Tag Archives: computing

Facebook hands over your privacy to Booking.com and a number of other websites

Posted on 20/12/2014 by freelander

Today, all my alarms about internet privacy (or rather lack thereof) rang out loud. I was checking my Facebook wall when I came across one of those ads we’re getting of late: it was Booking.com advertising hotel rooms available in … Continue reading →

Posted in Consumer | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Howto fix: black screen / adjust brightness after resume (Linux)

Posted on 12/09/2012 by freelander

. In some computers with Intel graphics (maybe others as well), I’ve often come across this problem: when resuming from sleep (standby) mode, I can’t adjust the screen brightness. There is a very well known fix for this: to pass … Continue reading →

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Howto fix: Linux (Mint, Ubuntu) install from USB failure, drops to busybox.

Posted on 11/09/2012 by freelander

More often than not, when trying to install several Linux distributions (or releases) via a USB stick created from the downloaded iso live or install image, I’ve experienced the frustration of being dropped to a busybox (which is the Linux … Continue reading →

Posted in Binary world | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Get rid of Acrobat's upgrade notification popup

Posted on 17/03/2012 by freelander

. Are you tired of the annoying “update acrobat” Acrobat icon popping up in your screen’s lower right corner every time you switch your computer on, or access any pdf document? For getting rid of it, you can go to … Continue reading →

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gstatic.com makes websites slow

Posted on 11/01/2012 by freelander

. For the past week or so, I’m experiencing a sensible slowness in my browsing experience: recently I often don’t manage to open Google maps, and at the same time some other websites, having -theoretically- nothing whatsoever to do with … Continue reading →

Posted in Binary world, Consumer | Tagged , | 15 Comments

Fix for Macbook white screen of death. Shame on Apple!

Posted on 18/12/2011 by freelander

If one day, on booting your Macbook (likely, after doing some serious modification to your hdd or filesystems), you hear the startup chime but you get an empty white screen showing no activity at all, which stays there forever, then … Continue reading →

Posted in Binary world, Consumer | Tagged , | 41 Comments

Gingerbread: Google Getting Greedier

Posted on 07/11/2011 by freelander

(Or why Google starts sucking.) At the beginning of times, when Earth was created, Google was Good. They had the “do no harm” philosophy; you were totally free to use their services or not, and when using them, you weren’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Binary world, Consumer | Tagged , | 7 Comments

No icons in QT apps on Xfce

Posted on 28/05/2011 by freelander

. If you ever experience this problem: QT apps showing no icons in their menus when running in Xfce desktop, you can fix it issuing these commands on a console: gconftool-2 –type boolean –set /desktop/gnome/interface/buttons_have_icons true gconftool-2 –type boolean –set … Continue reading →

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