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