Reclaim your inbox with Mozilla Thunderbird

Many of us would have not one, but two or three or even more separate email accounts. Is there an easier way to manage them all without logging in to each one of them and checking for new mails one by one?

There is! The magic software is called an email client. And in this post, I’m gonna show you how to use one free, open-source email client: Mozilla Thunderbird.

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PS: This is my first ever video tutorial :)

 

It’s random! Nah, it’s the universe.

Toss a coin in front of your friends and ask them what are the chances you get a head rather than a tail? Fifty fifty would most likely be the answer.

The coins that are doomed to suffer for 1000 years

But is it? Toss the same coin a hundred times, would you get 50 heads and 50 tails? You’d have to be very lucky to get that. Toss the same coin again for another 50 times, would you get heads and tails in exactly the same order as your last 50 tosses? If you were to toss the same coin again for one more time, would you be able to predict with absolute certainty which side of the coin you’ll get?

Obviously your next 50 tosses won’t yield heads and tails in exactly the same order as your last 50 tosses, nor can you say with absolute certainty which side of the coin you’ll get on your next toss. This is all trivial. We say that the toss of a coin acts randomly.

But is it really random? Now suppose that we are now living in the year 3010. Imagine that a thousand years from now, all the scientists and engineers and mathematicians in the world have endeavoured on a millennium-long project to model every single aspect of a coin toss. Continue Reading

 

Into the wild: Graphene theme for WP 3.0

I designed, coded and developed my very first WordPress theme a year ago, for use on my blog. I did consider to make it free for public use back then, but I also wanted my blog to be unique, so I held that idea back. Now that khairul-syahir.com is already in version 3, and it has got new fancy clothes to put on, there’s no more reason to not release my first theme to the public domain.

khairul-syahir.com-v2 WordPress theme repackaged as Graphene

My first theme was originally named khairul-syahir.com-v2, for lack of better name, I know. But then again I think it is customary to name the WordPress theme that you’re gonna use only for one site with the name of that site. There’s really no incentive to do otherwise, and picking a good name is no easy task as well. It takes a few days of intermittent pondering in the shower to come up with one. Continue Reading

 

Wellington and Snow

This winter holiday I finally got a chance to go to the ski area in the central part of New Zealand’s North Island, the Whakapapa (pronounced ‘fa-ka-pa-pa’) Ski Area. Didn’t get the chance to try skiing or snowboarding though, gotta do that another time. There were 10 of us and the ski/snowboard rental was pretty expensive. I’m gonna come back again one day and take the proper ski/snowboard lessons!

The snowman that we built. Borrowed that cap from my friend when my ears started to go numb.

For someone who comes from a country with hot-and-humid climate all year round, the ski area with snow all around was really, really cold. Touch your skin against the snow for a just a few seconds and you feel the burning sensation already, literally.

I got to experience that first hand when we had to perform the prayers at the ski area and I didn’t have any cap to cover my head, so I had to put my forehead on the snow during one of the parts of the prayers. And yes, spreading snow on your arms and face and feet for the ablution wasn’t exactly something you wanna do repeatedly either.

But it was a really fun excursion, and we built the biggest snowman that day. Truth is, we didn’t see anybody else making any other snowman, so apparently it was just us who bothered to make one! Heck, that was the first time we got to play with snow for some of us, and we weren’t gonna leave without at least leaving a decent snowman. Continue Reading

 

Introducing khairul-syahir.com v3

Just a year ago, about this same time of the year, I designed and coded my very first own WordPress theme to be used with this blog. That was my first ever WordPress theme developed from scratch. It was a big learning experience for me, figuring out how to code the new design into a fully working WordPress theme.

To be able to create your own WordPress theme, you have to be familiar with at least three types of codes: XHTML, CSS, and PHP. I had quite a firm grasp already on the first two, but I know little of PHP, just enough to get me started. Back then, I was unfamiliar with how the WordPress theme works, so I spent a lot of time reading tutorials on the web, learning how to do it as I go along. Back then, it was quite a big learning experience for me.

And now, after a year, I coded my fourth WordPress theme, the khairul-syahir.com-v3. It was a big learning experience back then, and it’s still a big learning experience now.

The Related Posts and Social Sharing feature has been integrated fully with the new khairul-syahir.com-v3

Continue Reading