Last year I purchased a Lenovo P620 with Ubuntu for use as my primary machine, and I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. It comes with a rear audio card, as one might expect, but also a separate, front audio card, that handles the headphone jack but also, curiously, contains a lo-fi speaker. My guess is that, as a workstation, having lo-fi onboard audio was good enough for most intended use-cases.

When creating applications with Spring, I prefer to declare beans explicitly using Java Config; it keeps Spring configuration centralized, and keeps my classes free of Spring dependencies. One thing that irks me about this approach is that is can make defining beans a bit cumbersome. Thankfully, Intellij’s Live templates make this a doddle.

Recently, a work colleague needed to transfer many large files to me for processing. We both had user accounts on the server on which the files resided, but based on the file system configuration, direct transfer via the usual strategy of move-the-files-to-a-shared-folder wasn’t feasible. While there was plenty of space on the partition mounted to /home, neither of us had privileges to create a mutually accessible directory in that space. We could both read from, and write to /tmp in the root partition, however, the total free disk space in that partition was smaller than most of the individual files.