[Fri Oct 12 17:12:43 CDT 2012]

I wonder how many people out there may be running into this issue too. As of a few releases ago, I noticed that at least once or twice a day Firefox starts leaking memory like mad and it almost brings my system to a halt. As a matter of fact, for a while I had to get into the habit of always opening a console and make sure it was always available at all times, so I could easily switch to it, and kill the process. The system load would sometimes reach stratospheric proportions (in the thirties and forties). So, after much testing this and that, I think I may have found out the culprit: certain settings of the Xmarks add-on. I just had to disable the setting to automatically synchronize by itself, as well as the one to save info about the open tabs. I did not bother to see which of the two was the real culprit, but since I disabled them both the problem is gone. {link to this entry}

[Tue Oct 9 16:52:32 CDT 2012]

A good friend seemed to remember there was a graphical frontend that he could use to see the key bindings from xmodmap. However, he just did not remember the exact name of the application. In case anybody needs it, it's XKeyCaps, written by Jamie Zawinski, also known as jwz, of Netscape fame. {link to this entry}

[Sun Oct 7 08:49:48 CDT 2012]

My son, just like me, also has a laptop with an English keyboard (well, in his case, it's an American keyboard, while it's British in mine) but needs to map special Spanish characters to certain keys in Linux to make it useful. So, I told him how to find out the keycodes for the keys using xev and, then, remap them using xmodmap (I wrote the details a few years ago here). However, a couple of days ago, he also wanted to know how to configure things so that he doesn't have to run the xmodmap command manually every time he logs into a new session. In otrher words, simply having the info saved in your .xmodmaprc file is not good enough (or not good enough for GNOME 3 running on Debian Wheezy, at any rate). The answer is not difficult at all:

$ xmodmap -pke > .Xmodmap
$ xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

That should do it. It seems to work both on Debian Squeeze and Wheezy under GNOME. {link to this entry}