Já não vou salvar o mundo

You may have seen this picture a few times before:

It's been viral a few times now and this is the explanation given with it:

When yesterday I discovered Google is going to shutdown Google Reader, I felt sad. Not because I am one of those hardcore users that had half of his social life in Google Reader's social features (which have been kicked out some time ago), but because I didn't know any decent alternatives.

Well, I decided to look and apparently there's a lot to try.

My girlfriend has found a cheap second-hand Sony Vaio laptop, which has been working great with Ubuntu, except for not having two-finger scrolling and suspending it causing it to reboot. We dug a little bit and ended up finding out how to enable the two-finger scrolling.

It's pretty simple, so we just created a script that gets executed on startup:

Recently, in an application I am writing with Django, I needed to get the domain name for an email that was being sent with django-registration.

Everyone should have a chance to stand at the edge of space like that, for no reason other than the fact that after gazing down upon our beautiful blue planet, one is forever changed and will undoubtedly comprehend how ridicule and insignificant all our arguments, disputes, fights and wars really are.

Having lived for a year in a flat that is owned by a University, I was using their internet connection, of course - and damn, will I miss having sustained 8 megabytes/sec downstream (yes, that's megaBYTES, not megaBITS). But not everything was roses: there were lots of restrictions in place, which I could understand, since it's a university network with several thousands of users and there are always those who like to misbehave. But it's still pretty annoying not being able to access anything other than HTTP, POP, IMAP and SSH on port 22.

When installing PIL, the Python Imaging Library, in a virtualenv in Ubuntu with pip install PIL, the installer reports that there's no JPEG, Zlib or Freetype2 support available, even though I had installed all the corresponding packages.

It turns out that the PIL installer looks for the libraries in /usr/lib/ but in Ubuntu they are in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ or /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/, depending on the architecture you use.

A quick and dirty solution for this is to create symlinks to those libraries in /usr/lib/, like this:
 

After getting Gnome classic back in Ubuntu 12.04 I was missing something crucial for my every-day use of Gnome: the ability to add/remove panel applets and program launchers.

Right-clicking on the panel doesn't bring up a menu like it used to - but there is a way to get it: super-key + alt + right-click (the "super-key" is also called the windows-key)
This is also how you move or remove items from the panel, by the way.

So I finally gave in and installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my desktop computer. Until now it was running Ubuntu 11.04, because I loathe Unity and Gnome 3 but I was starting to feel the need to have more up-to-date libraries and programs.

Fortunately I found out that I can avoid going insane, having the "classic" Gnome interface with pretty much the same look-and-feel as I was used to from Gnome 2, with a very simple change:

sudo apt-get install gnome-sesion-fallback