls this way. Sometimes I put my phone out of sight (while charging), or I simply don't see the display light up even when it's on my desk. I could call them back all the time, or wait until they call back, but both are not really desirable solutions. So instead I implemented a solution, which most of you would consider over-the-top.
The Qwerty keyboard originates from the 19th century and is still widely used. As far as my knowledge goes, the touch screen was not yet invented at that time, there were only massive type writers with hammers which could occasionally clash. In fact, the Qwerty layout was designed to be as tedious as possible, to minimize the chance that two hammers would collide. These days Qwerty is obsolete, almost no one has an old style type writer. Still it's used for convenience, while more ergonomic alternatives are available. Dvorak, for instance, is the most well-known alternative layout, which is supported by almost every major operating system.
To keep sane in a life with study, work and personal stuff, one should remain organized. There are several ways to do so; the most effortless way would be to keep all things in memory. While not everyone is gifted with random access memory in their heads, other tools should be used instead. Think of post-its, a notebook or a calendar. A less common way is to create empty files on your Windows desktop, with a filename describing a task. To keep track of all my tasks I use digital task lists. To be more precise, for almost two years I use Remember The Milk (RTM) and since then I barely forgot about doing something.
Yesterday I bought the Beejive instant messenger from the Market and gave it a spin.
Evernote is an online service which stores notes for you. There are various ways to create and sync your notes across machines: there's a web-interface, a reasonable Windows client and an Android client. Quite convenient to quickly jot down something.
There's also a Chrome extension providing Evernote functionality from the browser. This makes it possible to 'clip' pages (store their full content or just a URL). Since a little while the extension also provides Simultaneous Search: when you enter a search query in Google it will also show your notes containing your keyword:
Awesome is a tiling window manager for X11, which automatically tiles windows nicely on your screen as soon as you open or close them. It's highly configurable: the configuration is written in the Lua language. So in fact, you're programming your own window manager to your liking.
This post explains how to use struts, since this is one of the blind spots in the documentation and anywhere else on the net.
I wanted to install dnsmasq on a Debian (lenny) system, but got a bit scared of its dependencies:
Drie maanden geleden voelde ik dat het tijd was voor een nieuwe telefoon. Ik gebruikte internet meer en meer op m'n Sony Ericsson C902, een nette telefoon maar een te klein schermpje om fatsoenlijk mee online te gaan. Mijn volgende telefoon is de HTC Desire geworden. Ik ben niet het type blijo dat op kieskeurig.nl onder de vermelding "een paar dagen in bezit" gaat lopen pochen hoe geweldig dit toestel wel niet is. Ik doe dat drie maanden later op m'n eigen site 
