Kontexty is the Czech word for "contexts", and that’s exactly what drew me to buy the domain kontexty.com some time ago. Originally, I wanted to build a different kind of social network: one where people could manage their social bubbles, share selectively, and stay connected without having to broadcast everything to everyone. A cool idea—but competing with Meta turned out to be more than a weekend project.

So I shifted focus. I had the domain, and the fascination with the hidden threads that shape how we see the world. I started this blog to explore those invisible layers, the stories we live and barely notice, and how a shift in kontext can completely change what we think we understand.

In this post, I want to explore one such layer which stays with me for some time. It starts with a melody, a song I grew up hearing in a Czech comedy film. Years later, I heard it again in a different setting, sung by children in Germany. Same melody, same message... or so it seemed. But the kontext changed everything.

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Looking back to the Czech government's 2022–2025 term, a few moments linger. Small details and fleeting impressions that together form a mosaic of Petr Fiala as a leader and as a person. Three events, in three different years:

• 🛒 A shopping trip in Germany (2023)
• 🏚 A visit to the socially excluded locality of Mojžíř (2024)
• 🌍 Silence on Gaza (2025)

Let's explore what they reveal, not just about him, but the ways he approached people, what he offered, and how those moments shaped both sides.

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Slunovrat. In Czech, it means solstice. But literally, it translates to the turning of the sun. That’s what they taught us in elementary school: twice a year, like clockwork, once in winter, once in summer. The shortest day, the longest day ... and the sun returns.

I remember thinking:

Wait, really?

I started breaking the word slun-ovrat apart to find a meaning. Slun[ce] means sun. But what exactly is ovrat? It sounded vaguely Czech, but I’d never heard it used on its own. The only association I had was with ploughs or tractors turning at the edge of a field. A kind of "reversal point." Was it the same with the sun? Did the sun stop? Turn around? Did it come back to the exact same spot where it rose? Was ovrat a hint at some special solar dynamic that no one had really explained?

I wanted to ask. But I didn’t dare.

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I still remember the end of Pope Francis’s first Urbi et Orbi. People were waiting for the traditional greetings, one language after another. A ritualized embrace of the world.

But he didn’t do it. At first, I was surprised. But then, I felt a strange relief. I realized: I don’t have to sit through a theatrical performance that no longer says anything real.

Instead of playing pope, Francis chose to be present — to speak directly, to those who suffer. He didn’t need to perform closeness. He wanted to live it.

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The year 2023 was a strange Christmas season in the Czech Republic, which was marked by a state mourning on 23 December. That's why I decided to write this blog and collect little snippets of what happened after the tragedy at this Christmas time. Pieces that caught my attention and which show that at Christmas time we must not lose hope.

Klánovice is a municipality near Prague formally part of the Prague agglomeration. It is bordered by a large forest, the Klánovice Forest. There have been murders in this forest in the past, but what happened here in December 2023 was particularly cruel and the whole country was left in shock by the act. On Friday, 15 December, a double murder with a firearm took place there, in which a two-month-old baby in a pram and her father died, see 1, 2. The police failed to catch the murderer until 21 December 2023, when the same criminal shot 14 people at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and then turned the gun on himself. It turned out that he had killed his father earlier that day. The total number of dead was thus 18, see 3.

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In this post, I describe the process of manual disk partitioning for installing Debian 12 Bookworm or Debian 13 Trixie and the issues that can arise with a locked bootloader. Debian is, in my opinion, an excellent operating system. I particularly appreciate its two-year release cycle, which feels far more practical than e.g. Ubuntu’s six-month cadence.

The recent industry-wide push for UEFI makes it virtually unavoidable on modern hardware. On paper, the features like "the GPT partitioning scheme that supports disks over 2TB" sound like pure progress. In practice, however, the UEFI standard has been heavily shaped by large vendors like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. They have implemented features such as Secure Boot, which are marketed as security measures but often functionally serve to lock users into a particular operating system. This is why installing Linux on a machine with pre-installed Windows has become an unnecessarily difficult struggle.

This guide will show you how, in most cases, you can take back control of your computer from vendors like Microsoft, Apple, or Google. You’ll learn how to manually configure disk partitions, using the older MBR layout when appropriate, or the GPT scheme required by UEFI systems. The goal is not only to ensure that Debian installs cleanly and boots reliably, but also to help you understand what’s happening behind the scenes, so you're not left wondering why the installer made certain choices for you.

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In virtually any supermarket in Hamburg, you can buy ready-made lasagne in 1 kg packs. Just pop one in the oven, wait an hour, and you’ve got dinner for two. At ALDI, they sell them for just 3.99 euros, making it one of the cheapest almost-ready meals you can get in that quantity. I buy them from time to time, they taste good. But several times I have come across these lasagne, from various stores, that were too sour. It's hard to tell then if it could have been the spoiled meat, or just the abundance of tomato puree and lemon juice in the béchamel.

When I went grocery shopping yesterday, I put two packs of these lasagnas in my cart so we'd have food for the weekend. Then I thought, what if I made the actual lasagna myself? Could they be better? And can I actually save money if I make them myself? Luckilly I have found dehydrated lasagna noodles in the shop so I could slid the semi-finished products back into the shelf.

In this post I describe how I prepared these with my son and if it was possible to make this gourmet delicacy cheaper than the ready made product.

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Google Chrome started to dominate web browsers usage stats as of 2012 and as of 2023 its market share is over 60%. Its engine even made it into Windows default browser Edge. Regardless of whether you like it or not, Google Chrome is now the dominant web browser and one that's hard to avoid.

I'm basically a conservative user, so even though many people around me have switched to Google Chrome in recent years, I've resisted as much as I can and stuck with Mozilla Firefox. I don't know exactly when it was, whether it was when some streaming service's DRM didn't work in Mozilla or when my favorite Linux distribution started using Chromium as its default browser, but Chrome-based browsers have found their way onto my computer.

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