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 …

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 …

I know it is a material thing, but I can become rather happy from a good-looking keyboard. The plus side of many mechanical keyboards is that one can change their looks with a different set of key caps. So I did. In the process I cleaned this keyboard up majorly …

After my piece on projectM last year, I installed it on several computers, not really thinking about extra .milk preset files (which contain the animations). Today, after some short searching thinking there might be more out there, I found this little gem of a collection: Presets Collection – Cream of the …

3D printed, retro-futuristic looking computer terminals. Not all as practical as the other, but inspiring and great looking at the least. I now kind of want an ultrawidescreen terminal on our table now.

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 …

As my corona-counter ticks day 22, and our kids have been home schooled for three weeks now, we decided to invest in some device to convert electrons into glyphs on paper. We have not had a printer at home for about 15 years, as most of our stuff could be …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Today I want to talk to you about the web and how it sometimes sucks. At least, the experience can suck a bit, especially when it is not open enough so you can set things to your own hands. Take for example YouTube, where overlays can ruin the end of …

After having one of our Hangouts videocalls, I started looking into why the browser plugin takes so much CPU-time (and makes the laptop hot and breezy in the process). Is stumbled upon the article How to tell if you're using hardware acceleration and dove into my own about:support page …

I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 15.04 with the ppa's to bring me Gnome 3.16 (gnome3-team and gnome3-staging). After a bit of fiddling (removing some old extensions and packages), I got it to show me GDM. After getting into the desktop, there were some odd issues though. These issues also …

After Chromebook: for fun and profit? @ 2014-10-05 I got myself an Acer C720p for cheap. It's new, just cheap, as that's how Chromebooks go :) It has a new-fangled touchscreen, which I actually tend to use while on Chrome OS. I hadn't thought I would do so (hey, it's a laptop …

If you get an ugly rectangular dropshadow in Ubuntu Gnome 14.10 with the gnome-staging ppa (because Gnome 3.14 is so slick), install the Intel graphics driver from ppa:mgedmin/ppa; this ppa has a patched xserver-xorg-video-intel that fixes this for Utopic users. source

Lately my work laptop has been acting up a bit after installation of a graphical driver went wonky. As I'm running a beta of Ubuntu Gnome on it, I don't blame anything but the flux in which the packages exist for the moment, so I took it in stride and …

If you are running a unix-like machine, like a Linux workstation, or BSD or Apple Mac, you might be acquainted with the ~/.ssh directory. SSH stores known hosts in their, as well as your public and private SSH keys and more important stuff. The contents of a ~/.ssh/config look …

Ubuntu's GDM still does not have a settings window where you can change looks to your liking. However, there are some tricks to still be able to do just that. First, open a terminal and type the following command: sudo cp /usr/share/applications/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop /usr/share/gdm/autostart …