I recently found myself in the situation of wanting to get out of a lease before its contractual maturity date. The most cost-effective way to do so is to transfer the lease to someone else. swapalease.com is one of the companies that promises to bring together people for such transactions.

A little while ago I blogged about SSD caching under Linux and promised to report back should I encounter any problems with the (rather complex) stack of btrfs on dm-crypt on lvm on bcache. I have now run this setup for several months and indeed encountered a few issues.

Git has arguable become the most widely used version control system in the open-source and free software communities. However, if you can live without GitHub and don't need to manage a code base as large as e.g. the Linux kernel, you are much better of using Mercurial. Here is why.

I recently set up a fresh Windows 7 system. While the installation completed without hassles, I was worried that an attempt to run Windows Update seemed to freeze in the "Checking for Updates" state.

Gnus is a mail user agent (MUA) and newsreader written in Emacs Lisp. It is famous for being very configurable, and for being one of the few MUAs that come with a decent editor to compose your messages (by virtue of actually running inside Emacs). I have switched between Gnus and Thunderbird as my primary MUA several times over the ...