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Halloween?

Inspired and adapted from a math joke:

Why do computer scientists always confuse Halloween and Christmas?
Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.

Computer Scientists Halloween demotivational poster

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Gnome 3: go to Shell? Not just yet, thanks.

In Debian Unstable the transition to Gnome 3 is taking place; when Gnome 3.0 firstly came out some unnamed geeky users complained loudly about the design decisions of the development team to push strongly towards gnome-shell as a new default UI; gnome-shell was designed focusing on usability (usability is a metric relative to a certain target audience BTW) and simplicity, hiding a lot of details from the users. Obviously you can never make everyone happy so some of us simply happened to be “out of target”: you know us computer people (*cough cough*), we like to be in charge and control The Machine...

Gnome Shell default look on Debian
gnome-tweak-tool show desktop icons
Gnome 3 fall-back mode default look on Debian
Gnome 3 fall-back mode applets rearranged
Gnome 3 fall-back mode rethemed to have a light panel

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Can I clone it, Ma?

In the attached picture you can see Betty Lou, the cat living in the garden here.

Betty Lou on National Geographic

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ssh tunnelling with Telepathy and ssh-contact

I needed to connect remotely to my brother's computer to help him fix something, in the past I relied on the X Windows protocol for these things: the people I was helping just needed to open a remote xterm on my screen (with $ xterm -display my.public.ip.address:0.0) to let me operate on their system , it was insecure —no encryption in the communication— but it was one simple command for them to copy and paste as I were putting on my end all the boring details about port forwarding and access control, but this time I wanted to try something different.


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Mapquest: these maps are different. Hell yeah, they are!

It's just weird to see that Rome or Naples are not rendered on these maps at certain zoom levels while Avellino and Vatican City are.

Mapquest: these maps are different.

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Migrate from gitweb to cgit with URL rewrite rules

Harald started migrating the gitweb installation on openezx.org over to cgit, because gitweb was eating up too much resources when stressed by web crawlers; there were still some details to take care of and I put some time into that.


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On git clone failing and tweaking object repack

I had been experiencing errors when cloning the OpenEZX kernel with git and I was finally able to solve the issue on the server, I am putting some notes here to save some time to someone else.


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Lemon Italian Ice

Lemon ice

Here's the recipe for Lemon Ice (“Sorbetto al Limone” in Italian) we use in the family, it is quite famous amongst our friends and sometimes we are asked for it, so I thought I could share it here before the summer comes.


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0x20

Thinking in hex does make you feel younger: I am in my early 20s, my body is in its best shape ever and I can see my hobbies turning into my passions.

And there was a time when I was even thinking to my age in octal, how silly I was.