The problem: The laptop display brightness fluctuates after booting when running on battery power.

The Soviet Union officially dissolved in 1991, but Russian language remained the region's lingua franca for decades. Many children of my generation were simultaneous bilinguals; we spoke both Azeri and Russian since childhood. I learned to type in Russian, but I never ever learned the official Windows Russian keyboard layout, because I didn't have a keyboard with Russian alphabet printed on it. The alternative was a phonetic layout, and I still remember a program called "Alt-Win", which allowed to select Azeri Latin, or Russian phonetic keyboard layouts in Windows 9x. Over the years, I used other tools in Windows XP and Windows 7 to recreate this layout. And then I moved to Linux.

In Linux, the only tool you need to create your own keyboard layout is a text editor. Would you like to find out how?

As I am writing this text, enjoying Finnish summer from an armchair in my backyard, a feeling of satisfaction fills me. After nine years with a home desktop machine, I'm finally back to using a personal laptop. I can once again work on my projects from anywhere - from a sofa in the living room or an airplane 10 km above the ground. "Good for you, Zaur, you've got a laptop, why are you so excited?" Let's go back a few years ago. It all began with a loud rant...

I have finally replaced my old Defender mouse with a brand-new, wireless blue laser-powered Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000. Some of the reasons for picking this particular mouse are: symmetric, wireless, laser and GNU/Linux support :). A month of usage has passed and there is enough time to write a review with all tips'n'tricks which can help handling this mouse properly.

If you've been using python for a long time, then you surely know that os.listdir() function returns an unsorted list of file names. I didn't care much until facing a situation, in which the sorted-sequential processing of files was crucial, and I could not remember whether the previous file processing were done in sorted order. Well, luckily they were. But hey, this is a little bit annoying, isn't it? Why os.listdir() returns an unsorted list of files? Would you like to find out?

Back in my "Windows" times, I was a fan of Foobar2000 music player. One of my favourite plug-ins was "Alarm", which could turn user's computer on during "suspend" state. So, I could switch my laptop to "sleep" mode, and be awaken in the morning by music from Foobar's playlist :) Is it possible to reproduce a similar trick in Linux? It depends on your hardware. Let's give it a try!

The worst thing has happened: I have an unexpected drive failure. That's how my Easter has started :(

An adventure of dealing with Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init