I recently moved from Dell Studio to Lenovo's Thinkpad Edge E430 laptop. It is an all-Intel machine and the drivers support is quite good. Initially the touchpad felt over sensitive as the cursor jumped a few pixels on finger lifts. Luckily, it is a common touchpad issue on Lenovo machines and easily fixable.

Create the following config file in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-thinkpad-touchpad.conf (create xorg.conf.d directory if it doesn't exist):

Section "InputClass" Identifier "touchpad" MatchProduct "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" Driver "synaptics" # fix touchpad resolution Option "VertResolution" "100" Option "HorizResolution" "65" # increment noise cancellation factor Option "HorizHysteresis" "50" Option "VertHysteresis" "50" …

I have two separate projects and both use a common set of directories. Since both the projects are under active development, I symlinked the common files. Thus the changes were incorporated in both the projects. However, git does not follow the symbolic links and instead saves its contents.

To solve it I:

1. Copied one of the projects into the another as a subdirectory using subtree.
2. Created symlinks from inside this subtree directory.
3. Changed the absolute paths of symbolic links into relative paths.
4. Automated all of the above into a script.

Detailed steps

A brilliant write-up on "How to Get Lost users to Come Back to Your Product - Five Lessons From Facebook"

Link: http://blog.alexgodin.com/post/47045832186/how-to-get-lost-users-to-come-back-to-your-product

Came across this New York Times article which shares about the Edison's list of questions for job candidates in his plant.

Of-course the list has a few questions which would have been relevant in those particular years (around 1921), but it can be great if we can modernise this list.

Just in case the original link does not work, here is the pdf.

Link: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F40F10FB355B1B7A93C3A8178ED85F458285F9

Bill Gates hits the bulls-eye in this open letter dated February 3, 1976. The line that strikes me the most is that "most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share." Something that is abnormally common in India.

The complete letter (via LettersOfNote:

I now realise the perils of piracy in India. Being addicted to piracy, and getting mp3s and movies for free, we now assume the net to be free. Software is the last thing we like to pay for. And probably this is the reason why …

I tried various guides on installing Microsoft Office 2010 on Ubuntu using Wine (1.5.22) but none worked. In each case the installer failed the midway. However, since the official Wine page gives it a rating of Platinum, I finally read through the page and it worked.

Bookmarking the relevant extracts for future.

Make sure all dependencies of Wine are installed on your system, including winbind.

1. Installed the latest Wine version. It auto installed wine-mono mentioned in the original article.

   $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install wine1.6

   …