dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

howto Articles


Fixing i915 display glitches

Lately I've had two laptops randomly glitch their screens at me. At first I worried their hinges were starting to give out (the connectors in those things are scarely fragile), but I noticed a message in dmesg: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* CPU pipe A FIFO underrun That …

NerdFonts on ChromeOS

I get way too much 'kick' out of a good font, and the Nerd Fonts project has been doing an awesome job at combining about every monospace font with glyphs/icons from FontAwesome, Devicons etc, for use in vim, terminal prompts and more. Of course I combine my frequent use …
article header image

Playing audio/music on Steam Deck from other device

Recently I acquired the Linux gaming handheld better known as the Valve Steam Deck, pictured above sitting on top of a cozy plaid as winter is here. Getting one was kind of a gamble for me, as I was not entirely sure I would be into handheld gaming, but I …
article header image

nginx atom feed configuration

Today I got an email from the Google Search Console about a page, or pages on dammIT that are "Duplicate without user-selected canonical". That generally means that a website has two (very) similar pages that contain the same content, without having a element in the duplicating pages …
article header image


Installing Firefox as a (real) .deb in Ubuntu 22.04

Canonical has a crush on snap. I don't. In Ubuntu 22.04 they replaced the native Firefox package with a snap package, making it slow and limited. It doesn't have to be that way. Mozilla's Firefox team has their own PPA for Firefox. As they use the same package name …

Home Assistant: wake-up light

Today I was hanging around in #nlhomeautomation on IRC as one does, and for some reason we started talking about alarm clocks. I wake up with a self-built wake-up light that is triggered by my Home Assistant instance and manifests as a nicely glowing bowl on my night stand that …

Fixing CS:GO on Ubuntu 21.10

Yesterday evening, my little gaming group came together online to play some Counter Strike: Global Offence (CS:GO), as a deviation from our regular battles in OpenRA (which is great fun by the way). We played CS:GO before, but for some reason when I launched it from Steam now …

Making a LEGO Domino Machine

Building and testing a LEGO machine for making domino runs. Each 'domino' is a stack of 5 1x3 LEGO bricks. Turn on captions for some insight into the design and build process. Skip to 5:14​ to see the machine being used to set up a domino run.
article header image

isso comments are up again

Commenting had been broken since the 19th of December because of the host having upgraded to Python 3.9 and isso breaking. I tried installing it anew from pip, but there is still a really old version on there; installing it as egg directly from its Git repository1 kind …

YouCompleteMe requiring a rather new vim

If you are even remotely using the same workflows as me, you will be using vim quite a bunch, and not limited to one machine with a given operating system. You might also have taken a liking to YouCompleteMe to serve as the code/word completion solution of choice. The …

Ripping a DVD, Linux style

Recently we got a DVD. After turning it around in our hands a few times and giggling at our reflections, we ordered an external USB DVD/CD eater so we actually could ingest some of its contents. As the hip techy people we are, having this material available to us …

About feeds (RSS, Atom)

Use web feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place. Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. You get the latest content …

projectM on Ubuntu

Lately, I was thinking back to the time when I had my 15" CRT monitor (and later my whopping 19" flat CRT) tuned to the beats that Winamp was playing for me. It was a famous plugin called Milkdrop, and it provided nicely psychedelic looking visuals based on the audio …
article header image

Roundcube webmail and Google contacts

Draft digging time! Something I've had in my drafts since the 25th of October, 2014, apparently: Roundcube is a decent self-hosted webmail solution, which benefits from integrating Google Contacts so you do not have to duplicate your address books (assuming you use Google for yours). Luckily someone wrote a plugin …

vim reloaded

An update about what I do with vim, making it more powerful and taking away some of the envy I have for the excellent IDE's out there (for example PyCharm and the rest of the IntelliJ family by JetBrains - try it, it's awesome). Also, it makes vim look a lot …
article header image

Unzip a bunch of zips in a oneliner

Ever needed to unzip a bunch of zip files into their own directory and you don't want to do so one by one? No? Well, here I have a oneliner for you anyway: ls -1 *.zip | while read zf; do echo ${zf::-4}; unzip "$zf" -d "${zf::-4}"; done This …

darktable and opencl in Ubuntu 19.04

Editing and even viewing (raw) photographs can be a bit taxing on your CPU. If you have an Nvidia GPU, you can supercharge your photo editor by using its OpenCL extensions to offload operations to. Using darktable myself, I had to do a minor bit of research before it worked …

Receive Sentry messages as Telegram notifications

To be able to receive Sentry notifications on Telegram (without using the plugin which only works in the self-hosted Sentry server), one can use webhooks. As I have webhaak to ducttape together webhook all the things, I created a script to send messages to our dev chat, filtering away some …

Git-based versioning

So you have this (web) application and you are growing a bit tired of having to manually bump the version number it tells to its users. Also, you would like to see if you are using an up-to-date edition of said app. Enter your Git repository. When you are running …