dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

#desktop Articles


Pretty Gnome

This howto has been stewing for the greater part of a decade, and I finally came around to writing it as I was freshly installing Ubuntu 25.04 on my ThinkPad T480s hacktop. Most of the tweaks apply for Gnome 48 (and probably 47 still) on whatever distribution you like …
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Silent corruption

Last week I had a revelation. I had been having odd issues with my workstation for years, which I wrote down to storage being iffy. It ranged from games complaining about corrupt files (of course while trying to play them online, together with friends) to Firefox or Electron apps suddenly …
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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 …

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 …

Love for keycaps

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 …
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NestDrop: Presets Collection – Cream of the Crop

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 …
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Modern retro computer terminals

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.
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …

Online life enhancer, edition 1

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 …
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How to smooth up your Firefox on Linux, including video

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 …

A solution to some odd Gnome 3.16 issues

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 …

Acer C720p Chromebook: my new hacktop

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 …



Doing nice things with your SSH config file

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 …

How to change the looks of Ubuntu 10.04's GDM

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 …