Jitu

Who does not know the problem? You are writing a text and then the touch pad below the space of a laptop is touched accidentally. The cursor jumps to a different place inside the text and in your enthusiasm you do not realize that, writing nonsense. It would be nice to switch on and off the touch pad easily. Some laptops have a built in switch for that, other use settings of a Synaptic touch pad. However, what if you do not have either of them?

Fortunately most touch pads are connected through the old interface PS/2. For those, who are new to the computer world: These are the round connectors for mouse and keyboard on the back of the desktop computer, recently colored in green and violet respectively. An external mouse is usually connected via USB. So what if you can unload the driver for PS/2 making the PS/2 devices (such as the touch pad) stop to work? A hardware without a driver will not work and hence will solve the problem.

In Linux this is quite easy: Open a terminal and type in modprobe -r psmouse as root to unload the driver for most Linux distributions. With modprobe psmouse the driver is loaded again and in about 2 to 5 seconds, the touch pad resumes its work without the necessity to restart the Xserver. If you do not want to load the driver during boot up, add the driver to the blacklisted modules in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist by adding the line blacklist psmouse anywhere in that file.

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The currency of India is the Indian Rupee. However the fact itself is not that interesting. But if you have a closer look at the notes, it says: “I promise the bearer to pay the sum of X Rupees”. So what does this mean? The signee (that is “I” or the Governor) promises the me (I am the “bearer”, since I am in the possession of the note currently) to pay me e.g. 10 Rupees for a 10 Rupees note. Therefore the note itself is something like a certificate of debt which I can exchange for real Rupees. If the note is only a certificate, what are the real Rupees?

A close-up of the promise given by the governor.

Asking people who deal with money daily for years, did not lead to any answer, but I earned lots of strange looks. Well, the answer (accordingly to Wikipedia) is quite easy: The word Rupee is derived from the Sanskrit word raupya, which means silver. Historically a Rupee was a silver coin meaning, it was a valuable metal. So in theory I could approach the signee and ask him to exchange the paper note (which gets its value only by the print) into a little pile of silver. Let’s see, if I will have success with that. A promise is a promise…

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