Sync Google Contacts with Thunderbird

Google Contacts is an Add-On for Thunderbird which creates an additional address book with your Google contacts.

Great tool!

CentOS-5 and file sharing over bluetooth

Dag Wieers wrote a very nice and simple blogpost called "OBEX for dummies. This post helped me getting bluetooth file-sharing work in less than five minutes. Thanks Dag! Tried to post a comment on the blog, however that failed for some reason...)

Switching from Linux to OpenBSD?

That grumpy BSD guy: Into a new year, slowly pounding the gates makes me think again about switching my Linux server (with lots of hacking attempts) to a more peaceful OpenBSD...

Support special functions keys on laptops with Linux

It's very uncool that some of the keys on my HP/Compaq nc6400 are not working by default. I get following messages in dmesg:

atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0xd9 on isa0060/serio0).
atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e059 ' to make it known.
atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0xd9 on isa0060/serio0).
atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e059 ' to make it known.

Jiri Koshina pointed me to HAL Keymap Quirks which is written by a Red Hat engineer.

My Results

For these (and a lot more) keys I (and you) need at least hal-0.5.10 as said in the link above from Jiri. The keys supported by hal are available in the 30-keymap-*.fdi files from the hal-info git:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/hal-info/tree/fdi/information/10freedesktop