It's been a long time since I wrote my last post. Lots of things have happened: I've found a job! It's Blancco. So, I have much less time now for everything starting from my Master thesis, ending with sports and reading. One learns to spend the time when there is no time at all :)

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!

There are so many browsers out there! Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari - are the major players on the market. But hey, there is another major and one of the oldest browsers in the world: Opera. You might have heard lots of rumours about it. Maybe even used it. Or maybe you belong to a small group of people, who actually use this browser everyday. Would you like to know, why I've been using Opera for 10 years? The answer lies below..

Sometimes, it's really hard to understand what happens inside a function or even a whole module of Python's Standard library. For example, the subprocess module contains a very tricky Popep class. I tried to use the the module to communicate with a MATLAB subprocess shell (e.g. send MATLAB commands to subprocess and read the output). Unfortunately I failed and was just able to pass a MATLAB script via command-line arguments. Yet, I learnt much about Popen.communicate() method and I'd like to share this knowledge with you.

A very common problem in Ubuntu is "how the heck do I change the first day of week to Monday?". One can google and find a lot of solutions with locales "hacking". Is there a simpler way to do that?