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 …

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 …

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 …

Recently, I wanted to split off a few files from a Git repository in which I keep notes to a repository of their own. Reason was that they served an entirely different purpose than the rest, so it made more sense to separate the two sets. However, they had quite …

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 …

Tips and thoughts on preparing and giving engaging presentations. As a person who does not give presentations often (lots of reasons), the points and pointers in this article sound really helpful. Also, one of the better explanations about why a full, information dense slide is unhelpful: Now imagine the audience …

When I made a remark that my commenting system is working again, a reader asked a simple enough question: how does one build a site like this? I realised there is no simple answer to this. Well, there is, but it takes a bunch of knowledge (and skills) one has …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

I like taking pictures, and having some of the nicer ones as a background to my daily computer shenanigans is a nice extension of this. Lately, I've been playing around a bit with having pictures show up differently (more abstractly, with less details so they distract less, like those nice …

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 …

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 …

I very recently moved this weblog to a new host, and in the process finally changed from Apache running mod_wsgi to nginx with uWSGI and supervisor (well, at least for the Python based web apps, as dammIT is a flat site). I'm using isso as commenting system, which runs as …

In my ~/.ssh/config file, I have been using a socket file for every host that I connect to, so TCP sessions can be re-used for faster connecting to a host I already am connected to. I had several iterations of the exact filename for this, as with longer hostnames …