Recent posts

Expanding encrypted Btrfs storage by adding an extra partition

What am I talking about? I’m assuming the following: You have a Btrfs partition that you store data on. (I don’t care what data. Don’t tell me.) You use LUKS to encrypt it. You’re running out of space. You have a way of obtaining additional space on your disk but you can’t just simply expand the existing partition. If your situation differs, the rest of this post may be much less helpful.

A workaround for screen backlight change delays

This article is for you if you’re one of the many unlucky laptop owners who are faced with unbearable delays while changing screen brightness (it can take several seconds for screen brightness to change after pressing the function key responsible for changing brightness).

I wasn’t able to locate the source of this problem, nor fix it with any available online resources, of which there are many (e.g. here, here, or here. Thus, to avoid further frustration, I decided to use xbacklight (which works without any delays) and assign it to a different key combination.

Changing screen brightness in accordance with human perception

Since the kernel update to version 3.16 in Arch Linux the function keys for changing screen brightness in my laptop have ceased to work (at least in Openbox). While I was struggling with the problem, I discovered that xbacklight works well and gives a nice smooth transition effect between brightness levels, so I decided to use it instead. But it did not work exactly in a way I expected it to.

Migrating Ruby on Rails applications from Heroku to Openshift

I’ve been using Heroku quite happily for some time now, and I still think of it as of a good platform for development purposes or hosting small web applications. However, I have not used any paid features of Heroku, because the initial step from $0 to $35 for one dyno is a bit too much for my taste.

But fortunately, the IT world constantly evolves and from time to time something new pops up. And if it seems interesting, I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t try it out.

MPlayer's features for geeks: watching movies in a terminal

The idea of watching movies in a text console may seem weird at the beginning, but it’s not as weird as you would think. I actually used it recently two or three times as a fallback solution, that allowed me to continue watching in spite of crashed graphical environment. Because if you like to play with bleeding-edge software, things tend to blow up from time to time. And if things blow up, it’s good to have some kind of “plan B”.