Category: Discoveries
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Please adapt Mozilla’s code so that PDF readers on Linux can handle XFA forms!
Mozilla’s PDFjs landed support for XFA PDF forms in 2021. This is how we can benefit from this in the land of desktop Linux.
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CHANS battery rebuild: giving traditional laptops a new life with refactored batteries cells
Back in 2018, when I acquired my legendary ThinkPad X220, I discovered that there is a lady in Ontario, Ms. Chulkova, who does professional battery rebuilding as a side-gig: if you’re in Canada (or the USA, to an extent) you can get your laptop (and other power tools) battery cells replaced by new high-quality cells.…
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The Longest Debugging—The journey towards a reliable Linux workstation
I have this curse where I keep finding heisenbugs not only in the software I use, but also in hardware… The difference being that, unlike software misbehavior, hardware issues take me months to figure out. But hey, they say I’m a persistent bastard. This blog post is mainly a tale about computer hardware, which is…
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Renommer un périphérique audio avec PulseAudio
J’ai découvert par hasard qu’on peut faire un clic droit sur le “profil” d’un périphérique dans pavucontrol pour renommer le périphérique. Or, cette fonctionnalité n’est pas disponible par défaut puisqu’il faut un module supplémentaire (sous Fedora, du moins). Pour faire un essai en temps réel: $ pactl load-module module-device-manager 34 “34”? Quelle drôle de réponse!…
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Pour en finir avec la congestion nasale: comment effectuer le rinçage nasal correctement
Ce billet pourrait aussi s’intituler « Comment en finir avec les allergies et court-circuiter le rhume, la grippe ou la sinusite », car selon mon expérience la congestion nasale est un symptôme qui empire tout le reste au point de prolonger la maladie. Quand on élimine la congestion nasale et la sinusite, on récupère beaucoup plus rapidement…
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"SmartEco" or "Extreme Eco" projector lamp power saving modes are a trap
Here are some findings I’ve been meaning to post for a while. A bit over a year ago, I fulfilled a decade-long dream of owning a good projector for movies, instead of some silly monitor with a diagonal measured in “inches”. My lifestyle very rarely allows me to watch movies (or series*), so when I…
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Le coût de la sécurité publique
Un constat du jour en m’amusant avec l’outil de visualisation du budget de la ville de Montréal: il semble que le Service de police de la Ville de Montréal coûte plus cher que la somme des salaires de tous les arrondissements! Avec les cotisations de l’employeur par dessus, le SPVM représente ainsi environ 12% du…
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BBC Radio's adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy
Other than for self-improvement, I’m not a big fan of books (nor podcasts) in general, because of the big time investment required. THIS, however, is such an amazing masterpiece of a radio adaptation that I can heartily recommend it to anyone who has a good grasp of spoken British English (it was produced over fourty…
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Escape from Stockholm — getting to Arlanda with night bus 592 or 593
Rule number one: trust Google Maps. Rule number two: do not believe the locals’ knowledge of their own transportation system. Stockholm is this big city that prides itself on having a great public transportation system. It sounds great. Until you find out at 1AM that everything shuts down at night. So here you are, in…
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Privacy does not exist — it never did
Warning: this is certainly a depressing post. The NSA/PRISM/big brother scandal of late didn’t surprise nor shock me. The discovery that “the NSA probably silently circumvents/broke all our crypto and hid backdoors everywhere” is not really a discovery to geeks who have given the whole system a bit of thought — spies are spying on us,…